Publications

Holy Protection or Holy Intercession is sometimes thought to be a particularly Russian holiday for good reason: nowhere in the Christian world is this day celebrated on such a grand scale as in Russia. The historical background is well-known: as the tradition goes, in 910 A.D. during the siege of Constantinople by Saracens, Our Lady spread her pall (omophorium) over the “Second Rome” and saved it from the foe. The holiday came to Rus in 1164 and the first church built in its honor was the Holy Intercession on Nerli Church. “Like Holy Protection, like the winter,” “Fall time until Holy Protection and winter...

Before reading about what is happening on the streets of cities throughout America, it’s a good idea to take a look at the website www.occupywallst.org. The site’s logo – an uplifted fist tagged with stark red and black letters OccupyWallStreet – says a lot on a basic visual level.Hostile Whirlwinds “Greed killed the American dream” reads one of the signs. The Occupy Wall Street protest movement began on September 17 in the heart of American business – on Wall Street, the address of the New York Stock Exchange. Over the four centuries of this street’s existence, it has witnessed a lot, and it...

Have you taken note that the Day of Agricultural Workers celebrated on October 9 is no longer called the Harvest Day and peasants are not longer called by this name. Now they are villagers and this is only a beginning, according to Anna Loshchikhina, a columnist of Russkiy Mir. The low-key transition to no-till farming will entail reorientation toward synthetic foods and cause further growth of food prices. Organic foods and a rural way of living will soon become exotics.The transition to no-till farming commenced in 2000. The key “no-till” principle is not to till the soil after harvesting, but to cover it with crop residues,...

… It was absolutely impractical to build that glass-and-concrete freak, striking a discordant note with the Kremlin architecture. People were condescendingly explained that “the governing bodies of the party and government” urgently needed a new contemporary building for congresses, forums and other noisy political assemblies. As usual, this was a lie. Did not the Kremlin have any solid and roomy halls before? It did, and as many as one would want. One example is a club hall in the former red commanders’ school building erected on the ruins of Chudov and Ascension monasteries – the future Kremlin Theatre. And...

All enthusiasts of Russian literature were pleased with two initiatives presented in Moscow last Thursday. Yeltsin Foundation announced at the RIA Novosti news agency about the launch of the Read Russia annual awards for the best foreign translation of Russian authors. The Institute of Translation was also presented. This non-profit organization will supervise and coordinate the activities of translators from and into Russian. Although Russia ranks fourth in the world in terms of the annually published books (next to USA, China and UK), of which 12% are translations, the situation with translations is not very rosy, says Vladimir...

Deputy Director of Russian Language Institute (RLI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the prominent philologist Leonid Krysin, explained why Russia proved unready to bolster the prestige of the Russian language among the migrants, despite their growing need to speak fluent Russian, in his interview for the Russkiy Mir portal.– Mr. Leonid, according to various estimates, from 10 to 18 million migrants presently resides in Russia. Increasingly often they come with their families. The result is first-graders lacking even elementary command of Russian. According to experts, the main problem is not even the great number of arriving kids...