What is Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky best known for?
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (, ;  – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.
Aleksandr Proshkin
Aleksandr Anatolyevich Proshkin (; born 25 March 1940) is a Russian film director and screenwriter. He has directed fourteen films since 1975. His 2009 film "The Miracle" was entered into the 31st Moscow International Film Festival.
Alexander Glazunov
Glazunov was acknowledged as a great prodigy in his field and, with the help of his mentor and friend Rimsky-Korsakov, finished some of Alexander Borodin's great works, the most famous being the Third Symphony and the opera "Prince Igor", including the popular "Polovtsian Dances". It is claimed that he reconstructed the overture from memory, having heard it played on the piano only once , although this claim is dubious, as the overture, with its involved counterpoint, is not playable by a single pianist. It is much more likely that, as attested by Shostakovich in "Testimony," that Glazunov simply composed the overture, giving all the credit to Borodin.
Russia
Russian and later Soviet cinema was a hotbed of invention in the period immediately following 1917, resulting in world-renowned films such as "The Battleship Potemkin" by Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was a student of filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov, who developed the Soviet montage theory of film editing at the world's first film school, the All-Union Institute of Cinematography. Dziga Vertov, whose "kino-glaz" ("film-eye") theory—that the camera, like the human eye, is best used to explore real life—had a huge impact on the development of documentary film making and cinema realism. The subsequent state policy of socialist realism somewhat limited creativity; however, many Soviet films in this style were artistically successful, including "Chapaev", "The Cranes Are Flying", and "Ballad of a Soldier".
Maxim Gorky
Gorky's return from Fascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin and given a mansion (formerly belonging to the millionaire Pavel Ryabushinsky, which was for many years the Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. The city of Nizhni Novgorod, and the surrounding province were renamed Gorky. Moscow's main park, and one of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, were renamed in his honour, as was the Moscow Art Theatre. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20 was named "Maxim Gorky" in his honour.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Another very notable practitioner was Adolf Miethe, with whom Prokudin-Gorsky studied in Germany in 1902. Miethe was a photochemist who greatly improved the panchromatic characteristics of the black-and-white photographic materials suitable for use with this method of color photography. He presented projected color photographs to the German Imperial Family in 1902 and was exhibiting them to the general public in 1903, when they also began to appear in periodicals and books. Miethe took the first known aerial color photographs, from a hot air balloon, in 1906.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
In 1855 Tzar Nikolai I died and the climate in the country instantly changed. In November 1855 Saltykov received the permission to leave Vyatka, the new governor Lanskoy rumoured to be the major assisting force behind this. In January 1856 the writer returned to Saint Petersburg and in February was assigned to the Interior Ministry. By this time many of the stories and essays that would be known as "Provincial Sketches" have been written, a series of narratives about the fictitious town of Krutogorsk, shown as a symbol of Russian serfdom. Ivan Turgenev who happened to read them first was unimpressed and, following his advice (and bearing in mind still fierce censorship) Nikolai Nekrasov refused to publish the work in "Sovremennik". In August 1856 Mikhail Katkov’s "The Russian Messenger" started publishing "Provincial Sketches", signed N.Shchedrin. The book, charged with anti-serfdom pathos and full of scathing criticism of provincial bureaucracy became instant success and made Saltykov famous. Many critics and colleagues called him the heir to Nikolai Gogol. "I’m in awe... Oh immortal Gogol, you must now be a happy man now to see such a genius emerging as your follower," Taras Shevchenko wrote in his diary. In 1857 "Sovremennik" at last reacted: both Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky rather belatedly praised Saltykov, characteristically, imparting to his work what it's never had: "aiming at the undermining the Empire's foundations."
Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky
As an engineer Garin-Mikhailovsky was involved in construction of the Laspi Pass highway and the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1891 he headed the surveying party that chose the place for building a railroad bridge over River Ob for the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was Garin-Mikhailovsky who rejected the option of raising a bridge in Tomsk. This decision later resulted in the foundation of Novosibirsk and played a vital role in development of the city.
Georgi Gitis
In 2008-2009 he has worked at Paradise Studio as the director of the animated feature film "Priklyuchenya Alenushki i Eremi" (which became the first Russian 3D animation film in wide release) and its sequel "Novye priklyucheniya Alenushki i Eremy". His "Novye priklyucheniya Alenushki i Eremy" won the Best Animation Award at the Kinotavrik-2010.
