Curated category
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…
- 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…
- Nikolai GogolNikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once described a planned masterpiece as a Russian answer to Dante's Divine Comedy. He never finished it.
- 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…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D.
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades.
- Georgy SviridovGeorgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was born on the 16th of December 1915 in the town of Fatezh. His father, a Bolshevik sympathizer named Vasily, died when Georgy…
- 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…