Publications

Svetlana Smetanina Valentina Tereshkova. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Valentina Tereshkova’s name is well-known all over the world. On March 6, she celebrates her 85th birthday. Her achievements as the first female cosmonaut and the only one to have made a solo flight into space at the age of 26 are still unchallenged. Valentina Tereshkova has been serving her homeland her entire life that can be safely considered to be long, fulfilling, and productive one. She was quite literally the USSR’s soft power in the international arena for many years. That move by our country was a very...

Sergey Vinogradov Yana Voronova from Riga came up with the idea of the Our Childhood Museum exhibiting Soviet-era toys 12 years ago when she was selecting toys for her newborn son. She opened Latvia's first museum of items from the USSR (from furniture to soap) and has collected tens of thousands of toys from the era that lasted for nearly a century. Yana Voronova and her dolls At the museum, Yana names the Soviet toy factories and artists that designed the teddy bears, dolls, and kewpies played by generations of people. She knows them all by heart. Truth be told, as soon as visitors come...

Svetlana Smetanina Photo: Psychea The Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation has registered an unprecedented upsurge of Russophobia in Europe. A school in Berlin displays pictures of Russian children on a wall of shame, a university in Prague expels Russian students, and even oncologists refuse to provide treatment to Russian patients. Greece has gone even further and imposed sanctions against Tchaikovsky's music. Europe is free, isn’t it? Russian compatriots in Europe are facing the worst kind of ethnic harassment. The first alarming reports came from the Czech...

Alla Shelyapina Photo credit: Denis Grishkin / Press Service of the Mayor and the Moscow Government/ mos.ru (CC BY 4.0) The history of medical vaccination dates back to about 250 years ago. Infectious diseases caused the deaths of millions of ordinary people and even kings and emperors. For example, the young Russian Emperor Paul II left the throne due to an agonizing fever caused by black smallpox in 1730; French King Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774. When vaccination against smallpox was introduced in Europe, Russia became one of the first states that encouraged vaccination. Smallpox Vaccination in Russia ...

Svetlana Smetanina Stanislav Beletsky. Photo credit: Stanislav Beletsky/Facebook Head of the Russian Center at the University of Dodoma Stanislav Beletsky came to Tanzania several years ago to teach Russian. At first, he experienced a real cultural shock, but then he genuinely fell in love with the country. – You recently shared how you dispel myths about Russia in your classes at the Russian Center. And what perception of Russia do your students have? What do they usually know about our country? – Tanzania is really far from Russia…There have not been many contacts between our...

The name of Russian master player Anatoly Karpov is well-known all over the world. He was the 12th World Chess Champion from 1975 to 1985, World Chess champion, a three-time FIDE World Champion in chess, and also three-time world champion according to FIDE. In total, he has 186 victories in international tournaments; the last of them he won just recently. Karpov is also known for his extensive social activities. He's the founder of a chain of children's chess schools around the world and the author of more than 30 books. In his recent book, Life and Chess. My Autobiography, Anatoly Karpov talks about his time, the "Karpov...