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Novodevichy Cemetery

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For the cemetery in St. Petersburg, see Novodevichy Cemetery (Saint Petersburg)

Cemetery entrance

The cemetery wall is used as a columbarium.

Novodevichy Cemetery (Russian: Новоде́вичье кла́дбище, Novodevichye kladbishche) is the most famous cemetery in Moscow. It lies next to the southern wall of the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site,^[1] it should not be confused with the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.

1 History
2 Interments
3 Monuments
4 Sculptors
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

History[edit]

The cemetery was designed by Ivan Mashkov and inaugurated in 1898,^[2] its importance dates from the 1930s, when the necropoleis of the medieval Muscovite monasteries (Simonov, Danilov, Donskoy) were scheduled for demolition. Only the Donskoy survived the Joseph Stalin era relatively intact, the remains of many famous Russians buried in other abbeys, such as Nikolai Gogol and Sergey Aksakov, were disinterred and reburied at the Novodevichy.

A 19th-century necropolis within the walls of the Novodevichy convent, which contained the graves of about 2000 Russian noblemen and university professors, also underwent reconstruction, the vast majority of graves were destroyed. It was at that time that the remains of Anton Chekhov were moved outside the monastery walls, his grave served as the kernel of the so-called "cherry orchard" - a section of the cemetery which contains the graves of Constantin Stanislavski and the leading actors of his company.

Interments[edit]

Under Soviet rule, burial in the Novodevichy Cemetery was second in prestige only to burial in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, among the Soviet leaders, only Nikita Khrushchev was buried at the Novodevichy rather than at the Red Square. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin Wall is no longer used for burials and the Novodevichy Cemetery is used for only the most symbolically significant burials, for example, in April 2007, within one week both the first President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin and world-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich were buried there.

Today, the cemetery holds the tombs of Russian authors, musicians, playwrights, and poets, as well as famous actors, political leaders, and scientists.^[3]^[4] More than 27,000 are buried at Novodevichy. There is scant space for more burials. A new national cemetery is under construction in Mytishchi north of Moscow.

The cemetery has a park-like ambience, dotted with small chapels and large sculpted monuments, it is divided into the old (Divisions 1-4), new (Divisions 5-8) and newest (Divisions 9-11) sections; maps are available at the cemetery office.^[5]

Monuments[edit]

Sculptors[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Novodevichy cemetery (Moscow).

The work of these sculptors, among others, can be found at Novodevichy Cemetery:

Nikolay Andreyev (1873–1932)
Mikhail Anikushin (1917–1997)
Lev Kerbel (1917–2003)
Sergey Konenkov (1874–1971)
Vera Mukhina (1889–1953)
Ernst Neizvestny (b. 1925)
Ivan Shadr (1887–1941)
Nikolai Tomsky (1900–1984)
Yevgeny Vuchetich (1908–1974)

References[edit]

^ Vorhees, Mara; Ryan Ver Berkmoes (2003). Lonely Planet Moscow. Lonely Planet. p. 256. ISBN 1864503599.
^ "Novodevichy Cemetery". Passport Magazine. April 2008. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
^ Roskies, David G. (1999). The Jewish search for a usable past. Indiana University Press. p. 217. ISBN 978-0-253-33505-0.
^ Brooke, Caroline (2006). Moscow: a cultural history. Oxford University Press. p. 268. ISBN 978-0-19-530952-2.
^ Gilbert, Hillary (2009). Frommer's Moscow Day by Day. Frommer's. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-470-72304-3.

External links[edit]

Coordinates: 55°43′29″N 37°33′15″E / 55.72472°N 37.55417°E / 55.72472; 37.55417

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Novodevichy_Cemetery&oldid=797471002"

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Novodevichy Cemetery (Saint Petersburg) – Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg is a historic cemetery in the south-west part of the city near the Moscow Triumphal Gate. The cemetery is named after the historical Resurrection Convent, in the 19th century it was the second most prestigious cemetery after the Tikhvin Cemetery in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The cemetery started in 1845 when the Smolny Convent was moved to this location, the first burials date to 1849. In the 1920s and 1930s, the church was demolished by the Soviet authorities and many tombs were destroyed. In 1989, major work was carried out at the cemetery. F. Marx, the chess-player Mikhail Chigorin, the politician Vyacheslav Pleve, many people confuse the cemetery with the Novodevichy Cemetery at the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow. Media related to Novodevichy cemetery at Wikimedia Commons History of the cemetery

1. Exit out of the Novodevichy Cemetery.

2. Old tombstones

Columbarium – A columbarium is a place for the respectful and usually public storage of cinerary urns. The term comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for doves, Roman columbaria were often built partly or completely underground. The Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas is an ancient Roman example, rich in frescoes, decorations, todays columbaria can be either free standing units, or part of a mausoleum or another building. Some manufacturers produce columbaria that are built entirely off-site and brought to the cemetery by a large truck, examples of these are the columbaria in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and Golders Green Crematorium in London. In other cases, columbaria are built into church structures, one example is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which houses a number of columbarium niches in the mausoleum built into the lower levels of the Cathedral. The construction of columbaria within churches is particularly widespread in the Czechoslovak H

1. The architecturally renowned Columbarium of San Francisco

2. Interior of a columbarium in Oakland, California (Julia Morgan 's Chapel of the Chimes). Some of the cinerary urns are book-shaped.

3. Each niche is covered with a marble plaque at this columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia

4. Detail of the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

Russian language – Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found betw

1. Russian language street sign in Russia.

2. Russian minimarket in Limassol, Cyprus; translation: "Teremok market. Russian goods. Phone number: 96 74 19 63"

3. This page from an "ABC" book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.

4. The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 is the second oldest East Slavic book known, one of many medieval illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Russian National Library.

Moscow – Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one o

1. Left to right, top to bottom: Moscow State University, Spasskaya Clocktower, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour; Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow International Business Center; Red Square

2. Tatar raid upon Moscow

3. Map of Moscow, 1784

4. Red Square, painting by Fedor Alekseev, 1801

Novodevichy Convent – Novodevichy Convent, also known as Bogoroditse-Smolensky Monastery, is probably the best-known cloister of Moscow. Its name, sometimes translated as the New Maidens Monastery, was devised to differ from an ancient maidens convent within the Moscow Kremlin, unlike other Moscow cloisters, it has remained virtually intact since the 17th century. In 2004, it was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Convent is situated in the south-western part of the historic town of Moscow. The Convent territory is enclosed within walls and surrounded by a park, the park is limited by the urban fabric of the city on the north and east sides. On the west side, it is limited by the Moscow River, the buildings are surrounded by a high masonry wall with 12 towers. The entrances are from the north and the south, the layout of the convent territory is an irregular rectangle stretching from the west to east. The oldest structure in the convent is the six-pillared five-domed Smolensky Cathedral and it is

1. Novodevichy Convent in summer

2. Tsarevna Sofia Alekseyevna at the Novodevichy Convent (1879), by Ilya Repin.

3. View from the neighboring house

4. Cathedral of Our Lady of Smolensk at the Novodevichy Convent (16th century).

Saint Petersburg – Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611,

1. Top left to bottom right: Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island, Smolny Cathedral, Moyka river with the General Staff Building, Trinity Cathedral, Bronze Horseman on Senate Square, and the Winter Palace.

2. The Bronze Horseman, monument to Peter the Great

3. Palace Square backed by the General Staff arch and building, as the main square of the Russian Empire it was the setting of many events of historic significance

4. Map of Saint Petersburg, 1903

Ivan Mashkov – Ivan Pavlovich Mashkov was a Russian architect and preservationist, notable for surveying and restoration of Dormition Cathedral of Moscow Kremlin, Novodevichy Convent and other medieval buildings. His best known extant building is Sokol luxury Art Nouveau apartment building in Kuznetsky Most Street, a prolific architect, Mashkov built mostly eclectic buildings with Russian Revival features. Ivan Mikhailovich Sokolov, son of a blacksmith, lost both his parents in early childhood. He was adopted by Pavel Karpovich Mashkov, a Lipetsk businessman, natalyas brother, Alexey Yefimovich Andreev, was a town architect in Lipetsk. In 1881, Ivan was admitted to Moscow School of Painting and he graduated Alexander Kaminsky class of architecture with an honorary medal and a construction license in 1886 at the age of 19 – an exceptionally quick education by any standard. In 1885–1888, Mashkov assisted Konstantin Bykovsky on Devichye Pole campus planning, in 1889–1890 he visited Lipetsk and completed

1. Sokol Building, 1903-1904, mosaic by Nikolay Sapunov

2. Sokol Building, 2007 photo

3. Sokol Building, detail, 2007 photo

4. Borisoglebsky Monastery, Dmitrov

Simonov Monastery – Simonov Monastery in Moscow was established in 1370 by monk Feodor, a nephew and disciple of St Sergius of Radonezh. The monastery land formerly belonged to Simeon Khovrin, a boyar of Greek extraction and he took monastic vows in the cloister under the name Simon, many of his descendants are also buried there. In 1379, the monastery was moved half a mile to the east and its original location, where bodies of the warriors killed in the Battle of Kulikovo had been buried, is still commemorated by the old Simonov church. During the 15th century, the cloister was the richest in Moscow, among the learned monks who lived and worked there were Vassian Patrikeyev and Maximus the Greek. A white stone cathedral was erected in 1405, it was enlarged by order of Ivan the Terrible. As the monastery defended southern approaches to Moscow, it was fortified in the 1640s. The last addition to the complex was a huge multi-storied bell-tower, the monastery was abolished by the Bolsheviks in 1923, and soon

1. A 19th-century watercolour view of the monastery.

Danilov Monastery – Danilov Monastery, in full Svyato-Danilov Monastery or Holy Danilov Monastery, is a monastery on the right bank of the Moskva River in Moscow, Russia. Since 1983, it has functioned as the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox church, Danilov Monastery was founded in the late 13th century by Alexander Nevskys son Daniil. Shortly before his death in 1303, Danilo took monastic vows, the Russian Orthodox church venerates him as a saint. The very first Muscovite archmandrite came from this monastery in 1300, in the 14th - 15th centuries, Danilov Monastery fell into decline. In 1560, Ivan the Terrible brought it back to life, in 1591, when the armies of a Crimean khan Kaza Giray approached Moscow, the area around Danilov Monastery was turned into a fortified mobile camp. In 1606, the led by Ivan Bolotnikov and Istoma Pashkov collided with the army of Vasili IV not far from the monastery. In 1607, an impostor by the name of Ileyka Muromets, being in the center of many military events during th

1. 19th-century view of the monastery

2. The katholikon

3. A visit by Ronald Reagan in 1988

4. Downtown

Donskoy Monastery – Donskoy Monastery is a major monastery in Moscow, founded in 1591 in commemoration of Moscows deliverance from the threat of an invasion by the Crimean Khan Kazy-Girey. Commanding a highway to the Crimea, the monastery was intended to defend southern approaches to the Moscow Kremlin, the monastery was built on the spot where Boris Godunovs mobile fortress and Sergii Radonezhskys field church with Theophan the Greeks icon Our Lady of the Don had been located. Legend has it that Dmitry Donskoy had taken this icon with him to the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, the Tatars left without a fight and were defeated during their retreat. Initially, the cloister was rather poor and numbered only a few monks, as of 1629, the Donskoy Monastery possessed 20 wastelands and 16 peasant households. In 1612, it was taken for one day by the Polish-Lithuanian commander Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, in 1618, Russian Streltsy defeated the Ukrainian Cossacks of Petro Konashevych under the monastery walls. In the mid-17

1. Donskoy Monastery in 1883

2. Our Lady of the Don, by Theophanes the Greek

Joseph Stalin – Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic So

1. Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

2. Prior to the revolution of 1917, Stalin played an active role in fighting the Russian government. Here he is shown on a 1911 information card from the files of the Russian police in Saint Petersburg.

