Jamala was born in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, where her ancestors were sent to from Crimea in one of Joseph Stalin’s bloody ethnic deportations. Her father, an ethnic Crimean Tatar, was a choir master. Her mother, an Armenian whose roots trace back to the now-disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, was a pianist. Jamala’s musical education thus started from […]
Alla Yurievna Perfilova, better known by her stage name, “Valeria,” is from the small town of Atkarsk in the Saratov Oblast in Russia’s southwest. Raised by a family of classical musicians, she studied music her whole life. After graduating high school, Valeria moved to Moscow and entered the prestigious Gnessin Academy of Music in Moscow. […]
A Moscow native, Natalia Illinichna Ionova, better known as Glu’koza, was first a child actress working in television. Among other projects, she shot a few episodes of the still-popular kids’ show Ералаш (Jumble; Yeralash). She was discovered in 2002 by the record producer Maxim Fadeev on the set of the Russian war movie Триумф (Triumph). […]
Sataney Setgalievna “Sati” Kazanova, was born in a small village in Kabardino-Balkaria, which lies in Russia’s Caucuses Mountains, along the border with Georgia. When she was 12, her family moved to the regional capital of Nalchik, where she began to seriously study music. Sati continued her studies in Vocals at Kabardino-Balkaria College of Culture and […]
Irakli Pirtskhalava was born in Moscow to a Georgian family. While he dreamed of playing soccer, his mother insisted that he go to music school. Irakli was just five years old at the time. At 13, he left music and played soccer, still a passion for him, for two years but realized. However, he was […]
Dima Bilan was born in Karachay-Cherkessia, a republic in Russia’s Caucasus region. He entered a specialty musical school in the fifth grade, where he studied primarily the accordion. He also took part in several youth contests in Karachay-Cherkessia and in Moscow. He entered the prestigious Gnessin Musical Academy in 2000. He met his future producer, […]
Traveling throughout Poland now is a group of musicians who come from a rather unusual background. The band, Paragraf 64, is comprised entirely of current prison inmates that combine metal with hip-hop. They are part of a service program aimed to rehabilitate prisoners through community service. I had the opportunity to see this band perform […]
Russian shanson is a uniquely Russian cultural phenomenon. A traditionally rebellious musical genre, which has a reputation for describing the darkest parts of life in Russia, became widely popular during the Soviet era, despite being effectively banned in the USSR. It has now moved from its underground existence to mainstream Russian culture. There are radio stations and […]
Russia, 1917, WWI. This is the story of the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, formed by the Russian Provisional Government in late May of 1917. When the revolution takes place in Russia during the third year of WWI, the country faces a political crisis leading to the collapse of the Russian army. The Provisional […]
Born into a family of musicians, Yulia Savicheva performed her first solo at age five. In 1994, her father’s band was invited to perform in Moscow, and she moved there from her native Kurgan, a city of about 350,000 in south-west Siberia. In Moscow, she studied ballet and theater for many years, helping her to […]
The following bilingual Russian MiniLesson is meant to build your vocabulary by providing Russian phrases within English text. Hover over the bold Russian to reveal its English translation. is a popular genre of humor in Russia. It usually consists of a list of “one-liners,” which rely on words with double-meanings, illogically juxtaposed sentences, misused words […]
Poetry and tounge twisters can be a great way to improve both your vocabularly and pronounciation in Russian! In Russian, tounge twisters are known as as “скороговорки” (which means something like “fast-sayings”). Below are several скороговорки that are fairly well known in Russia and are often used for “training the tounge.” 1. На горке горько ревет Егорка. […]
