Lilya Palveleva is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Russian Service.
The announcement that Russia's population declined in 2019 for the second consecutive year came as no surprise to demographers. But the rate of decline -- the population loss in 2019 was three times the 2018 figure -- has many questioning whether the government has the vision and the political will to reverse the trend.
The Russian Culture Ministry has ordered regional governments to ensure that exhibitions in museums correspond with "the state's priorities." They have until April 30 to come up with a plan.
When the next manned rocket blasts off for the International Space Station, a box containing relics of St. Serafim of Sarov will be strapped to the chest of the Russian cosmonaut commanding the mission. Serafim's adventure highlights the expanding influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Dzerzhinsky didn't survive the purge of Moscow Metro station names honoring Soviet officials. Lenin didn't either. But the name of a Bolshevik revolutionary who helped murder the tsar's family lives on at Voikovskaya station -- at least for now.
Many Russian theater critics are up in arms over the composition of the jury for the country's most prestigious theater awards. They claim President Vladimir Putin's conservative culture minister is seeking to inject a dose of patriotism into the proceedings.
The airbrushing of the legacy of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin continues in Russia. To mark the 70th anniversary of Victory Day in May, a civic group headed by Russia's culture minister plans to open a museum dedicated to Stalin "as the symbol of Soviet successes and victories."
The Russian human rights organization Memorial on June 25 offered a rare showing of "Gaamer," the award-winning 2011 film by up-and-coming Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov. Sentsov, meanwhile, remains in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, where he is being detained on suspicion of terrorist plotting in his native Crimea.
The standoff over Crimea is creating bitter rifts in Russia's artistic community. Russian cultural luminaries have published rival open letters – one backing their country's invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula, the other condemning what they call an act of aggression against Ukraine.
A mysterious fire strikes the historic Muromtsev Dacha, the 1930s wooden country house in a Moscow suburb that was home to Russian writers like Venedikt Yerofeyev. The building's fate had long been under dispute, and local supporters suspect the cultural monument was deliberately set ablaze.