3. A group of participants in the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1919. In the middle are Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin.

Nikolai Gogol – Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and his later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire. Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire and his mother descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the nineteenth century. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncles home theater, in 1820, Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nezhin and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing and he was not popular among his schoolmates, who called him their mysterious dwarf, but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition, e

1. Cover of the first edition of The Government Inspector (1836).

2. Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergey Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898)

3. Commemorative plaque on his house in Rome

4. Gogol, painted in 1840

Sergey Aksakov – Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov was a 19th-century Russian literary figure remembered for his semi-autobiographical tales of family life, as well as his books on hunting and fishing. According to the Velvet Book of Russian genealogy, the Aksakovs trace their line to Šimon, a Varangian nephew of Haakon the Old. Sergey was born in Ufa and brought up there and in the estate at Novo-Aksakovka in Orenburg guberniya. He was also introduced to literature by his mother at an age, and became especially fond of Kheraskovs Rossiada. He was educated at the Kazan Gymnasium and then, in 1805, at Kazan University and he was also distracted by his obsessive interest in the theater. He left the university in 1807, and the year went to St. Petersburg to take up government service. He resigned from the service in 1811 and moved to Moscow. In 1816 he married Olga Semenovna Zaplatina, and the couple had six sons and he began publishing translations, reviews, and articles in the early 1820s, though his importan

1. Portrait of Aksakov by Vasily Perov

2. Aksakov garden in Ufa, named in honor of Sergey Aksakov

3. The Aksakov Family Coat of Arms.

Anton Chekhov – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in esteem by writers. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his career, Medicine is my lawful wife, he once said. These four works present a challenge to the ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a theatre of mood. Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew and he made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Anton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great 29 January 1860

1. Anton Chekhov

2. Birth house of Anton Chekhov

3. Young Chekhov in 1882

4. The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.

Constantin Stanislavski – Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognised as a character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his system of training, preparation. Its influential tours of Europe and the US and its productions of The Seagull and Hamlet established his reputation. At the MATs 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career. He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his lifes great work, the acting manual An Actors Work. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin and was one of the first to be granted the title of Peoples Artist of the USSR. Stanislavski wrote that there is nothing more tedious than an actors biography, at the request of a US p

1. Stanislavsky in 1936

2. Stanislavsky as the Knight in The Society of Art and Literature's 1888 production of Alexander Pushkin 's The Miserly Knight.

3. Stanislavsky with his soon-to-be wife Maria Liliana, playing Ferdinand and Louise in The Society of Art and Literature's production of Schiller's Intrigue and Love in 1889.

4. Stanislavsky as Othello in 1896.

Soviet Union – The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly befor

1. Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd with Trotsky, 1920

2. Flag

3. Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. After Yezhov was executed, he was edited out of the image.

Kremlin Wall Necropolis – Burials in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolshevik victims of the October Revolution were buried in mass graves at Red Square. It is centered on both sides of Lenins Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–1930, in 1925–1927 burials in the ground were stopped, funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself. Burials in the ground only resumed with Mikhail Kalinins funeral in 1946, the practice of burying dignitaries at Red Square ended with the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. The Kremlin Wall Necropolis was designated a landmark in 1974. The moat was lined with a fortress wall, and spanned by three bridges connecting the Kremlin to the posad. From 1776–1787 Matvey Kazakov built the Kremlin Senate that today provides a backdrop for the present-day Necropolis, throughout the 18th century the unused, neglected fortifications deteriorated and were not properly rep

1. Tombs of Suslov, Stalin, Kalinin, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev in front of the Kremlin wall. Tomb of Yuri Andropov, which stands between Kalinin's and Dzerzhinsky's, is obstructed by trees. The Mausoleum is immediately to the right.

2. As recently as in 1800, the site of Necropolis was a boggy moat spanned with stone bridges.

3. November 10, 1917. Mass grave on Red Square

4. The first wooden Mausoleum in 1925

Nikita Khrushchev – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, Khrushchevs party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Khrushchev was born in the village of Kalinovka in 1894, close to the border between Russia and Ukraine. He was employed as a metalworker in his youth, and during the Russian Civil War was a political commissar, with the help of Lazar Kaganovich, he worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalins purges, and approved thousands of arrests, in 1938, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. During what was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev was again a commissar, Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. After t

1. Khrushchev in East Berlin, 1963

2. Khrushchev in 1916

3. NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda (middle) inspecting the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, 1935. Khrushchev is left behind Yagoda.

4. Nestor Lakoba, Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria and Aghasi Khanjian during opening of the Moscow Metro

Red Square – Red Square is a city square in Moscow, Russia. It separates the Kremlin, the royal citadel and currently the official residence of the President of Russia. Red Square is often considered the central square of Moscow since Moscows major streets, the name Red Square neither originates from the pigment of the surrounding bricks nor from the link between the colour red and communism. Rather, the name came about because the Russian word красная, several ancient Russian towns, such as Suzdal, Yelets, and Pereslavl-Zalessky, have their main square named Krasnaya ploshchad. The rich history of Red Square is reflected in paintings by Vasily Surikov, Konstantin Yuon. The square was meant to serve as Moscows main marketplace and it was also the site of various public ceremonies and proclamations, and occasionally a coronation for Russias Tsars would take place. The square has been built up since that point and has been used for official ceremonies by all Russian governments since it was establish

1. View of Red Square looking northwest from St. Basil's Cathedral

2. Saint Basil's (finished 1561)

3. 17th century Palm Sunday procession leaving Saint Basil for Kremlin.

4. Execution of streltsy by Tsar Peter I (to the right on a horse) in Red Square, 1698 (painted 1881)

President of Russia – The President of the Russian Federation is the elected head of state, Supreme Commander-in-Chief and holder of the highest office within the Russian Federation. The current President of Russia is Vladimir Putin, in 1991, the office was briefly known as the President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 25 December 1991. According to the 1978 Russian Constitution, the President of Russia was head of the executive branch, according to the current 1993 Constitution of Russia, the President of Russia is not a part of the Government of Russia, which exercises executive power. In all cases where the President of the Russian Federation is unable to fulfill his duties, they shall be temporarily delegated to the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the Federation Council is the third important position after the President and the Prime Minister. In the case of incapacity of both the President and Prime Minister, the chairman of the house of parliament becomes acting head of stat

1. Incumbent Vladimir Putin since 7 May 2012

2. Standard of the President of the Russian Federation

3. Chain of office

4. Vladimir Putin takes the Presidential Oath while placing his right hand on the Presidential copy of the Russian Constitution.

Boris Yeltsin – Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the reforms as one of Gorbachevs most powerful political opponents. During the late 1980s, Yeltsin had been a member of the Politburo, no one had resigned from the Politburo before. This act branded Yeltsin as a rebel and led to his rise in popularity as an anti-establishment figure, on 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. However, Yeltsin never recovered his popularity after a series of economic. He vowed to transform Russias socialist economy into a capitalist market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization, due to the sudden total economic shift, a majority of the national property and wealth fell into the hands of a small number of oligarchs. The well-off millionaire and billionaire oligarchs likened themselves to 19

1. Boris Yeltsin

2. Boris Yeltsin (second from left) with childhood friends

3. Boris Yeltsin with Raisa Gorbacheva.

4. Yeltsin on 21 February 1989

Mstislav Rostropovich – Mstislav Leopoldovich Slava Rostropovich was a Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He is considered to be one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, in addition to his interpretations and technique, he was well known for both inspiring and commissioning new works, which enlarged the cello repertoire more than any cellist before or since. Rostropovich was internationally recognized as an advocate of human rights. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and had two daughters, Olga and Elena Rostropovich, mstislavs father was born in Voronezh to Witold Rostropowicz, a composer of Polish noble descent, and Matilda Rostropovich, née Pule. The Polish part of his family bore the Bogoria coat of arms, mstislavs mother Sofiya and her elder sister Nadezhda were the daughters of the founder of the Fedotov Music School in Orienburg, Nikolay Fedotov. Nadezhda married the cellist Semyon Kozolupov, who was thus Rostropovichs uncle by marriage, Rostropovich grew up in Baku and s

1. Mstislav Rostropovich

2. Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten in 1964

3. Rostropovich playing the Duport Stradivarius at the White House in 1978.

4. Mstislav Rostropovich with wife Galina Vishnevskaya in 1965

Mytishchi – Population,173,160,159,900,154, 068 ,125,000,60,000. Mytishchi has humid continental climate, same as Moscow, with long, cold winters and short, in the 8th–9th centuries, first Slavic tribes began settling here. In and around Mytishchinsky District about a dozen of settlements from the 11th–13th centuries have been discovered. The modern settlement has been known since 1460 and since the 19th century it has known as Bolshiye Mytishchi. Its history is linked to the Yauzsky port. Mytishchi was an important place on the ship route. Through this site commercial ships had been hauled across on wheels, rollers, merchants had to pay a duty for this. The settlement got its name thanks to the duty, which had known as myt. In the mid-19th century, the population was 389, Town status was granted to Mytishchi in 1925. Within the framework of administrative divisions, Mytishchi serves as the center of Mytishchinsky District. As an administrative division, it is, together with twenty-four rural loca

