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Russian Chanson
Russian chanson (; from French "chanson") is a neologism for a musical genre covering a range of Russian songs, including Russian romance, city romance songs, Bard (Soviet Union), author song performed by singer-songwriters, and blatnaya pesnya or "criminals' songs" that are based on the themes of the urban underclass and the criminal underworld. History The Russian chanson originated in the Russian Empire. The songs sung by serfs and political prisoners of the Tsar are very similar in content to the songs sung in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation today. However, during the Soviet Union, the style changed, and the songs became part of the culture of samizdat and dissent. During the Khrushchev thaw, the Soviet Union released a lot of prisoners from the gulag. When the former prisoners returned from the gulags back to their homes in the 1950s, the songs that they had sung in the camps became popular with Soviet students and nonconformist intelligentsia. Then, in ...
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Russian Romance
Russian romance ( ''románs'') is a type of sentimental art song with hints of Romani people, Romani influence that was developed in Imperial Russia by such composers as Nikolai Titov (1800-1875), Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851), Alexander Egorovich Varlamov, Alexander Varlamov (1801–48), and Alexander Gurilyov (1803–58). By the early 20th century, several types of the Russian romance had emerged. An elite type of the Italianate opera-influenced song known as the "salon romance" is contrasted to the lower-class genre of "cruel romance" which features "sentimental courtship, illicit love, pained rejection, and often suicide". The latter is supposed to have given birth to the Russian chanson. The Russian romance had its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s when the top performers included Anastasia Vyaltseva, Varvara Panina, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, Tamara Tsereteli, Pyotr Leshchenko, and Alexander Vertinsky. In the early Soviet Union, Soviet era the genre was less favoured, as it was s ...
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Tsar
Tsar (; also spelled ''czar'', ''tzar'', or ''csar''; ; ; sr-Cyrl-Latn, цар, car) is a title historically used by Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word '' caesar'', which was intended to mean ''emperor'' in the European medieval sense of the term—a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor, holding it by the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official—but was usually considered by Western Europeans to be equivalent to "king". Tsar and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396), the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1908–1946), the Serbian Empire (1346–1371), and the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721). The first ruler to adopt the title ''tsar'' was Simeon I of Bulgaria. Simeon II, the last tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person to have held this title. Meaning in Slavic languages The title tsar is derived from the Latin title for the Roman emperors, ''c ...
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Duma
A duma () is a Russian assembly with advisory or legislative functions. The term ''boyar duma'' is used to refer to advisory councils in Russia from the 10th to 17th centuries. Starting in the 18th century, city dumas were formed across Russia. The first formally constituted state duma was the Imperial State Duma introduced to the Russian Empire by Emperor Nicholas II in 1905. The Emperor retained an absolute veto and could dismiss the State Duma at any time for a suitable reason. Nicholas dismissed the First State Duma (1906) within 75 days; elections for a second Duma took place the following year. The Russian Provisional Government dissolved the last Imperial State Duma (the fourth Duma) in 1917 during the Russian Revolution. Since 1993, the State Duma () has functioned as the lower legislative house of the Russian Federation. Etymology The Russian word is inherited from the Proto-Slavic word '' *duma'' which is of disputed origin. Its origin has many proposed theor ...
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Alexander Rosenbaum
Alexander Yakovlevich Rosenbaum People's Artist of Russia, PAR (, ''Aleksandr Jakovlevič Rozenbaum'') (born September 13, 1951) is a Russian Bard (Soviet Union), bard from Saint Petersburg. Among his most famous songs are the ones about Saint Petersburg, Leningrad, the Soviet–Afghan War, Cossacks, and Odessa. Songs such as "Gop-Stop" (a comedy about two gangsters executing an unfaithful lover) and "Vals-boston" (Boston (dance), The Boston Waltz) are popular across Russian social groups and generations. Rosenbaum is an accomplished guitarist and accompanies himself on either a six- or twelve-string acoustic guitar, using the Open G tuning adopted from the Russian guitar, Russian seven string guitar. His attitude toward the criminal song genre can best be illustrated by his own words: Early life Rosenbaum graduated from the First Pavlov State Medical University of St. Peterburg in 1974, Rosenbaum worked in the medical field for four years. His musical education consists of ...