Mikhail Glinka
The modern Russian music critic Viktor Korshikov thus summed up: "There is not the development of Russian musical culture without...three operas – Ivan Soussanine, Ruslan and Ludmila and the Stone Guest have created Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. "Soussanine" is an opera where the main character is the people, "Ruslan" is the mythical, deeply Russian intrigue, and in "Guest", the drama dominates over the softness of the beauty of sound." Two of these operas – "Ivan Soussanine" and "Ruslan and Ludmila" – were composed by Glinka.
Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
A large number of prominent people worked and studied at the KPI: E.O.Paton, the inventor of electric welding; M. I. Konovalov, a well-known chemist; I. P. Bardin, Ukraine's greatest metallurgist; A. M. Lyulka, USSR's premier designer of jet engines; rocket scientist Sergey Korolyov; creator of Sikorsky Helicopters, the well-known inventor Igor Sikorsky, well-known scientist in the field of fuel combustion and protection of the atmosphere from industrial pollution Isaak Sigal; Boris Yakovlevich Bukreev, a prominent mathematician known for his works in complex functions, differential equations, and non-Euclidean geometry. President of the First Exam Board in chemistry faculty was Dmitri Mendeleev.
Vladimir Gendlin
Vladimir Gendlin (born May 26, 1936) is a Russian commentator and expert of boxing, the two-time TEFI award winner. He is the Founder of professional boxing telecats on Russian television. Gendlin's program «Bolshoi Ring» was considered the best program about boxing in the world by the World Boxing Union in 1995.
Sergey Danilochkin
He was born in 1971, in Kazakhstan.
In 1992 he graduated from the St.Petersburg Military higher school of military messages and railway troops with appropriation of proficiency engineer till entities of carriages (logistics).
In 1994 he graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University) with appropriation of proficiency engineer - economist.
In 1996 he defended a thesis on competition of scientific degree of the candidate of economical sciences.
Since 1996 pre 2009 he worked in a Ural mining-metallurgical company and other, large companies as the mainmast head - manager.
In 2004 he was awarded the Gold Medal of Peter the Great in the revival of science and economics in Russia
In 2000 he was admitted to the correspondent member of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
In 2010 he defended his doctoral thesis on the methodology dividend enterprise management industry in Russia. From 2009 to 2013 he worked as a professor at the Department of Economics and Finance, Humanities Institute Odintsovo. 
Writer of series of the publications on toolkit of justification, of management decision in the field of microeconomics and dividend enterprise management. The basic spheres of professional competency - statistical analysis, systematization of business-processes, project and financial management. The founder of controlling in Russia. Author of more than 50 scientific works. The founder of the dividend control.
Center on Global Interests
Nikolai Zlobin, CGI's founder and president, is a Russian-American political expert, author and journalist who served as an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1990s. While acknowledging the difficulties of opening a new think tank in an already saturated environment, Zlobin said his goal was to create an organization that would "go beyond Cold-War thinking" to provide a strategic, long-term vision for U.S.-Russian relations. The organization's board is chaired by Bruce Blair, an American nuclear analyst and scholar. Both were formerly with the World Security Institute (WSI). Blair, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" for his work on nuclear nonproliferation, is also co-founder of Global Zero, an international initiative launched in December 2008 to promote the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Using a railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the U.S. Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of century-ago Russia.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Some of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs, digitally processed, made available by the Library of Congress
Viktor Ivanov (stunt coordinator)
Viktor Ivanov (sometimes credited as Victor Ivanov) is a Russian film director and veteran stunt coordinator best known for the feature film "White Gold" and for his design of the spectacular car chase through the streets of Moscow in "The Bourne Supremacy", for which he won the "Best Vehicle" award at the 2005 Taurus World Stunt Awards.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
The method of color photography used by Prokudin-Gorsky was first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and demonstrated in 1861, but good results were not possible with the photographic materials available at that time. In imitation of the way a normal human eye senses color, the visible spectrum of colors was divided into three channels of information by capturing it in the form of three black-and-white photographs, one taken through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter. The resulting three photographs could be projected through filters of the same colors and exactly superimposed on a screen, synthesizing the original range of color additively; or viewed as an additive color image by one person at a time through an optical device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope, which contained colored filters and transparent reflectors that visually combined the three into one full-color image; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow, which, when superimposed, reconstituted the color subtractively.
Georgy Golitsyn
G.S. Golitsyn is the recipient of the Russian Academy of Sciences A.A. Friedman prize (1990) for his works on “Study of the General Circulation of Atmosphere and Convection.” In 1997 he was named Honorary Scholar of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. In 1996 he was awarded the Demidov Prize for his geostudies. In 2005 he was awarded Alfred Wegener Medal of the European Union of Geosciences. In 2011 he was named Honorary Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. Academician Golitsyn is founding member of Sigma Xi Moscow.