1. Voloshinoy Street in Mytishchi

2. Monument to the first Russian water supply system

Mikhail Bulgakov – Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian writer, physician and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15 May 1891 in Kiev, Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. His mother was Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakova, a former teacher, both of his grandfathers were clergymen in the Russian Orthodox Church. Afanasiy Bulgakov was born in Bryansk Oblast, Russia, where his father was a priest, Varvara Bulgakova was born in Karachev, Russia. From childhood Bulgakov was drawn to theater, at home, he wrote comedies, which his brothers and sisters acted out. In 1901 Bulgakov joined the First Kiev Gymnasium, where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature, theatre, the teachers of the Gymnasium exerted a great influence on the formation of his literary taste. After the death of his father in 1907, Mikhails mother, after graduation from the Gymnasium in 1909

1. Mikhail Bulgakov

2. Bulgakov, 1930 or earlier

3. Gravestone of Mikhail Bulgakov and Yelena Bulgakova.

4. Soviet postal stamp: prepaid postcard of 1991.

Vladimir Mayakovsky – Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. Mayakovsky often found engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady, Vladimir Vladimirovichs mother Alexandra Alexeyevna, was a housewife, looking after the children, a son and two daughters, Olga and Lyudmila. The family was of Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their fathers side, at home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian, I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. Thus three cultures are united in me, he told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview, Georgia for Mayakovsky remained the eternal symbol of beauty. I know, its nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, in 1902 Mayakovsky joined the Kutai

1. Mayakovsky in 1924

2. The Mayakovskys in Kutaisi

3. Mayakovsky in 1910

4. Mayakovsky (center) with the fellow Futurist group members

Sergei Prokofiev – Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian and Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. Prokofievs greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed works in that genre, including The Gambler. Prokofievs one operatic success during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Opera and subsequently performed over the decade in Europe. During that time he married a Spanish singer, Carolina Codina, in the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofievs ballets and operas to be staged in America and western Europe. He enjoyed some success there – notably with Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, the Nazi invasion of the USSR spurred him to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoys War and Peace. Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Sontsovka, a rural estate in the Y

1. Sergei Prokofiev in New York, 1918

2. Prokofiev as drawn by Henri Matisse for the premiere of Chout (1921)

3. Prokofiev and his second wife, Mira Mendelson

4. Sergei Prokofiev with Mstislav Rostropovich

Nikolay Andreyev – For the Soviet-era Russian pictorialist, see Nikolay Andreyev Nikolay Andreyevich Andreyev was a Russian sculptor, graphic artist and stage designer. As a young man Andreyev studied with Sergey Volnukhin and in 1902 became associated with the Peredvizhniki group of realists, a native of Moscow, Andreyev was the designer of two Moscow statues known for their removal. One is the bronze figure of Gogol, with bronze friezes of Gogols greatest characters surrounding the base, finished in 1909. Similarly Andreyevs figure of Freedom was erected with a 26-meter obelisk in Tverskaya Street in 1919 and it was blown up in 1941 and replaced with the equestrian statue of Yuri Dolgorukiy, by sculptor Sergei Orlov, completed in 1954. He also produced a number of portraits of Soviet leaders, including Stalin. Andreyev created the first post-1917 artistic representation of Stalin, dated 1 May 1922 and this drawing was executed in the realist style including Stalins pockmarks and stiffened arm. This was

1. Statue of Gogol now standing in a courtyard of Nikitsky Boulevard

Lev Kerbel – Lev Efimovich Kerbel was a renowned sculptor of Soviet realist works. Kerbels creations included statues of Marx, Lenin, Yuri Gagarin, which were sent by Soviet Government as gifts to socialist and the Third World countries across the world. In 1976 the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union presented the Government of Sri Lanka the monument of Solomon Bandaranaike, in 1990s following the collapse of the socialist block many of his works of art were destroyed. However his enormous Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, has preserved as a cultural monument. Kerbel was born to a Russian Jewish family in the village of Semyonovka in Chernigov Governorate, Russian Republic, levs family moved to the russian Smolensk region, where he began sculpting as a child. He continued to sculpt and in 1934 he won an award from the Komsomol for a plaque of Lenin, during World War II, Kerbel helped build the defenses for the Battle of Moscow, then served in the Northern Fleet, gainin

1. Lev Kerbel's Monumental Bust of Karl Marx in Chemnitz, Germany

2. The Lenin Monument in Parque Lenin, Havana, Cuba (1984, sculptor - Lev Kerbel, architect - A.Quintana)

3. The “Kursk” submarine crew memorial

Sergey Konenkov – Sergey Timofeyevich Konenkov was a famous Russian and Soviet sculptor. He was often called the Russian Rodin, Konenkov was born in a peasant family, in a village of Karakovichi in Smolensk province. Sergey studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, graduating in 1897 and he travelled to Italy, France, Egypt, Greece, and Germany. During the Russian revolution of 1905 Konenkov was with the workers on the barricades, Konenkov later supported the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1922 Konenkov married Margarita Ivanovna Vorontsova, and in 1923 they travelled to the United States to take part in an exhibition of Russian and Soviet art. The trip was supposed to last for a few months, but Konenkov stayed in the States for 22 years, in 1928–1929 the sculptor visited Italy to meet and work on a portrait of the Soviet writer Maksim Gorky. He had an exhibition in Rome. During the American period, Konenkov created a body of work focusing on Bible themes. He produced works d

1. Kore (Russian: Кора), 1912

2. Bather (Russian: Купальщица), 1917

3. The Poor (Russian: Нищая Братия), 1917

Ernst Neizvestny – Ernst Iosifovich Neizvestny was a Russian-American sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and art philosopher. He emigrated to the U. S. in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City and his last name in Russian literally means unknown. Alexander Calder, the American artist, once said to Neizvestny, All my life I create the world of children, Neizvestny was born 9 April 1925 in Sverdlovsk. In 1942, at the age of 17, he joined the Red Army as a volunteer, at the close of World War II, he was heavily wounded and sustained a clinical death. Although he was awarded the Order of the Red Star posthumously and his received a official notification that her son had died. In 1947, Neizvestny was enrolled at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga and he continued his education at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute and the Philosophy Department of the Moscow State University. His sculptures, often based on the forms of the body, are noted for their expressionism. Although his preferred material is bronze, hi

1. Ernst Neizvestny receives the Order of Honor from Vladimir Putin, October 2000

Ivan Shadr

1. Ivan Shadr in his Moscow studio c.1930s.

2. Shadr at work in his studio in Moscow on one version of the Girl with an Oar.

3. The Cobblestone Is the Weapon of the Proletariat, 1927, bronze, Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery

Nikolai Tomsky

1. Lenin in East Berlin, Germany, 1970, removed 1992

Yevgeny Vuchetich

1. Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares

2. Contents

International Standard Book Number

1. A 13-digit ISBN, 978-3-16-148410-0, as represented by an EAN-13 bar code

LIST OF IMAGES

1. Novodevichy Cemetery (Saint Petersburg) – Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg is a historic cemetery in the south-west part of the city near the Moscow Triumphal Gate. The cemetery is named after the historical Resurrection Convent, in the 19th century it was the second most prestigious cemetery after the Tikhvin Cemetery in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The cemetery started in 1845 when the Smolny Convent was moved to this location, the first burials date to 1849. In the 1920s and 1930s, the church was demolished by the Soviet authorities and many tombs were destroyed. In 1989, major work was carried out at the cemetery. F. Marx, the chess-player Mikhail Chigorin, the politician Vyacheslav Pleve, many people confuse the cemetery with the Novodevichy Cemetery at the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow. Media related to Novodevichy cemetery at Wikimedia Commons History of the cemetery

Novodevichy Cemetery (Saint Petersburg) – Exit out of the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Novodevichy Cemetery (Saint Petersburg) – Old tombstones

2. Columbarium – A columbarium is a place for the respectful and usually public storage of cinerary urns. The term comes from the Latin columba and originally referred to compartmentalized housing for doves, Roman columbaria were often built partly or completely underground. The Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas is an ancient Roman example, rich in frescoes, decorations, todays columbaria can be either free standing units, or part of a mausoleum or another building. Some manufacturers produce columbaria that are built entirely off-site and brought to the cemetery by a large truck, examples of these are the columbaria in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and Golders Green Crematorium in London. In other cases, columbaria are built into church structures, one example is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which houses a number of columbarium niches in the mausoleum built into the lower levels of the Cathedral. The construction of columbaria within churches is particularly widespread in the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, an example can be seen at the Church of St Nicolas in Old Town Square. In the Roman Catholic Church, although traditional burial is still preferred, as a result, columbaria can be found within some Catholic cemeteries. Columbaria are often similar in form to traditional Buddhist temples. In Buddhism, ashes of the deceased may be placed in a columbarium (in Chinese, a naguta, in Japanese, a nokotsudo and this practice allows for the family of the deceased to visit the temple for the conduct of traditional memorials and ancestor rites. In the Bet Guvrin area several series of caves dug into soft rock were found. There were several theories about their use, for ritual burial, for growing pigeons to be used for ritual sacrifice. One such cave had been covered by a close to the time of its original usage. This cave had no ashes found in it, but also no pigeon droppings, among the archaeologic finds on Masada, a columbarium tower foundation remains. Catacomb Cemetery Charnel house Crypt Grave Ossuary Reliquary Tomb Photographs and commentary on ancient Roman columbaria Columbarium

Columbarium – The architecturally renowned Columbarium of San Francisco
Columbarium – Interior of a columbarium in Oakland, California (Julia Morgan 's Chapel of the Chimes). Some of the cinerary urns are book-shaped.
Columbarium – Each niche is covered with a marble plaque at this columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia
Columbarium – Detail of the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

3. Russian language – Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi

Russian language – Russian language street sign in Russia.
Russian language – Russian minimarket in Limassol, Cyprus; translation: "Teremok market. Russian goods. Phone number: 96 74 19 63"
Russian language – This page from an "ABC" book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.
Russian language – The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 is the second oldest East Slavic book known, one of many medieval illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Russian National Library.

