Publications
If someone wants to recall something good from Soviet history, you can be 90% sure that he or she will recall Yuri Gagarin. Today, his flight into outer space is both historically and ideologically significant primarily because that first flight of man into orbit around the earth in retrospect seems to be the only achievement of Soviet society that is not debated, that is not called into doubt, that is not tied to some huge number of “senseless” victims.
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s practically all aspects of Soviet life were called into question and ridiculed. Only the space epic of Gagarin and Korolev remained untouched...
Deputy Executive Director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation Tatiana Bokova was a guest on the Voice of Russia radio program “Nashi lyudi” [Our People]. She spoke about the Foundation’s plans for the upcoming year.
“The Russkiy Mir Foundation will of course continue its work in all there areas it has been active in previous years, and we are already starting on our plans for this year. In two weeks the grant review committee will meet and determine which projects will supported in the framework of our grant program,” Bokova explained.
According to the deputy executive director of the Foundation, the number of...
The year 2011 has been declared the Year of Cosmonautics, and the 50th anniversary or Gagarin’s flight will be celebrated not only by the state but also by a large number of public organizations. And this is not only because this event half a century ago remains a significant one for our society and for its collective memory and self-esteem. The Russian Space Program remains one of the science-intensive sectors for which Russia has every right to be proud and where we not only have past achievements but also promising prospects for the future. Thus the high level of attention to this occasion by the country’s leadership is quite...
The Gorshenin Institute (Kiev, Ukraine), as a part of a research project called Ukraine – Russia: Results of the Year, carried out a survey of experts on the main events of 2010 in Ukrainian-Russian relations and prospects for these relations in 2011.
According to Executive Director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation Vyacheslav Nikonov, in 2011 relations between the two countries will develop in correspondence to the national interests of Russia and Ukraine, which will take into account each others’ views.
"Next year will be, I think, interesting from the standpoint of how Ukraine will connect, and whether it will join the...
In 1963, the young poet Joseph Brodsky wrote his first poem dedicated to Christmas. His final poem dedicated to this subject was Flight into Egypt, written in December 1995. The poet died the following January in New York.Brodsky strove to write a poem about Christmas each year, and as a result the Nativity cycle of poems spanning his entire life was created. The poet can be by no means considered a church-going person. He was never baptized. But sometimes in conversations he would state that he found Calvinism most appealing, “because according to Calvinist doctrine man answers to himself for everything.” He was also attracted...
The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a review of the main foreign policy events of the year. An unofficial translation is copied below and can also be found on the website of the ministry.
The Major Foreign Policy Events of 20101. The year 2010 saw international relations continue to be transformed, changing from a confrontation and conflict paradigm to that based on cooperation. The central task of Russian foreign policy, as President Dmitry Medvedev repeatedly emphasized, inter alia in his remarks at the Meeting of Ambassadors and Permanent Representatives of the Russian Federation and in the annual State-of-the Nation Address to the...
