David Remnick reports from Moscow on the recent acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin: “The ballet company has always uncannily embodied the society to which it belongs: imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and, now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia…” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/12HWJJO

Photograph by Misha Friedman.

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

A history of meteorites, asteroids, and comets from our archive: http://nyr.kr/XUdNpf

Over the past ten years, Russia has seen a rise in domestic cults; the Russian Orthodox church estimates that over four thousand religious movements currently exist across the country.

Click-through for a selection of David Monteleone’s photographs from his time with the Vissarionites, a religious cult that lives in a community based in the rural Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, and more on the Vissarionites by Maria Lokke: http://nyr.kr/WCv0SB

Moscow has a lot of elevators—upward of a hundred and twenty thousand, which is more than twice as many as New York City. Many are old—every fifth elevator in the Russian capital has exceeded its lifespan. And a lot of people get stuck in them—depending on whom you ask, anywhere from an estimated hundred and twenty thousand to more than two hundred thousand people get stuck in a Moscow elevator each year. 

Sally McGrane meets Moscow’s specially-trained elevator mechanics, and reports on the art of elevator rescue: http://nyr.kr/UDVK7o 

(Source: newyorker.com)

Winding beneath the magnificent halls of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, with its Da Vincis, diamonds, Greek statuary, Egyptian parchments, enormous number of paintings, mechanical peacock clock, and other treasures, there is a catacomb of cellars. It was into this windowless nether region—far below the Winter Palace’s expansive view of the waters of the Neva—that Maria Haltunen and I had cautiously descended. As I followed her through a narrow, imperfectly-lit corridor, full of large pipes and jutting wires, Haltunen gasped. “Look!” she said.

In the semi-darkness, a little being had appeared. He perched, a foot-tall shadow, on a water pipe.

“Oh, you are a fat one!” said Haltunen, jangling the chain of her I.D. pass like a talisman as she approached the pointy-eared creature. “How nice you are!”

Sally McGrane on the cats of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia: http://nyr.kr/SPKPSU

Photograph by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP.

For years, Putin has maintained a certain vagueness when it came to Russia’s post-Soviet national identity and its ethical basis, but today he finds himself under pressure to define what his Russia stands for.

Masha Lipman on Putin’s definition of the “right” values “that ‘good’ Russians should be guided by”: http://nyr.kr/OYeIj9

Photograph by Platon.

Read David Remnick on the resistance to Putin.

David Remnick on the Pussy Riot scandal: http://nyr.kr/R1fF0j

…the true verdict will be a verdict on the regime, not them. The women of Pussy Riot, like Sinyavsky and Brodsky before them, have spoken with the confidence of free people who know that their words—not least their closing statements—will outlive their persecutors, both in the courtroom and the Kremlin.

Photograph by Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty

Masha Lipman on The Absurd and Outrageous Trial of Pussy Riot: http://nyr.kr/QBTuv7

…the prosecution of Pussy Riot does, indeed, have a lot in common with the Soviet dissidents’ trials. Then as now, the judges didn’t care to conceal their bias; then as now, there was a clear sense that conviction was preordained. Then as now, those in the dock were voices of reason, honesty and morality, while their persecutors were cruel, absurd, and ultimately immoral. Then as now, the formal charge was a thin disguise. In 1964, the poet Joseph Brodsky was charged and convicted for “parasitism”; in 1968, the participants of the demonstration against Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia were charged with violation of public order. The Pussy Riot women are tried for hooliganism and for inciting religious hatred…