4. Moscow – Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality

Moscow – Left to right, top to bottom: Moscow State University, Spasskaya Clocktower, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour; Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow International Business Center; Red Square
Moscow – Tatar raid upon Moscow
Moscow – Map of Moscow, 1784
Moscow – Red Square, painting by Fedor Alekseev, 1801

5. Novodevichy Convent – Novodevichy Convent, also known as Bogoroditse-Smolensky Monastery, is probably the best-known cloister of Moscow. Its name, sometimes translated as the New Maidens Monastery, was devised to differ from an ancient maidens convent within the Moscow Kremlin, unlike other Moscow cloisters, it has remained virtually intact since the 17th century. In 2004, it was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Convent is situated in the south-western part of the historic town of Moscow. The Convent territory is enclosed within walls and surrounded by a park, the park is limited by the urban fabric of the city on the north and east sides. On the west side, it is limited by the Moscow River, the buildings are surrounded by a high masonry wall with 12 towers. The entrances are from the north and the south, the layout of the convent territory is an irregular rectangle stretching from the west to east. The oldest structure in the convent is the six-pillared five-domed Smolensky Cathedral and it is situated in the centre of the axes between the two entrance gates. Most scholars agree that the cathedral was rebuilt in the 1550s or 1560s and it was formerly ringed by four smaller chapels, in an arrangement reminiscent of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin. Its frescos are among the finest in Moscow, the cathedral may be a focal point of the convent, but there are many other churches. Most date from the 1680s, when the convent was renovated at the behest of the regent Sofia Alexeyevna. The blood-red walls and crown-towers, two lofty over-the-gates churches, a refectory, and residential quarters were all designed in the Muscovite Baroque style, in the old cathedral, a new bowl for holy water and gilded carved iconostasis were installed in 1685. Its four tiers contain 16th-century icons endowed by Boris Godunov, the fifth tier displays icons by leading 17th-century painters, Simeon Ushakov and Fyodor Zubov. An arresting slender belltower, also commissioned by tsarevna Sofia, was built in six tiers to a height of 72 metres and this light octagonal column seems to unite all major elements of the ensemble into one harmonious whole. Vasili III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, founded the Novodevichy Convent in 1524 in commemoration of his conquest of Smolensk in 1514, the structure began as a fortress at a curve of the Moskva River three versts to the south-west of the Moscow Kremlin. It became an important part of the defensive belt of Moscow. Upon its founding, the Novodevichy Convent was granted 3,000 rubles, vasilis son, tsar Ivan the Terrible, would later grant a number of other villages to the convent. In 1610–1611 a Polish unit under the command of Aleksander Gosiewski captured the Novodevichy Convent, once Russian forces had retaken the convent, tsar Michael Fyodorovich supplied it with permanent guards. By the end of the 17th century, the Novodevichy Convent possessed 36 villages in 27 uyezds of Russia, in 1744, it owned 14,489 peasants

Novodevichy Convent – Novodevichy Convent in summer
Novodevichy Convent – Tsarevna Sofia Alekseyevna at the Novodevichy Convent (1879), by Ilya Repin.
Novodevichy Convent – View from the neighboring house
Novodevichy Convent – Cathedral of Our Lady of Smolensk at the Novodevichy Convent (16th century).

6. Saint Petersburg – Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, tens of thousands of serfs died building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate, Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712,9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan, by 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great, in 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two. His endeavours to modernize Russia had met opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life

Saint Petersburg – Top left to bottom right: Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island, Smolny Cathedral, Moyka river with the General Staff Building, Trinity Cathedral, Bronze Horseman on Senate Square, and the Winter Palace.
Saint Petersburg – The Bronze Horseman, monument to Peter the Great
Saint Petersburg – Palace Square backed by the General Staff arch and building, as the main square of the Russian Empire it was the setting of many events of historic significance
Saint Petersburg – Map of Saint Petersburg, 1903

7. Ivan Mashkov – Ivan Pavlovich Mashkov was a Russian architect and preservationist, notable for surveying and restoration of Dormition Cathedral of Moscow Kremlin, Novodevichy Convent and other medieval buildings. His best known extant building is Sokol luxury Art Nouveau apartment building in Kuznetsky Most Street, a prolific architect, Mashkov built mostly eclectic buildings with Russian Revival features. Ivan Mikhailovich Sokolov, son of a blacksmith, lost both his parents in early childhood. He was adopted by Pavel Karpovich Mashkov, a Lipetsk businessman, natalyas brother, Alexey Yefimovich Andreev, was a town architect in Lipetsk. In 1881, Ivan was admitted to Moscow School of Painting and he graduated Alexander Kaminsky class of architecture with an honorary medal and a construction license in 1886 at the age of 19 – an exceptionally quick education by any standard. In 1885–1888, Mashkov assisted Konstantin Bykovsky on Devichye Pole campus planning, in 1889–1890 he visited Lipetsk and completed there two schools, a hospital and a prison chapel – at the age of 23. Back in Moscow, Mashkov completed over a dozen still in his twenties. Mashkovs Sokol building is not only for his career. It is the building in the city designed in original Vienna Secession style. Its gilded roof and abundant forged iron ornaments looked like a citation from Otto Wagner, at the same time, the building is definitely Muscovite, the shape of its frieze repeats the lines of nearby Hotel Metropol. The majolica mosaic of a falcon flying over a sea was made by Nikolay Sapunov. The subject of this picture itself is a double citation – from Maxim Gorkys Song of a falcon, however, the building has nothing to do with these symbols or with Mashkovs natural name – it was named after M. V. Mashkovs work prior to Sokol belongs to traditional muscovite eclectics and moderate Russian Revival of 1880s-1890s, an unusually large share of his work was built for public charities, which ruled out expensive decorations and interiors. The only decoration he allowed was Abramtsevo majolica, after the Russian Revolution of 1905, the public lost the interest in Art Nouveau, architects responded with a revival of Neoclassicism. Mashkov completed two buildings in a stern, Saint Petersburg version of this style. In 1912-1913, he built his last major project - psychiatric hospital in Poteshnaya Street and these buildings didnt make architectural landmarks, Mashkov, however, did make a lasting statement with his iconic monument to Ivan Fydorov. Like many contemporary architects, Mashkov was keen on studying and preserving historical national architecture and he surveyed many historical churches and monasteries in Moscow, Dmitrov, Borovsk etc. published his own studies and edited the journal of Society. Mashkov supervised restoration of Kremlin cathedrals, Sukharev Tower, St. Basil Cathedral, in 1908-1918, he also co-chaired Moscow Architectural Society and contributed to the construction of House of Architects

Ivan Mashkov – Sokol Building, 1903-1904, mosaic by Nikolay Sapunov
Ivan Mashkov – Sokol Building, 2007 photo
Ivan Mashkov – Sokol Building, detail, 2007 photo
Ivan Mashkov – Borisoglebsky Monastery, Dmitrov

8. Simonov Monastery – Simonov Monastery in Moscow was established in 1370 by monk Feodor, a nephew and disciple of St Sergius of Radonezh. The monastery land formerly belonged to Simeon Khovrin, a boyar of Greek extraction and he took monastic vows in the cloister under the name Simon, many of his descendants are also buried there. In 1379, the monastery was moved half a mile to the east and its original location, where bodies of the warriors killed in the Battle of Kulikovo had been buried, is still commemorated by the old Simonov church. During the 15th century, the cloister was the richest in Moscow, among the learned monks who lived and worked there were Vassian Patrikeyev and Maximus the Greek. A white stone cathedral was erected in 1405, it was enlarged by order of Ivan the Terrible. As the monastery defended southern approaches to Moscow, it was fortified in the 1640s. The last addition to the complex was a huge multi-storied bell-tower, the monastery was abolished by the Bolsheviks in 1923, and soon thereafter most of its buildings were demolished to make way for an automobile plant. Surviving structures all date back to the 17th century and include three towers of cannon-like appearance and auxiliary buildings in the Naryshkin baroque style, recently the Moscow government announced plans for a full-scale reconstruction of the famous cloister. The first service here after the restoration was held in 1992

Simonov Monastery – A 19th-century watercolour view of the monastery.
Simonov Monastery
Simonov Monastery
Simonov Monastery

9. Danilov Monastery – Danilov Monastery, in full Svyato-Danilov Monastery or Holy Danilov Monastery, is a monastery on the right bank of the Moskva River in Moscow, Russia. Since 1983, it has functioned as the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox church, Danilov Monastery was founded in the late 13th century by Alexander Nevskys son Daniil. Shortly before his death in 1303, Danilo took monastic vows, the Russian Orthodox church venerates him as a saint. The very first Muscovite archmandrite came from this monastery in 1300, in the 14th - 15th centuries, Danilov Monastery fell into decline. In 1560, Ivan the Terrible brought it back to life, in 1591, when the armies of a Crimean khan Kaza Giray approached Moscow, the area around Danilov Monastery was turned into a fortified mobile camp. In 1606, the led by Ivan Bolotnikov and Istoma Pashkov collided with the army of Vasili IV not far from the monastery. In 1607, an impostor by the name of Ileyka Muromets, being in the center of many military events during the Time of Troubles, the monastery was severely damaged in 1610. In the early 17th century, it was surrounded by a wall with seven towers. In 1710, there were 30 monks in Danilov Monastery, in 1764, there were only twelve of them on staff. By 1900, however, the rose to seventeen. In 1805, an almshouse for women was established at the monastery, later it was turned into an almshouse for elderly clergymen. In 1812, the monastery was ransacked by the French army, the monasterial sacristy and treasury, however, had been transported to Vologda and Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra shortly before the French occupied Moscow. First documented information on Danilov Monasterys landownership can be traced back to 1785, by the end of the 19th century, the monastery had already possessed 178 desyatinas and a few buildings in Moscow. The remains of most of them, however, were transported in Soviet years to the Novodevichy Cemetery, by 1917, Danilov Monastery had 19 monks and four novices and owned 164 desyatinas of land. After the October Revolution, the monastery housed archimandrites who had deprived of their pulpits. In 1929, the Soviets issued a decree on closing the monastery. The last monastery closed in Moscow became the first one to be returned in 1983 to the Moscow Patriarchy and became a spiritual, in 1988, the monastery was restored. A residence was built for the Patriarch and Synod, as well as a funeral chapel, when the monastery was closed in 1929 and 1930, its bell set was saved from Communist melting through the purchase by American industrialist Charles R. Crane

Danilov Monastery – 19th-century view of the monastery
Danilov Monastery – The katholikon
Danilov Monastery – A visit by Ronald Reagan in 1988
Danilov Monastery – Downtown

