Curated playlist
Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev stood before a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of February 1956, and in four hours dismantled the reputation of a man who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute.…
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904 at the age of forty-four -- the same disease that had killed his brother claiming…
- Nikolai GogolNikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once described a planned masterpiece as a Russian answer to Dante's Divine Comedy. He never finished it. On the night of the 24th of February 1852, he burned the manuscript that held most of the second part of…
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as teenagers and lived in an adobe-walled hut belonging to his grandfather. He died…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother. At age fourteen, he read novels by Jules Verne that sparked his interest in aeronautics. He wrote a letter to…
- Dziga VertovDziga Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman in Białystok, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family that would eventually scatter across continents and history. When he finally chose his working name, it was a…
- Lev KuleshovLev Kuleshov placed the same footage of an actor named Ivan Mozzhukhin next to a bowl of soup, then a coffin, then a woman reclining on a couch. The actor's face never changed. Yet audiences watching each version were convinced they saw…
- Boris YeltsinBoris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament on a sweltering August day in 1991 and delivered a speech that would echo across the twentieth century. Below him, a crowd had gathered to defy a coup against Soviet leader…
- Sergei ProkofievSergei Prokofiev died on the 5th of March 1953 , the same day as Joseph Stalin. His coffin had to be carried by hand through the back streets of Moscow, away from the vast crowds mourning the dictator. About 30 people attended his funeral.…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His…
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several decades reshaping itself by force. His father, Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov, was…
- Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
- Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938, he described 327 manuscript pages, roughly 22 chapters, waiting on his desk. He…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district. His father owned serfs in three provinces. His family descended from the princes of Smolensk. By the…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match the model of his pistol. Neighbors reported hearing two shots, not one. Ten days…
- Nikolai PodgornyNikolai Podgorny held the highest ceremonial office in the Soviet Union for more than a decade, yet his story ends with him being physically removed from a painting. On the 24th of May 1977, a unanimous vote by the Central Committee…
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- Sergei EisensteinSergei Eisenstein arrived in Hollywood in May 1930 with a contract worth $100,000 and an invitation from Paramount Pictures to make a film in the United States. He had already directed two of the most celebrated silent films in history. He…
- Alexander ProkhorovAlexander Prokhorov was born on the 11th of July 1916 in Atherton, Australia, the child of Russian parents who had fled Tsarist repression on the other side of the world. That unusual origin - an Australian childhood, a Russian soul, a…
- Alfred SchnittkeAlfred Garrievich Schnittke was born on the 24th of November 1934 in Engels, a city in the Volga German ASSR of the Russian SFSR, to parents who straddled two worlds. His father was Jewish, born in Frankfurt, and had moved to the Soviet…
- Vladimir VernadskyVladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky died on the 6th of January 1945, just as the Soviet atomic bomb project he had helped inspire was beginning to take shape. He never saw the nuclear age he had argued for. What he left behind was something…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…
- Georgy SviridovGeorgy Sviridov wrote the piece of music that millions of Soviet citizens heard every evening. Yet most of them never connected it to his name. His score for the 1965 film Time, Forward! supplied the opening theme for Vremya, the nightly…
- Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow in 1853, the second son of one of Russia's most prominent historians, yet he spent his final days as what witnesses described as a homeless pauper, dying at a borrowed estate. Between those two points…