Curated playlist
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
- Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky stood in Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of December 1849, waiting to be shot. He had been split into a three-man group with the firing squad before him, the third man in the second row. Beside him stood…
- Catherine the GreatCatherine the Great was born Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, on the 2nd of May 1729, in the Ducal Castle of Stettin in Prussian Pomerania. Her family had little money. Her rise was bankrolled by her mother…
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of…
- Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin was born on the 7th of October 1952 in Leningrad, a city shaped by some of the most catastrophic violence of the 20th century. His older brother Viktor died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad…
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those heavens from a cell in the Lubyanka prison. He had been arrested three months earlier,…
- Wassily KandinskyWassily Kandinsky stood in his studio one day and stared at a painting on the wall for a long moment before realising it was his own work, hanging upside down. That disorienting pause, according to some art historians, cracked something…
- Sofia GubaidulinaSofia Gubaidulina was born on the 24th of October 1931 in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. She was five years old when she discovered music, and from that first encounter she never separated it…
- Nicolas SlonimskyNicolas Slonimsky died on the 25th of December 1995 in Los Angeles, at the age of 101. He had spent the last decade of his life celebrating that improbable longevity with a characteristic mix of wit and industry. For his 98th birthday, he…
- Alexei NavalnyAlexei Navalny boarded a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on the 20th of August 2020 having consumed, by his spokeswoman's account, nothing that morning but a cup of tea purchased at the airport. Within minutes he was screaming aboard the…
- Nikolay LosskyNikolay Onufriyevich Lossky once summed up his entire philosophy in four words: 'all is immanent in all'. He called the system built from that idea intuitive-personalism. It was a way of thinking about reality that put him at odds with the…
- Nikolai BerdyaevNikolai Berdyaev once told Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared head of the Soviet secret police, exactly what was wrong with Bolshevism. He was sitting across from the Cheka's most powerful man, under arrest, at a midnight interrogation. He did…
- Semyon FrankSemyon Lyudvigovich Frank was born in Russia on the 28th of January 1877. He entered the world within a Jewish family in Moscow. His father worked as a doctor but died when Semyon was still young. The boy grew up under the care of his…
- Valentina TereshkovaIt is I, Seagull. Everything is fine. I see the horizon. It's a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is. Those words came from Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile worker, radioing down from orbit…
- Alla PugachevaAlla Pugacheva sold more than 250 million records over the course of her career. That number places her not in a regional category but in a conversation with the biggest-selling artists the world has ever produced. Yet outside the former…