10. Donskoy Monastery – Donskoy Monastery is a major monastery in Moscow, founded in 1591 in commemoration of Moscows deliverance from the threat of an invasion by the Crimean Khan Kazy-Girey. Commanding a highway to the Crimea, the monastery was intended to defend southern approaches to the Moscow Kremlin, the monastery was built on the spot where Boris Godunovs mobile fortress and Sergii Radonezhskys field church with Theophan the Greeks icon Our Lady of the Don had been located. Legend has it that Dmitry Donskoy had taken this icon with him to the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, the Tatars left without a fight and were defeated during their retreat. Initially, the cloister was rather poor and numbered only a few monks, as of 1629, the Donskoy Monastery possessed 20 wastelands and 16 peasant households. In 1612, it was taken for one day by the Polish-Lithuanian commander Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, in 1618, Russian Streltsy defeated the Ukrainian Cossacks of Petro Konashevych under the monastery walls. In the mid-17th century the monastery was attached to the Andreyevsky Monastery, in 1678, however, its independence was reinstated and the cloister received rich donations, including more than 1,400 peasant households. In 1683, the Donskoy Monastery was elevated to the archmandrite level, vidogoshchsky, Zhizdrinsky, Sharovkin, and Zheleznoborovsky monasteries were attached to the Donskoy Monastery between 1683 and 1685. Since 1711, the Great Cathedrals vault was used for burials of Georgian tsarevichs of the Bagrationi family, in 1724, the monks and the property of the Andreyevsky Monastery were transferred to the Donskoy Monastery. By 1739, it had already possessed 880 households with 6,716 peasants,14 windmills, and a few fisheries. In 1747, the wanted to transfer the Slavic Greek Latin Academy to the Donskoy Monastery. Archbishop Ambrosius was killed within the walls during the Plague Riot in 1771. In 1812, the French army ransacked the Donskoy Monastery, the most valuable things having been moved to Vologda prior to that, there had been 48 monks and 2 novices in the monastery by 1917. After the October Revolution, the Donskoy Monastery was closed, in 1922–1925, Patriarch Tikhon was detained in this cloister after his arrest. He chose to remain in this monastery after his release, saint Tikhons relics were discovered following his canonization in 1989. They are exhibited for veneration in the Great Cathedral in summer, in 1924, some of the facilities of the Donskoy Monastery were occupied by a penal colony for children. When the monastery was established, Boris Godunov personally laid the stone of its cathedral. This diminutive structure, quite typical for Godunovs reign, has a dome crowning three tiers of zakomara. In the 1670s, they added two symmetrical annexes, and a refectory leading to a tented belltower and its iconostasis, executed in 1662, formerly adorned one of Moscow churches demolished by the Communists

Donskoy Monastery – Donskoy Monastery in 1883
Donskoy Monastery – Our Lady of the Don, by Theophanes the Greek
Donskoy Monastery
Donskoy Monastery

11. Joseph Stalin – Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues

Joseph Stalin – Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943.
Joseph Stalin – Prior to the revolution of 1917, Stalin played an active role in fighting the Russian government. Here he is shown on a 1911 information card from the files of the Russian police in Saint Petersburg.
Joseph Stalin – A group of participants in the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1919. In the middle are Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin.

12. Nikolai Gogol – Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and his later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire. Gogol was born in the Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi, in Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire and his mother descended from Leonty Kosyarovsky, an officer of the Lubny Regiment in 1710. As was typical of the left-bank Ukrainian gentry of the nineteenth century. As a child, Gogol helped stage Ukrainian-language plays in his uncles home theater, in 1820, Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nezhin and remained there until 1828. It was there that he began writing and he was not popular among his schoolmates, who called him their mysterious dwarf, but with two or three of them he formed lasting friendships. Very early he developed a dark and secretive disposition, marked by a painful self-consciousness and boundless ambition, equally early he developed a talent for mimicry, which later made him a matchless reader of his own works and induced him to toy with the idea of becoming an actor. In 1828, on leaving school, Gogol came to Saint Petersburg, full of vague and he had hoped for literary fame, and brought with him a Romantic poem of German idyllic life – Hans Küchelgarten. He had it published, at his own expense, under the name of V. Alov, the magazines he sent it to almost universally derided it. He bought all the copies and destroyed them, swearing never to write poetry again, Gogol was in touch with the literary aristocracy, had a story published in Anton Delvigs Northern Flowers, was taken up by Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnyov, and was introduced to Pushkin. In 1831 Gogol brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories and he followed it in 1832 with a second volume, and in 1835 by two volumes of stories entitled Mirgorod, as well as by two volumes of miscellaneous prose entitled Arabesques. However, Gogols satire was much more sophisticated and unconventional, at this time, Gogol developed a passion for Ukrainian history and tried to obtain an appointment to the history department at Kiev University. Despite the support of Pushkin and Sergey Uvarov, the Russian minister of education and his fictional story Taras Bulba, based on the history of Ukrainian cossacks, was the result of this phase in his interests. During this time he developed a close and lifelong friendship with another Ukrainian. In 1834 Gogol was made Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg and he turned in a performance ludicrous enough to warrant satiric treatment in one of his own stories. At the final examination, he sat in silence with a black handkerchief wrapped around his head, simulating a toothache. This academic venture proved a failure and he resigned his chair in 1835, during this time, the Russian critics Stepan Shevyrev and Vissarion Belinsky, contradicting earlier critics, reclassified Gogol from a Ukrainian to a Russian writer. It was only after the presentation at the Saint Petersburg State Theatre, on 19 April 1836, the comedy, a violent satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, was staged thanks only to the intervention of the emperor, Nicholas I

Nikolai Gogol – Cover of the first edition of The Government Inspector (1836).
Nikolai Gogol – Daguerreotype of Gogol taken in 1845 by Sergey Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898)
Nikolai Gogol – Commemorative plaque on his house in Rome
Nikolai Gogol – Gogol, painted in 1840

13. Sergey Aksakov – Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov was a 19th-century Russian literary figure remembered for his semi-autobiographical tales of family life, as well as his books on hunting and fishing. According to the Velvet Book of Russian genealogy, the Aksakovs trace their line to Šimon, a Varangian nephew of Haakon the Old. Sergey was born in Ufa and brought up there and in the estate at Novo-Aksakovka in Orenburg guberniya. He was also introduced to literature by his mother at an age, and became especially fond of Kheraskovs Rossiada. He was educated at the Kazan Gymnasium and then, in 1805, at Kazan University and he was also distracted by his obsessive interest in the theater. He left the university in 1807, and the year went to St. Petersburg to take up government service. He resigned from the service in 1811 and moved to Moscow. In 1816 he married Olga Semenovna Zaplatina, and the couple had six sons and he began publishing translations, reviews, and articles in the early 1820s, though his important work came much later. He retired from the service in 1838. In 1832 he met Gogol and recognized in him what he had failed to see in Púshkin or any other man—a purely Russian genius, aksákovs house, a stronghold of pure Russianism in Moscow society, became the temple of the cult of Gógol, and Aksákov its high priest. It was Gogol who revealed to Aksakov the possibility of creating literature based directly on life, in 1834 Aksakov published his first realistic story, A Blizzard. Around 1840, encouraged by Gogol, he began writing the book that would make him famous, while he was working on that, he published books about two of his favorite activities since his youth, Notes on Fishing and Notes of a Hunter in Orenburg Province. In 1843 Aksakov settled in the village of Abramtsevo, where he entertained writers including Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, in the late 1850s he published his most enduring works, The Family Chronicle and Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson. These reminiscences of a childhood spent in a Russian patriarchal family brought Aksakov recognition as a literary artist of the first rank, Aksakovs semi-autobiographical narratives are unmatched for their scrupulous and detailed description of the everyday life of the Russian nobility. Among Aksakovs other works are The History of My Acquaintance with Gogol, Memoirs and his fairy tale The Scarlet Flower was adapted into an animated feature film in the Soviet Union in 1952. New York,1961, tr. by M. C, enlightenment from the East, Early Nineteenth Century Russian Views of the East from Kazan University, Znanie. Umenie,13, 318–338, doi,10. 17805/zpu.2016.1.29, archived from the original on 5 May 2016, the memoir and autobiographical prose of S. T. Aksakov, problems of poetics. Thesis. in Russian Media related to Sergey Aksakov at Wikimedia Commons Works by Sergey Aksakov at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Sergey Aksakov at Internet Archive

Sergey Aksakov – Portrait of Aksakov by Vasily Perov
Sergey Aksakov – Aksakov garden in Ufa, named in honor of Sergey Aksakov
Sergey Aksakov – The Aksakov Family Coat of Arms.

14. Anton Chekhov – Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in esteem by writers. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his career, Medicine is my lawful wife, he once said. These four works present a challenge to the ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a theatre of mood. Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew and he made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Anton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great 29 January 1860, the third of six surviving children, in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. His father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a serf and his Ukrainian wife, were from the village Vilkhovatka near Kobeliaky. A director of the choir, devout Orthodox Christian, and physically abusive father. Chekhovs mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia and our talents we got from our father, Chekhov remembered, but our soul from our mother. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that its sickening and frightening to think about it, remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool. Chekhov attended the Greek School in Taganrog and the Taganrog Gymnasium and he sang at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his fathers choirs. In 1876, Chekhovs father was declared bankrupt after overextending his finances building a new house, to avoid debtors prison he fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolay, were attending university. The family lived in poverty in Moscow, Chekhovs mother physically and emotionally broken by the experience, Chekhov was left behind to sell the familys possessions and finish his education. Chekhov remained in Taganrog for three years, boarding with a man called Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house. Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he managed by private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches and he sent every ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with humorous letters to cheer them up. Chekhov also enjoyed a series of affairs, one with the wife of a teacher. In 1879, Chekhov completed his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, Chekhov now assumed responsibility for the whole family

Anton Chekhov – Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov – Birth house of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov – Young Chekhov in 1882
Anton Chekhov – The Taganrog Boys Gymnasium in the late 19th century. The cross on top is no longer present.

15. Constantin Stanislavski – Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognised as a character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his system of training, preparation. Its influential tours of Europe and the US and its productions of The Seagull and Hamlet established his reputation. At the MATs 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career. He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his lifes great work, the acting manual An Actors Work. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin and was one of the first to be granted the title of Peoples Artist of the USSR. Stanislavski wrote that there is nothing more tedious than an actors biography, at the request of a US publisher, however, he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art, though its account of his artistic development is not always accurate. Two English-language biographies have been published, David Magarshacks Stanislavsky, A Life and Jean Benedettis Stanislavski, His Life, Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection. His system of acting developed out of his persistent efforts to remove the blocks that he encountered in his performances and he also introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast. Despite the success that this brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Both his struggles with Chekhovs drama and his experiments with Symbolism encouraged a greater attention to inner action and he began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of psychological realism and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy. He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training, the system cultivates what Stanislavski calls the art of experiencing. In rehearsal, the searches for inner motives to justify action. Stanislavskis earliest reference to his system appears in 1909, the year that he first incorporated it into his rehearsal process. The MAT adopted it as its official rehearsal method in 1911, later, Stanislavski further elaborated the system with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the Method of Physical Action. Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an active analysis, in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised, the best analysis of a play, Stanislavski argued, is to take action in the given circumstances. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals, meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West

Constantin Stanislavski – Stanislavsky in 1936
Constantin Stanislavski – Stanislavsky as the Knight in The Society of Art and Literature's 1888 production of Alexander Pushkin 's The Miserly Knight.
Constantin Stanislavski – Stanislavsky with his soon-to-be wife Maria Liliana, playing Ferdinand and Louise in The Society of Art and Literature's production of Schiller's Intrigue and Love in 1889.
Constantin Stanislavski – Stanislavsky as Othello in 1896.