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State Kremlin Palace
The State Kremlin Palace (), previously and unofficially known as the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (Кремлёвский дворец съездов), is a large modern building inside the Moscow Kremlin. History The building was built at the initiative of Nikita Khrushchev as a modern arena for Communist Party meetings. The building replaced several heritage buildings, including the old neo-classical building of the Kremlin Armoury, State Armoury, and some of the back corpuses of the Great Kremlin Palace. This, and that the architecture of the projected building contrasted with the historic milieu resulted in quite an uproar, particularly after other historic buildings of the Kremlin, such as the Chudov Monastery, Chudov and Ascension Convent, Ascension cloisters, had already been demolished during the Stalin era and laws, that were introduced by the mid-1950s, prohibited the demolition of historic structures, making the construction in some ways illegal. The construction wo ...
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Vladimir Ustinov
Vladimir Vasilyevich Ustinov (; born 25 February 1953) is a Russian lawyer and statesman. Since 2008 he is the Plenipotentiary Envoy to the Southern Federal District. Until 2008, he was Russia's Minister of Justice. He was Vladimir Putin's first General Prosecutor of Russia from 2000 to June 2006. He has the prosecutor's rank of Active State Councillor of Justitia and the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation. High-profile cases * Investigation into Russian apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk (1999) * The case of Media-Most and Vladimir Gusinsky (2000) * The case of Chechen terrorist Salman Raduyev (2000-2001), for the first time in the history of modern Russia, the Prosecutor-General acted as a public prosecutor at the trial * Investigation of the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk (2000 - 2002) * Nord-Ost (2002) * Yukos case (2003-2005) * Criminal prosecution of former Ukrainian Prime Minister ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ...
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Soviet Bard
The term bard ( rus, бард, p=bart) came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment, similarly to folk singers of the American folk music revival. Because in bard music songwriters perform their own songs, the genre is also commonly referred to as author song (, ''avtorskaya pesnya'') or bard song (, ''bardovskaya pesnya''). Bard poetry differs from other poetry mainly in being sung with simple guitar accompaniment, as opposed to being spoken. Another difference is that it focuses less on style and more on meaning. This means that fewer stylistic devices are used, and the poetry is often in the form of a narrative. What separates bard poetry from other songs is that the music is far less important than the lyrics; chord progressions are often very simple and tend to repeat from one bard song to another. A far more obvious difference is the comme ...
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Magnetic Tape Recorder
Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that occur through a magnetic field, which allows objects to attract or repel each other. Because both electric currents and magnetic moments of elementary particles give rise to a magnetic field, magnetism is one of two aspects of electromagnetism. The most familiar effects occur in ferromagnetic materials, which are strongly attracted by magnetic fields and can be magnetized to become permanent magnets, producing magnetic fields themselves. Demagnetizing a magnet is also possible. Only a few substances are ferromagnetic; the most common ones are iron, cobalt, nickel, and their alloys. All substances exhibit some type of magnetism. Magnetic materials are classified according to their bulk susceptibility. Ferromagnetism is responsible for most of the effects of magnetism encountered in everyday life, but there are actually several types of magnetism. Paramagnetic substances, such as aluminium and oxygen, are weakly attracted to an ...
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Alexei Kosygin
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin (–18 December 1980) was a Soviet people, Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1980 and, alongside General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, was one of its most influential policymakers during the mid-1960s. Kosygin was born in the city of Saint Petersburg in 1904 to a Russian working-class family. He was conscripted into the labour army during the Russian Civil War, and after the Red Army's demobilization in 1921, he worked in Siberia as an industrial manager. Kosygin returned to Leningrad in the early 1930s and worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. During the Eastern Front (World War II), Great Patriotic War (World War II), Kosygin was tasked by the State Defence Committee with moving Soviet industry out of territories soon to be overrun by the German Army. He served as Minister of Finance (Soviet Union), Minister of Finance for a year before becoming Minister of Light Industry (Soviet Union) ...
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Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (19 December 190610 November 1982) was a Soviet politician who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until Death and state funeral of Leonid Brezhnev, his death in 1982 as well as the fourth List of heads of state of the Soviet Union, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 1960 to 1964 and again from 1977 to 1982. His 18-year term as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin's in duration. Brezhnev was born to a working-class family in Kamianske, Kamenskoye (now Kamianske, Ukraine) within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. After the results of the October Revolution were finalized with the creation of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev joined the Communist party's youth league in 1923 before becoming an official party member in 1929. When Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he joined the Red Army as a Political commissar, ...
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Gulag
The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й" (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps), but the full official name of the agency #Etymology, changed several times. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners, a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extra ...
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