This 325-meter tall cliff called "Aq Qaya" or "White Rock" in the Belogorsky District is a popular filming location, which is not surprising given that this place could be somewhere in Puerto Rico.

📸 Aydar Daminov

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Happy belated birthday to Boris Pasternak!

133 years ago on February 10 was the birthday of the great Russian poet and Nobel laureate in literature, Boris Pasternak.

You can read our summary of his major work Doctor Zhivago.

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Aurora borealis in Teriberka, Murmansk region.

📷 by @mr_alex_turner

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Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo: The Russian revolutionary’s affair with the icon of global feminism

Leon Trotsky led the October Revolution and created the Red Army. Despite all his merits, he was expelled from the USSR and received political asylum in Mexico, where he and his wife lived in the house of the legendary Frida Kahlo - one of the most prominent Latin American artists and feminists.

The acquaintance eventually grew into a passionate love affair.

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Konstantin Bogaevsky’s 10 most important works

Konstantin Bogaevsky took his first steps in painting in his native Feodosia. There he studied under great marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky.

Later, the well-known poet Maximilian Voloshin called him “the painter of the land” with good reason. Setting up a studio in Feodosia, Bogaevsky created paintings in which he conveyed his peculiar, melancholic vision of the ancient hills and mountains of Crimea.

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Suzdal’s outdoor museum: Exploring traditions of wooden architecture

Among the town’s many architectural landmarks, perhaps the most distinctive is the wooden Church of the Tikhvin Icon of the Virgin, located a short distance downriver on the same bank as the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb.

Although the construction date is subject to question; one version states that a wooden church was built on the site in the 1650s and then rebuilt in its present form in 1717.

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In the late 19th century, Konstantin Makovsky was considered a fashionable and expensive portrait painter and author of historical paintings. He also had a big gold medal of the Paris World's Fair to his name.

Yet, Makovsky often painted touching and sentimental pictures about hard rural life too. His barefoot girl running with her brother from a thunderstorm is a real scene from life observed by the artist during one of his trips to the Russian provinces.

📷 ‘Children Running from the Storm’, 1872, Sputnik

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On this day in 1864 the legendary Moscow Zoo was opened!

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“Stalin’s blossoming garden”: rise and demise of the Volga German Soviet Republic

The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic became the first national autonomous region in the young socialist state. Vladimir Lenin signed the decree establishing it in 1918.

The history of the USSR itself was reflected in this republic’s tragic fate. Flourishing in the 1920s, it was caught in the avalanche of Stalin’s repressions. With the beginning of the war against Nazi Germany, the inhabitants of the autonomous region were forcefully deported en masse to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The republic itself was liquidated forever.

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How the Soviet Union prepared for World War II

The USSR had been preparing for a new world war from its very foundation. The country’s leadership was convinced that the capitalist West would sooner or later try to destroy the world’s first “socialist state of workers and peasants”.

By the Summer of 1941, the numerical strength of the Red Army had reached five million, even surpassing the Wehrmacht and its allies in numbers of tanks and aircraft.

The Soviet Armed Forces seemed a formidable fighting force, but they faced all sorts of organizational and technical problems. To solve them, the country’s leadership did everything possible in an attempt to delay the beginning of the war. It didn’t succeed in doing so, however.

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