16. Soviet Union – The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states

Soviet Union – Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd with Trotsky, 1920
Soviet Union – Flag
Soviet Union – Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. After Yezhov was executed, he was edited out of the image.
Soviet Union

17. Kremlin Wall Necropolis – Burials in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow began in November 1917, when 240 pro-Bolshevik victims of the October Revolution were buried in mass graves at Red Square. It is centered on both sides of Lenins Mausoleum, initially built in wood in 1924 and rebuilt in granite in 1929–1930, in 1925–1927 burials in the ground were stopped, funerals were now conducted as burials of cremated ash in the Kremlin wall itself. Burials in the ground only resumed with Mikhail Kalinins funeral in 1946, the practice of burying dignitaries at Red Square ended with the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. The Kremlin Wall Necropolis was designated a landmark in 1974. The moat was lined with a fortress wall, and spanned by three bridges connecting the Kremlin to the posad. From 1776–1787 Matvey Kazakov built the Kremlin Senate that today provides a backdrop for the present-day Necropolis, throughout the 18th century the unused, neglected fortifications deteriorated and were not properly repaired until the 1801 coronation of Alexander I. In one season the moat with bridges and adjacent buildings was replaced with a span of paved square. More reconstruction followed in the 19th century, the stretch of Kremlin wall south from Senate Tower was badly damaged in 1812 by the explosion at the Kremlin Arsenal set off by the retreating French troops. Eventually, the structures of the towers were deemed sound enough to be left in place. Peters bastions were razed, The Kremlin wall facing Red Square was rebuilt shallower than before, in July 1917, hundreds of soldiers of the Russian Northern Front were arrested for mutiny and desertion and locked up in Daugavpils fortress. Later,869 Dvinsk inmates were transported to Moscow, here, the jailed soldiers launched a hunger strike, public support to them threatened to develop in citywide riot. On September 22,593 inmates were released, the rest were left behind bars until the October Revolution, the released soldiers, collectively called Dvintsy, stayed in the city as a cohesive unit, based in Zamoskvorechye District and openly hostile to the ruling Provisional Government. Immediately after the October Revolution in Saint Petersburg, Dvintsy became the force of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Late at night of October 27–28 a detachment of two hundred men marching north to Tverskaya Street confronted the loyalist forces near the State Historical Museum on the Red Square. In the fighting 70 of the Dvintsy, including their company commander Sapunov, were killed at the barricades, on the following day the loyalists, led by Colonel Konstantin Ryabtsev, succeeded in taking over the Kremlin. They gunned down the surrendered Red soldiers at the Kremlin Arsenal wall, more were killed as the Bolsheviks stormed the Kremlin, finally taking control on the night of November 2–3. Voices reached us across the place, and the sound of picks. Mountains of dirt and rock were piled high near the base of the wall, climbing these we looked down into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge fires

Kremlin Wall Necropolis – Tombs of Suslov, Stalin, Kalinin, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev in front of the Kremlin wall. Tomb of Yuri Andropov, which stands between Kalinin's and Dzerzhinsky's, is obstructed by trees. The Mausoleum is immediately to the right.
Kremlin Wall Necropolis – As recently as in 1800, the site of Necropolis was a boggy moat spanned with stone bridges.
Kremlin Wall Necropolis – November 10, 1917. Mass grave on Red Square
Kremlin Wall Necropolis – The first wooden Mausoleum in 1925

18. Nikita Khrushchev – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, Khrushchevs party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Khrushchev was born in the village of Kalinovka in 1894, close to the border between Russia and Ukraine. He was employed as a metalworker in his youth, and during the Russian Civil War was a political commissar, with the help of Lazar Kaganovich, he worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalins purges, and approved thousands of arrests, in 1938, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. During what was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev was again a commissar, Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalins close advisers, in the power struggle triggered by Stalins death in 1953, Khrushchev, after several years, emerged victorious. On 25 February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the Secret Speech, denouncing Stalins purges and his domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, especially in agriculture. Hoping eventually to rely on missiles for defense, Khrushchev ordered major cuts in conventional forces. Despite the cuts, Khrushchevs rule saw the most tense years of the Cold War, flaws in Khrushchevs policies eroded his popularity and emboldened potential opponents, who quietly rose in strength and deposed the premier in October 1964. However, he did not suffer the fate of previous losers of Soviet power struggles, and was pensioned off with an apartment in Moscow. His lengthy memoirs were smuggled to the West and published in part in 1970, Khrushchev died in 1971 of heart disease. Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894, in Kalinovka, a village in what is now Russias Kursk Oblast and his parents, Sergei Khrushchev and Ksenia Khrushcheva, were poor peasants of Russian origin, and had a daughter two years Nikitas junior, Irina. Sergei Khrushchev was employed in a number of positions in the Donbas area of far eastern Ukraine, working as a railwayman, as a miner, and laboring in a brick factory. Wages were much higher in the Donbas than in the Kursk region, Kalinovka was a peasant village, Khrushchevs teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, later stated that she had never seen a village as poor as Kalinovka had been. Nikita worked as a herdsboy from an early age and he was schooled for a total of four years, part in the village parochial school and part under Shevchenkos tutelage in Kalinovkas state school. She urged Nikita to seek education, but family finances did not permit this. In 1908, Sergei Khrushchev moved to the Donbas city of Yuzovka, fourteen-year-old Nikita followed later that year, while Ksenia Khrushcheva and her daughter came after

Nikita Khrushchev – Khrushchev in East Berlin, 1963
Nikita Khrushchev – Khrushchev in 1916
Nikita Khrushchev – NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda (middle) inspecting the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, 1935. Khrushchev is left behind Yagoda.
Nikita Khrushchev – Nestor Lakoba, Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria and Aghasi Khanjian during opening of the Moscow Metro

19. Red Square – Red Square is a city square in Moscow, Russia. It separates the Kremlin, the royal citadel and currently the official residence of the President of Russia. Red Square is often considered the central square of Moscow since Moscows major streets, the name Red Square neither originates from the pigment of the surrounding bricks nor from the link between the colour red and communism. Rather, the name came about because the Russian word красная, several ancient Russian towns, such as Suzdal, Yelets, and Pereslavl-Zalessky, have their main square named Krasnaya ploshchad. The rich history of Red Square is reflected in paintings by Vasily Surikov, Konstantin Yuon. The square was meant to serve as Moscows main marketplace and it was also the site of various public ceremonies and proclamations, and occasionally a coronation for Russias Tsars would take place. The square has been built up since that point and has been used for official ceremonies by all Russian governments since it was established. The relevant decrees were issued in 1493 and 1495 and they called for the demolition of all buildings within 110 sazhens of the wall. Three square gates existed on this side of the wall, which in the 17th century, were known as, the last two are directly opposite Red Square, while the Konstantino-Elenensky gate was located behind Saint Basils Cathedral. In the early 19th century, the Arch of Konstantino-Elenensky gate was paved with bricks, from this gate, wooden and stone bridges stretched across the moat. Books were sold on this bridge and stone platforms were built nearby for guns – raskats, the Tsar Cannon was located on the platform of the Lobnoye mesto. The square was called Veliky Torg or simply Torg, then Troitskaya by the name of the small Troitskaya Church, after that, the square held the name Pozhar, which means burnt. It was not until 1661–62, when it was first mentioned by its contemporary Krasnaya – Red name, Red Square was the landing stage and trade centre for Moscow. Ivan the Great decreed that trade should only be conducted from person to person, but in time, after a fire in 1547, Ivan the Terrible reorganised the lines of wooden shops on the Eastern side into market lines. The streets Ilyinka and Varvarka were divided into the Upper lines, Middle lines and Bottom lines, after a few years, the Cathedral of Intercession of the Virgin, commonly known as Saint Basils Cathedral, was built on the moat under the rule of Ivan IV. This was the first building which gave the square its present-day characteristic silhouette, in 1595, the wooden market lines were replaced with stone. By that time, a platform for the proclamation of the tsars edicts. Red Square was considered a sacred place, during the expulsion of Poles from Moscow in 1612, Prince Dmitry Pozharsky entered the Kremlin through the square

Red Square – View of Red Square looking northwest from St. Basil's Cathedral
Red Square – Saint Basil's (finished 1561)
Red Square – 17th century Palm Sunday procession leaving Saint Basil for Kremlin.
Red Square – Execution of streltsy by Tsar Peter I (to the right on a horse) in Red Square, 1698 (painted 1881)

20. President of Russia – The President of the Russian Federation is the elected head of state, Supreme Commander-in-Chief and holder of the highest office within the Russian Federation. The current President of Russia is Vladimir Putin, in 1991, the office was briefly known as the President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 25 December 1991. According to the 1978 Russian Constitution, the President of Russia was head of the executive branch, according to the current 1993 Constitution of Russia, the President of Russia is not a part of the Government of Russia, which exercises executive power. In all cases where the President of the Russian Federation is unable to fulfill his duties, they shall be temporarily delegated to the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the Federation Council is the third important position after the President and the Prime Minister. In the case of incapacity of both the President and Prime Minister, the chairman of the house of parliament becomes acting head of state. The president is empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves. The president also directs the foreign and domestic policy of the Russian Federation, the president is elected directly through a popular vote to a six-year term. The law prohibits anyone from ever being elected to the presidency for a consecutive term. In all,3 individuals have served 4 presidencies spanning 6 full terms, on May 7,2012, Vladimir Putin became the 4th and current president. A candidate for office must be a citizen of the Russian Federation who is at least 35 years old and has resided in Russia for at least 10 years. The Constitution of Russia limits the election of one person to the Presidency to two consecutive terms, since the constitution contains no ruling on a total number of terms that a President may serve, a former president may seek re-election after sitting out one complete term. The election of the President is mainly regulated by the Presidential Election Law, the Federation Council calls the presidential elections. If it does not call an election that is due. The Election Day is the second Sunday of the month and the electoral constituency is the territory of the Russian Federation as a whole. Each faction in the State Duma, the house of the Russian parliament has the right to nominate a candidate for the presidential elections. The minimum number of signatures for a presidential candidate fielded by a party with no parliamentary representation is 100,000. Terms were extended from four to six years in 2008, during Dmitry Medvedevs administration, the President is elected in a two-round system every six years, with a two consecutive term limitation. If no candidate wins by an majority in the first round

President of Russia – Incumbent Vladimir Putin since 7 May 2012
President of Russia – Standard of the President of the Russian Federation
President of Russia – Chain of office
President of Russia – Vladimir Putin takes the Presidential Oath while placing his right hand on the Presidential copy of the Russian Constitution.