Historiography in the Soviet Union
The struggle against foreign domination and the heroism of its participants is a recurring theme in Soviet historiography. Soviet historians have an upbeat assessment of Alexander Nevsky, characterized as one of the greatest military leaders of his time for defeating the German knights' invasions of Russia in the 13th century. Much importance is attached to the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), which marked the beginning of the end of the Mongol domination of Russia. Dmitry Donskoi for his leadership of the anti-Mongol struggle is credited for being an outstanding military commander and contributing significantly to the unity of the Russian lands.
Soviet espionage in the United States
One early Soviet spy ring was headed by Jacob Golos. Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Golosenko, Tasin, Rasin or Raisen) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative in the USSR. He was also a longtime senior official of the CPUSA involved in covert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies. He took over an existing network of agents and intelligence sources from Earl Browder. Golos' controller was the head of the NKVD's American desk, Gaik Ovakimian, also known as "The Puppetmaster", who would later serve a key role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Golos was the "main pillar" of the NKVD intelligence network. He had worked with Soviet intelligence from the mid-1930s, and probably earlier. He was not merely a CPUSA official assisting the NKVD (an agent or "probationer" in Soviet intelligence parlance) but held official rank in the NKVD, and claimed to be an oldtime Chekist.
Mikhail Borodin
Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg, better known by the alias Borodin (9 July 1884 – 29 May 1951), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Communist International (Comintern) agent. He is most well known for his role as advisor to Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang (KMT) in China during the 1920s.
Pyotr Boborykin
The novel "Kitay-Gorod" was one of Boborykin's most famous works. It was originally conceived as a study on the life and mores of the inhabitants of Kitay-gorod. This work is interesting not only from an artistic, but also from a historical point of view. In the novel, he describes with almost scientific precision the details of merchant life; culinary preferences, daily duties, and the customs of merchants and nobles against the backdrop of anticipated social and political change. His main task is the treatment of the historical role of Moscow in the last third of the nineteenth century. Boborykin was also credited with inventing the snack salad "Erundopel" (Ерундопель), first introduced in the pages of "Kitay-Gorod".
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (, tr. ; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films "Strike" (1925), "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) and "" (1928), as well as the historical epics "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) and "Ivan the Terrible" (1944, 1958). In their decennial poll, the "Sight and Sound" magazine named his "Battleship Potemkin" the 11th greatest movie of all time.
Serge Sorokko
One of Sorokko's main initiatives was advancing the virtually nonexistent public profile of the underground art movement then taking place in the Soviet Union, which included works by expatriates who had relocated to the West, as well as the multitude who remained. With the advent of glasnost, in 1988, Sorokko orchestrated and sponsored an unprecedented return to the Soviet Union of the exiled Russian artist Mihail Chemiakin, for a retrospective exhibition at the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery. It was then that Sorokko met Tair Salakhov, First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists. Together with Salakhov, Sorokko has been directly involved with bringing art exhibitions to museum venues in Russia and, in exchange, showing established, but never before seen in the West, Russian artists in his galleries in the U.S. Among various Sorokko's endeavors was staging of the premiere exhibition of works of the Soviet artist and fashion designer, Slava Zaitsev, whose paintings and drawings were displayed at Sorokko galleries in New York City, San Francisco, and Beverly Hills, as well as producing an exhibition of the expatriate Russian painter , at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
In 2004, the Library of Congress contracted with computer scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1,902 negatives from the high-resolution digital images of the glass-plate negatives. He applied algorithms to compensate for the differences between the exposures and prepared color composites of all the negatives in the collection. As the library offers the high-resolution images of the negatives freely on the Internet, many others have since created their own color representations of the photos, and they have become a favorite testbed for computer scientists.
History of Russian animation
Gennady Sokolsky focused on environmental films with attractive characters and ambient soundtracks: ' (1977), ' (1978) and "The Adventures of Lolo the Penguin" (1986), a joined Soviet-Japanese feature co-directed with Kenji Yoshida. Leonid Nosyrev explored the Russian North folklore with a number of ethnographical films based on the stories by Boris Shergin, Stepan Pisakhov and Yuri Koval. In 1987 seven of them were combined into a "Laughter and Grief by the White Sea" feature film.
