The Americans: That’s So 80s

For my last post, I decided to talk about The Americans, one of my favorite shows currently airing on television. The show follows Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, two undercover Soviet spies who live in Fall Church, VA (not only is that...

Manuscripts Don’t Burn

For my blog post of the week, I wanted briefly look at censorship in 1960's Soviet Russia and how censorship effected The Master and Margarita, a book by that many consider to be one of the greatest pieces of literature of the...

Work at Home,Work at Work, Always Stressed

In the 1950s, a Soviet housewife was expected, first and foremost, to be a provider for her family. She was expected to take care of her children, keep her husband happy, prepare meals, make sure the house was cleaned, wash...

When You Wish Upon A Pike

Since there is a '30s module about Russian childhood under Stalin and a '30s module about the arts, I thought it would be appropriate to combine the two in my post. By The Pike's Wishes is a 1936 play by Yelizaveta Tarakhovskaya. Tarakhovskaya was...

Sporty Chic(k)

The featured image is a 1929 painting by Ivan Kulikov that highlights the importance of sport in Russia during the late 1920s. The "Great Turn" was a major departure from the New Economic Police (NEP), a movement many thought was...

A Feast for A Famine

The famine that plagued Russia from 1921 to 1923 is widely noted as one of the largest disasters of the 20th century. The quick succession of World War I by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War created a...

October Manifesto: Trying to Cool Down the Rising Temperatures

Saying that 1905 was a tumultuous year for Russia would be an understatement. "Bloody Sunday" set the tone for a year filled with protests, culminating with a nation-wide strike in September (Freeze 253). The strikes, coupled with the complete embarrassment...

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky collection

  This is a 1910 photograph of Elder Makarii sitting his cell. The picture was taken in the town of Verkhoturye,  which is located in the middle of the Ural mountains. Prokudin-Gorsky was highly revered for his photography and hoped...