21. Boris Yeltsin – Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the reforms as one of Gorbachevs most powerful political opponents. During the late 1980s, Yeltsin had been a member of the Politburo, no one had resigned from the Politburo before. This act branded Yeltsin as a rebel and led to his rise in popularity as an anti-establishment figure, on 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. However, Yeltsin never recovered his popularity after a series of economic. He vowed to transform Russias socialist economy into a capitalist market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization, due to the sudden total economic shift, a majority of the national property and wealth fell into the hands of a small number of oligarchs. The well-off millionaire and billionaire oligarchs likened themselves to 19th century robber barons, in October 1993, troops loyal to Yeltsin stopped an armed uprising outside of the parliament building, leading to a number of deaths. Yeltsin then scrapped the existing Russian constitution, banned political opposition, on 31 December 1999, under enormous internal pressure, Yeltsin announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of his chosen successor, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin left office widely unpopular with the Russian population, Yeltsin kept a low profile after his resignation, though he did occasionally publicly criticise his successor. Yeltsin died of heart failure on 23 April 2007. Boris Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka, Talitsky District, Sverdlovsk, USSR, growing up in rural Sverdlovsk, he studied at the Ural State Technical University, and began his career in the construction industry. In 1934 Nikolai Yeltsin was convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to hard labour in a gulag for three years, Nikolai remained unemployed for a period of time and then worked again in construction. His mother, Klavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina, worked as a seamstress, Boris studied at Pushkin High School in Berezniki. In 1949 he was admitted to the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk, majoring in construction, the subject of his degree paper was Construction of a Mine Shaft. From 1955 to 1957 he worked as a foreman with the building trust Uraltyazhtrubstroy, from 1957 to 1963 he worked in Sverdlovsk, and was promoted from construction site superintendent to chief of the Construction Directorate with the Yuzhgorstroy Trust. In 1963 he became chief engineer, and in 1965 head of the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine, responsible for sewerage and he joined the ranks of the CPSU nomenklatura in 1968 when he was appointed head of construction with the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee. In 1975 he became secretary of the committee in charge of the regions industrial development. In 1976 the Politburo of the CPSU promoted him to the post of the first secretary of the CPSU Committee of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yeltsin was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 17 March 1961 to 13 July 1990, and a nomenklatura member from 1968

Boris Yeltsin – Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin – Boris Yeltsin (second from left) with childhood friends
Boris Yeltsin – Boris Yeltsin with Raisa Gorbacheva.
Boris Yeltsin – Yeltsin on 21 February 1989

22. Mstislav Rostropovich – Mstislav Leopoldovich Slava Rostropovich was a Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He is considered to be one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, in addition to his interpretations and technique, he was well known for both inspiring and commissioning new works, which enlarged the cello repertoire more than any cellist before or since. Rostropovich was internationally recognized as an advocate of human rights. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and had two daughters, Olga and Elena Rostropovich, mstislavs father was born in Voronezh to Witold Rostropowicz, a composer of Polish noble descent, and Matilda Rostropovich, née Pule. The Polish part of his family bore the Bogoria coat of arms, mstislavs mother Sofiya and her elder sister Nadezhda were the daughters of the founder of the Fedotov Music School in Orienburg, Nikolay Fedotov. Nadezhda married the cellist Semyon Kozolupov, who was thus Rostropovichs uncle by marriage, Rostropovich grew up in Baku and spent his youth there. During World War II his family moved back to Orenburg and then in 1943 to Moscow, at the age of four, Rostropovich learned the piano with his mother. He began the cello at the age of 10 with his father, in 1943, at the age of 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied cello with his uncle Semyon Kozolupov, piano, conducting and composition with Vissarion Shebalin. His teachers also included Dmitri Shostakovich, in 1945 he came to prominence as a cellist when he won the gold medal in the Soviet Unions first ever competition for young musicians. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1948, and became professor of cello there in 1956, Rostropovich gave his first cello concert in 1942. He won first prize at the international Music Awards of Prague, in 1950, at the age of 23 he was awarded what was then considered the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, the Stalin Prize. At that time, Rostropovich was already known in his country and while actively pursuing his solo career, he taught at the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1955, he married Galina Vishnevskaya, a soprano at the Bolshoi Theatre. Rostropovich had working relationships with Soviet composers of the era, in 1949 Sergei Prokofiev wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op.119, for the 22-year-old Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. Prokofiev also dedicated his Symphony-Concerto for cello to him, this was premiered in 1952, Rostropovich and Dmitry Kabalevsky completed Prokofievs Cello Concertino after the composers death. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote both his first and second cello concertos for Rostropovich, who gave their first performances. His international career started in 1963 in the Conservatoire of Liège, Rostropovich went on several tours in Western Europe and met several composers, including Benjamin Britten, who dedicated his Cello Sonata, three Solo Suites, and his Cello Symphony to Rostropovich. Britten was also renowned as a piano accompanist and together they recorded, among other works, Schuberts Sonata for Arpeggione and his daughter claimed that this recording moved her father to tears of joy even on his deathbed

Mstislav Rostropovich – Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Rostropovich – Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten in 1964
Mstislav Rostropovich – Rostropovich playing the Duport Stradivarius at the White House in 1978.
Mstislav Rostropovich – Mstislav Rostropovich with wife Galina Vishnevskaya in 1965

23. Mytishchi – Population,173,160,159,900,154, 068 ,125,000,60,000. Mytishchi has humid continental climate, same as Moscow, with long, cold winters and short, in the 8th–9th centuries, first Slavic tribes began settling here. In and around Mytishchinsky District about a dozen of settlements from the 11th–13th centuries have been discovered. The modern settlement has been known since 1460 and since the 19th century it has known as Bolshiye Mytishchi. Its history is linked to the Yauzsky port. Mytishchi was an important place on the ship route. Through this site commercial ships had been hauled across on wheels, rollers, merchants had to pay a duty for this. The settlement got its name thanks to the duty, which had known as myt. In the mid-19th century, the population was 389, Town status was granted to Mytishchi in 1925. Within the framework of administrative divisions, Mytishchi serves as the center of Mytishchinsky District. As an administrative division, it is, together with twenty-four rural localities, as a municipal division, the Town of Mytishchi is incorporated within Mytishchinsky Municipal District as Mytishchi Urban Settlement. The city is the oblasts largest center for industry and education, Mytishchi is famous for its aqueduct, built in the 18th century by the order of Catherine the Great. It was the first water supply constructed in Russia to provide the Kremlin with pure water, Mytishchi is twinned with, There is Ognivo puppet theatre, FEST drama and comedy theatre and youth theater Domoy. Постановление №123-ПГ от28 сентября2010 г, «Об учётных данных административно-территориальных и территориальных единиц Московской области», в ред. Постановления №252-ПГ от26 июня2015 г, «О внесении изменения в учётные данные административно-территориальных и территориальных единиц Московской области». Опубликован, Информационный вестник Правительства МО, №10,30 октября2010 г, Закон №198/2004-ОЗ от29 декабря2004 г. «О статусе и границах Мытищинского муниципального района и вновь образованных в его составе муниципальных образований», Закона №73/2015-ОЗ от5 мая2015 г. Вступил в силу со дня официального опубликования, Подмосковье, №13,26 января2005 г

Mytishchi – Voloshinoy Street in Mytishchi
Mytishchi – Monument to the first Russian water supply system

24. Mikhail Bulgakov – Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian writer, physician and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15 May 1891 in Kiev, Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. His mother was Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakova, a former teacher, both of his grandfathers were clergymen in the Russian Orthodox Church. Afanasiy Bulgakov was born in Bryansk Oblast, Russia, where his father was a priest, Varvara Bulgakova was born in Karachev, Russia. From childhood Bulgakov was drawn to theater, at home, he wrote comedies, which his brothers and sisters acted out. In 1901 Bulgakov joined the First Kiev Gymnasium, where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature, theatre, the teachers of the Gymnasium exerted a great influence on the formation of his literary taste. After the death of his father in 1907, Mikhails mother, after graduation from the Gymnasium in 1909, Bulgakov entered the Medical Faculty of Kiev University, which he finished with special commendation. He then took a position as a physician at the Kiev Military Hospital, in 1913, Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered with the Red Cross as a doctor and was sent directly to the front. Bulgakovs suffering from these wounds had deleterious long-term effects, to suppress chronic pain, especially in the abdomen, he injected himself with morphine. Over the next year his addiction grew stronger, in 1918, he abandoned morphine and never used it again. Morphine, a released in 1926, is his account of that trying period. In 1916, Bulgakov graduated from the Medical Department of Kiev University and his life in those days is reflected in his A Country Doctors Notebook. In September 1917 Bulgakov was moved to the hospital in Vyazma, in February 1918, he returned to Kiev, Ukraine, where he opened a private practice at his home at Andreyevsky Descent,13. Here he lived through the Russian Civil War and witnessed ten coups, successive governments drafted the young doctor into their service while two of his brothers were serving in the White Army against the Bolsheviks. In February 1919 he was mobilised as a physician by the Ukrainian Peoples Army. There, he became ill with typhus and barely survived. That was when he last saw his family, after the Civil War, after illness Bulgakov abandoned his career as a doctor for that of a writer

Mikhail Bulgakov – Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov – Bulgakov, 1930 or earlier
Mikhail Bulgakov – Gravestone of Mikhail Bulgakov and Yelena Bulgakova.
Mikhail Bulgakov – Soviet postal stamp: prepaid postcard of 1991.

