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Richard Sorge in 1940 Today is the 70th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought America into the second world war*, which, in turn, meant that  – there was no way that Japan would attack Russia in the Far East;  – Britain was getting America as an ally against Hitler and [...]

The original Svetlana Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, died on 22 November 2011. She had a long and, at times, troubled life. A Kremlin princess until Stalin’s death in 1953, in 1967 she defected to the USA, an event that was a big propaganda coup for the West. (see video below, wiki about her here). There [...]

Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva died on 22 November in the USA. She had an amazing life, forever trying to escape from the shadow of the great dictator and never quite being able to. Without any connection to her at all, this beautiful song, Aderyn Llwyd (Sparrow) by Mary Hopkin sprang into my memory (she recorded [...]

Zatuliveter reporting for RT, click to watch. Katia Zatuliveter has been in the news in Britain for months, but presenters and newsreaders still stumble over her seemingly un-Russian looking/sounding surname. It is indeed uncommon. To the point that one Russian name-deciphering web-site even says it is of Germanic or Jewish origin. However the name’s semantics [...]

British workers are on strike today – because people are fuming over cuts and pension age hike. Despite the massive anti-strike propaganda pre-strike opinion polls showed that 61 percent of the public support the industrial action. It is expected to be the largest industrial action since the 70s. Estimates say that around 2 million workers [...]

Some Russian boatmen without the stick… Popularised by Shaliapin and Glen Miller, the emblematic Russian folk-song known in the West as the Song of the Volga Boatmen, to Russians is the Song of the Big Stick (“Дубинушка”). The discrepancy is hiding somewhere in the mists of history. There isn’t really a dubina there, it’s just [...]

One of the most optimistic sci-fi novels by the famous Russian duo Arkady and Boris Strugatsky has the title “Обитаемый остров”, literally the Inhabited Island. Max Kammerer, a member of the future Earth’s space probing ‘Free Search Group’ is stranded on a planet which strikingly resembles today’s Earth. He quickly realises that things have to [...]

Andrei Gavrilov This is a video with Andrei Gavrilov (Андрей Юрьевич Гаврилов) talking about translation.  Gavrilov is a legendary figure in Russia. He dubbed an endless number of English, French and Japanese-language films on video, beginning from 1980s when the flood of Western cinema started to break through the walls of the Soviet Union on [...]

Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011 Steve Jobs’ Apple grew out of freedom. Jobs, a hippy, rejected the accepted way of thinking and behaving. His philosophy was to look at the established differently, think laterally, pursue simplicity, reliability – and beauty. That is what makes him as a man and his creation, a Mac, [...]

Nobel Prize in literature went to Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden. He is considered by Swedes as the national poet. They compare him in importance to Strindberg and Bergman. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 and has been unable to speak since, but has continued to write. Internationally he is one of the most widely translated [...]