One of the most famous Russian animators is Yuriy Norshteyn. His films "Little Hedgehog in the Fog" (1975) and "Tale of Tales" (1979) won numerous awards at international festivals. "Tale of Tales" was named the best animation film of all time at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles and at the 2002 Animafest Zagreb. Since the beginning of perestroika Norshteyn has been working on "The Overcoat".
Mikhail Pugovkin
Pugovkin went on to appear in more than 100 films. His roles in Leonid Gaidai's comedies, such as "Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures" (1965), "Twelve Chairs" (1971), "" (1973) and "Borrowing Matchsticks" (1980) made him one of the most popular comedians of the former Soviet Union.
Soviet rocketry
As a young adult, Sergei Korolev (1907–1966) had always been fascinated by aviation. At college, his fascination towards rocketry and space travel grew. He became one of the most important rocket engineers of Soviet aircraft technology, and became "Chief Designer" of the Soviet space program. Sergei Korolev was a vitally important member of GIRD, and later became the head of the Soviet space program. Korolev would play a crucial role in both the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the mission which put Yuri Gagarin in space in 1961.
In the early stages of Soviet rocketry science, Korolev, who initiated the program in Moscow, called the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, abbreviated as GIRD in Russian. As a renowned aeronautical engineer and the director of GIRD, he and his colleagues were enthusiastic supporters of Russia's race to space, and their focus was aimed at using liquid propellant to push their rockets into the atmosphere.
Moscow
The Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, abbreviated as VGIK, is the world's oldest educational institution in Cinematography, founded by Vladimir Gardin in 1919.
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Aleksey Batalov were among its most distinguished professors and Mikhail Vartanov, Sergei Parajanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Eldar Ryazanov, Alexander Sokurov, Yuriy Norshteyn, Aleksandr Petrov, Vasily Shukshin, Konrad Wolf among graduates.
Gordey Kolesov
Mikhail Efremov, theater and film actor and Merited Artist of Russia, preparing Top-5 News for June 4 especially for the National News Service information agency, wrote this about Gordey: “A six-year-old Russian child prodigy Gordey Kolesov won the talent show which aired on Chinese Central Television. Gordey knows five languages, is a top-ranked chess player and a member of the Russian national team in this sport. Gordey, you are our future, the entire country is watching you!”
Gordey's videos are very famous on the Internet, the most popular ones being “6-year-old Gordey Kolesov at China’s Central TV, CCTV-1,” “Gordey Kolesov wins Talent Show on Chinese Central TV,” “First place in chess at Shenzhen,” “Chinese guitar song by Gordey Kolesov,” “China. Chess training,” “Vladimir Mayakovsky: A note to China,” “475 Chinese idioms,” and other videos in which he and his father recite poems, “Hey you, my dear Russia” by Sergey Yesenin in Chinese and Mao Zedong's poetry in Chinese and Russian.
Gordey Kolesov is one of the world's youngest masters of timed Rubik's Cube solving.
Leon Sachs
Grigory Unanian – the soloist of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra of Cinematography (artistic director and principal conductor – Sergey Skripka). 
Mihail Rahlevksky – a Russian conductor; the founder and artistic director of the Kremlin Chamber Orchestra. 
Andrey Podgorny – artistic director and conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, founded within the walls of the Gnessin Musical School; a director of the Gnessin Musical School. 
Yury Pochekin – A Russian violinist, a famous violin maker. A member of Russia's Violin Makers Union, of the Spanish Association on Professional Violin and Bow Makers, of the European Association of Violin Makers and of the International Artistic Union of Violin and Bow Makers. 
Alexander Rukin – an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation, a violinist, a laureate of international competitions of the "Capriccio Ensemble", a professor of the Rachmaninoff State Conservatory of Rostov.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (, born Saltykov, pseudonym Nikolai Shchedrin; – ), was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, "Otechestvenniye Zapiski" (variously translated as "Annals of the Fatherland", "Patriotic Notes", "Notes of the Fatherland", etc.), until the government banned it in 1884. His best-known work, the novel "The Golovlyov Family", appeared in 1876.
Mikhail Zhukov (conductor)
Zhukov was awarded Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR (1941), People's Artist of the Latvian SSR (1949), and the USSR State Prize (Гос. пр. СССР 1950). Zhukov is particularly noted for his association with Prokofiev, having conducted the premiere (1940) and first recording (1960) of "Semyon Kotko".