25. Vladimir Mayakovsky – Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. Mayakovsky often found engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship. Even after death his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady, Vladimir Vladimirovichs mother Alexandra Alexeyevna, was a housewife, looking after the children, a son and two daughters, Olga and Lyudmila. The family was of Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their fathers side, at home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian, I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. Thus three cultures are united in me, he told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview, Georgia for Mayakovsky remained the eternal symbol of beauty. I know, its nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, in 1902 Mayakovsky joined the Kutais gymnasium where, as a 14-year-old he took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi. His mother, aware of his activities, apparently didnt mind, people around warned us we were giving a young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations, she later remembered. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906 the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, in July 1906 Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of the Moscows 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature. For me it was philosophy, Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, thered be no higher art for me than The Foreword by Marx, he recalled in the 1920s in his autobiography I, Myself. In 1908, the boy was dismissed from the gymnasium because his mother was no able to afford the tuition fees. For two years he studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts, where his sister Lyudmila had started her studies a few years earlier. As a young Bolshevik activist, Mayakovsky distributed propaganda leaflets, possessed a pistol without a license and this resulted in a series of arrests and finally an 11-month imprisonment. It was in a confinement of the Moscow Butyrka prison that Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time. Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one, he wrote in I, as an underage person, Mayakovsky avoided a serious prison sentence and in January 1910 was released. A warden confiscated the young mans notebook, and years later Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, upon his release from prison, Mayakovsky remained an ardent Socialist, but realized his own inadequacy as a serious revolutionary. Having left the Party, he concentrated on education, sat down and started to learn… Now my intention was to make the Socialist art, he later remembered

Vladimir Mayakovsky – Mayakovsky in 1924
Vladimir Mayakovsky – The Mayakovskys in Kutaisi
Vladimir Mayakovsky – Mayakovsky in 1910
Vladimir Mayakovsky – Mayakovsky (center) with the fellow Futurist group members

26. Sergei Prokofiev – Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian and Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. Prokofievs greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed works in that genre, including The Gambler. Prokofievs one operatic success during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Opera and subsequently performed over the decade in Europe. During that time he married a Spanish singer, Carolina Codina, in the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofievs ballets and operas to be staged in America and western Europe. He enjoyed some success there – notably with Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, the Nazi invasion of the USSR spurred him to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoys War and Peace. Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Sontsovka, a rural estate in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Sergei Alexeyevich Prokofiev, was an agronomist, Prokofievs mother, Maria, came from a family of former serfs who had been owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf-children were taught theatre and arts from an early age. She was described by Reinhold Glière as a woman with beautiful. Who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her, after their wedding in the summer of 1877, the Prokofievs had moved to a small estate in the Smolensk governorate. Eventually Sergei Alexeyevich found employment as a engineer, employed by one of his former fellow-students, Dmitri Sontsov. By seven, he had learned to play chess. At the age of nine, he was composing his first opera, The Giant, as well as an overture, unable to arrange that, Tanayev instead arranged for composer and pianist Reinhold Glière to spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. The first series of lessons culminated, at the 11-year-old Prokofievs insistence, the following summer, Glière revisited Sontsovka to give further tuition. By 1904, his mother had decided instead on Saint Petersburg, glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofievs mother to have her son apply for admission to the Conservatory. He passed the tests and enrolled that year. Several years younger than most of his class, Prokofiev was viewed as eccentric and arrogant and he also shared classes with the composers Boris Asafyev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the latter becoming a relatively close and lifelong friend. As a member of the Saint Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a rebel, while getting praise for his original compositions

Sergei Prokofiev – Sergei Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Sergei Prokofiev – Prokofiev as drawn by Henri Matisse for the premiere of Chout (1921)
Sergei Prokofiev – Prokofiev and his second wife, Mira Mendelson
Sergei Prokofiev – Sergei Prokofiev with Mstislav Rostropovich

27. Nikolay Andreyev – For the Soviet-era Russian pictorialist, see Nikolay Andreyev Nikolay Andreyevich Andreyev was a Russian sculptor, graphic artist and stage designer. As a young man Andreyev studied with Sergey Volnukhin and in 1902 became associated with the Peredvizhniki group of realists, a native of Moscow, Andreyev was the designer of two Moscow statues known for their removal. One is the bronze figure of Gogol, with bronze friezes of Gogols greatest characters surrounding the base, finished in 1909. Similarly Andreyevs figure of Freedom was erected with a 26-meter obelisk in Tverskaya Street in 1919 and it was blown up in 1941 and replaced with the equestrian statue of Yuri Dolgorukiy, by sculptor Sergei Orlov, completed in 1954. He also produced a number of portraits of Soviet leaders, including Stalin. Andreyev created the first post-1917 artistic representation of Stalin, dated 1 May 1922 and this drawing was executed in the realist style including Stalins pockmarks and stiffened arm. This was also the last time Stalin was portrayed with his imperfection, the drawing was later criticized by the Great Leader, questioning Andreyevs knowledge of human anatomy. Andreyev died in Moscow and is buried in the citys most famous cemetery, news article on the destruction of the Statue of Liberty Plamper, Jan, The Stalin Cult, a study in the alchemy of power, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,2012

Nikolay Andreyev – Statue of Gogol now standing in a courtyard of Nikitsky Boulevard

28. Lev Kerbel – Lev Efimovich Kerbel was a renowned sculptor of Soviet realist works. Kerbels creations included statues of Marx, Lenin, Yuri Gagarin, which were sent by Soviet Government as gifts to socialist and the Third World countries across the world. In 1976 the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union presented the Government of Sri Lanka the monument of Solomon Bandaranaike, in 1990s following the collapse of the socialist block many of his works of art were destroyed. However his enormous Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, has preserved as a cultural monument. Kerbel was born to a Russian Jewish family in the village of Semyonovka in Chernigov Governorate, Russian Republic, levs family moved to the russian Smolensk region, where he began sculpting as a child. He continued to sculpt and in 1934 he won an award from the Komsomol for a plaque of Lenin, during World War II, Kerbel helped build the defenses for the Battle of Moscow, then served in the Northern Fleet, gaining renown as a military artist. After the war, Kerbels career took off with a range of commissions. In 1958 he sculpted a statue in Shanghai that depicted a huge Soviet, when Soviet-Chinese relations foundered a few years later, the statue was torn down by a mob. Another example of Lev Kerbels sculptures is the Lenin Monument in the Parque Lenin area of Havana, while some people dismiss Kerbels works as a flat Communist propaganda, Kerbel himself claimed that he was always more interested in art than politics. Many people now view his few remaining statues with nostalgia, particularly in Chemnitz, among the monuments on the graves of the Soviet soldiers carefully preserved in Germany the sculptures in Berlin, and on Seelow Heights were carved by Lev Kerbel. One of the last works of Kerbel was the Memorial to the crew of the “Kursk” submarine, one of Lev Kerbels daughters is American actress Alexandra Callas

Lev Kerbel – Lev Kerbel's Monumental Bust of Karl Marx in Chemnitz, Germany
Lev Kerbel – The Lenin Monument in Parque Lenin, Havana, Cuba (1984, sculptor - Lev Kerbel, architect - A.Quintana)
Lev Kerbel – The “Kursk” submarine crew memorial

29. Sergey Konenkov – Sergey Timofeyevich Konenkov was a famous Russian and Soviet sculptor. He was often called the Russian Rodin, Konenkov was born in a peasant family, in a village of Karakovichi in Smolensk province. Sergey studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, graduating in 1897 and he travelled to Italy, France, Egypt, Greece, and Germany. During the Russian revolution of 1905 Konenkov was with the workers on the barricades, Konenkov later supported the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1922 Konenkov married Margarita Ivanovna Vorontsova, and in 1923 they travelled to the United States to take part in an exhibition of Russian and Soviet art. The trip was supposed to last for a few months, but Konenkov stayed in the States for 22 years, in 1928–1929 the sculptor visited Italy to meet and work on a portrait of the Soviet writer Maksim Gorky. He had an exhibition in Rome. During the American period, Konenkov created a body of work focusing on Bible themes. He produced works depicting Jesus Christ and the Christian prophets and apostles, in 1935 he was commissioned by the Princeton University to do a sculpture of Albert Einstein. It is said that Einstein was interested in the work of the Russian sculptor, there have been allegations that Margarita was working in those years for the Soviet Government, but no concrete evidence has been provided to support the theory. Under direct orders from Joseph Stalin in 1945, a ship was sent to New York to bring Konenkov back to the USSR, the sculptor was given a large studio on Gorky street in the centre of Moscow. He had found favor enough with the regime to be asked to design a plaque commemorating the first anniversary of the October Revolution on the Senate Tower of the Kremlin and he also made wood carved crosses and other pieces for the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent in Moscow. Konenkov received numerous Soviet awards, including the star of the Hero of Socialist Labour, the order of Lenin. He is buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Convent, list of Russian artists The Uncommon Vision of Sergei Konenkov, 1874-1971, A Russian Sculptor and His Times. Marie Turbow Lampard, John E. Bowlt, New York Times - How the F. B. I. tracked the calls of Einstein Letters suggest Einstein affair with spy Konenkovs Grandson Arrested For Arson Konenkovs grave

Sergey Konenkov – Kore (Russian: Кора), 1912
Sergey Konenkov – Bather (Russian: Купальщица), 1917
Sergey Konenkov – The Poor (Russian: Нищая Братия), 1917

30. Ernst Neizvestny – Ernst Iosifovich Neizvestny was a Russian-American sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and art philosopher. He emigrated to the U. S. in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City and his last name in Russian literally means unknown. Alexander Calder, the American artist, once said to Neizvestny, All my life I create the world of children, Neizvestny was born 9 April 1925 in Sverdlovsk. In 1942, at the age of 17, he joined the Red Army as a volunteer, at the close of World War II, he was heavily wounded and sustained a clinical death. Although he was awarded the Order of the Red Star posthumously and his received a official notification that her son had died. In 1947, Neizvestny was enrolled at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga and he continued his education at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute and the Philosophy Department of the Moscow State University. His sculptures, often based on the forms of the body, are noted for their expressionism. Although his preferred material is bronze, his larger, monumental installations are often executed in concrete, most of his works are arranged in extensive cycles, the best known of which is The Tree of Life, a theme he has developed since 1956. Other well-known works he created during the Soviet period include Prometheus in Artek, much of his art from the Soviet era was destroyed before he was force exiled to America. Neizvestnys talent for large sculptures was again recognized when in the late 1980s six Taiwan cities commissioned the New Statue of Liberty to be built in Kaohsiung harbor. Like the original in New York, it was planned to be 152 feet tall, at least one about five feet tall, and approximately 13 smaller bronzes, each slightly over 18 inches, sold to clients of Magna Gallery in San Francisco. Although the authorized number of signed and numbered castings was 200, far fewer were actually cast and sold. The reasons are largely political, and are described in Albert Leongs bio of Neizvestny, during the 1980s, Neizvestny was a visiting lecturer at the University of Oregon and at UC Berkeley. He also worked with Magna Gallery in San Francisco, and had a number of shows which were well-attended in the mid to late 1980s. This gallery also asked him to create his suite of five original graphics, Man through the Wall, Magna Gallery was closed at the end of 1992. During this time, Neizvestny worked diligently to get his dream Tree of Life monumental sculpture funded, in 1996, Neizvestny completed his Mask of Sorrow, a 15-meter tall monument to the victims of Soviet purges, situated in Magadan. The same year, he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation, although he lived in New York City and worked at Columbia University, Neizvestny frequently visited Moscow and celebrated his 80th birthday there. A museum dedicated to his sculptures was established in Uttersberg, Sweden, some of his crucifixion statues were acquired by John Paul II for the Vatican Museums

Ernst Neizvestny – Ernst Neizvestny receives the Order of Honor from Vladimir Putin, October 2000