Mikhail Prokhorov
After selling off most of Norilsk's non-mining assets, Prokhorov moved to modernize a highly complex mining operation which required icebreakers to transport metal over the frozen Arctic region. Prokhorov invested in an innovative Finnish freighter that did not require icebreakers. Norilsk Nickel is headquartered in Moscow. Environmental and labor conditions are harsh, and pollution remains a problem; Prokhorov has invested heavily in pollution control. However, despite these efforts, the mining areas continue to suffer from a high level of pollution. He converted Norilsk's gold-mining interests into the US$8.5 billion corporation Polyus Gold, Russia's largest gold producer. In 2003, he oversaw the acquisition of Stillwater Mining, his first international venture. He resigned as Norilsk CEO in February 2007 and declared his intention to separate his assets from those of long-time partner Vladimir Potanin. The two engaged in protracted negotiations to separate the conglomerate Interros, which the duo co-owned since the 1990s, into separate holdings.
Gorky Park (band)
Gorky Park (international title) or Парк Горького (Russian title) is a Russian hard rock band, that gained mainstream popularity in the United States during Perestroika. Gorky Park is famous for its kitsch use of western stereotypes of Russians, such as pseudo-traditional clothing, balalaika-like guitar design and the hammer and sickle as their logo. It was the first Russian band to be aired on MTV.
In 1987 guitarist Alexey Belov, vocalist Nikolay Noskov, bassist Alexander "Big Sasha" Minkov, guitarist Yan Yanenkov, and drummer Alexander Lvov (formerly from Aria) came together to form Gorky Park. Stas Namin, a famous 70's soviet musician, became the band's manager. Because Gorbachev lifted the censorship, many underground rock bands, including Gorky Park, became able to receive more widespread popularity. Later that year the band left Russia for the United States in search of a record deal.
Sergey Mikhalkov
During the Soviet era, Mikhalkov and his wife, Natalia Konchalovskaya sometimes worked for the KGB, for example by presenting undercover KGB staff officers to foreign diplomats, as in the case of French ambassador Dejean who was compromised by the KGB in 1950s. His younger brother Mikhail Mikhalkov was also a notable writer as well as a KGB agent.
Use of the Soviet anthem, with Mikhalkov's lyrics, continued until 1991, when it was retired by President Boris Yeltsin after the USSR disintegrated. However, when Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin in 2000, he began to clamor for a restoration of Alexandrov’s music in place of Yeltsin's choice.
Sergei Gorkov
On 25 May 2017, it was reported that Kushner was being investigated for his meetings with Gorkov and Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, meetings which Kushner omitted on his form about foreign contacts when applying for security clearance. Gorkov's status as an FSB alumnus has led to media scrutiny of his past, especially as VEB acted as a cover for convicted Russian spy Yevgeny Buryakov, who was deported from the U.S. in March after serving 30 months in federal prison. CNN also noted that when Donald Trump brought the Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow in 2013, its biggest sponsor was Sberbank, led by Gorkov at the time.
2018 Pavel Grudinin presidential campaign
On 6 February Pavel Grudinin gave an interview to the popular Russian video blogger Yury Dud. In an interview Grudinin said he believes Joseph Stalin is the best ruler of Russia in the last hundred years. He criticized the CEO of Rosneft Igor Sechin, saying that he was ready to fire him, because the company, which he manages, is ineffective. Grudinin also said that he was ready to take Alexei Navalny to his team. At the conclusion of the interview, Grudinin and Dud made a bet where if Pavel Grudinin gains less than 15% of the vote, he will have to shave off his mustache, but if Grudinin gets more than 15% of the votes, Yury Dud will have to cut his hair bald.
Valery Gergiev
From 1995 to 2008, Gergiev was principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1997, he became principal guest conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. His contract there ran until the 2007–2008 season, and his premieres included a new version of Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov", revised and reorchestrated by Igor Buketoff in a manner faithful to Mussorgsky's intentions (unlike the Rimsky-Korsakov revision mostly used for many years until the 1960s or 1970s). In 2002, he was featured in one scene in the film "Russian Ark", directed by Alexander Sokurov and filmed at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Lev Gor'kov
Lev Petrovich Gor'kov (Лев Петрович Горьков; 14 June 1929 – 28 December 2016) was a Russian-American research physicist internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of superconductivity. He was a professor of physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and a program director in Condensed Matter at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. He was one of the Magnet Lab's founding scientists.
Spiritual direction
Eastern Orthodoxy comes from the same pre-schism traditions, but the role of a "spiritual director" or "elder" in Orthodoxy has maintained its important role. The original Greek term geron (meaning "elder", as in gerontology) was rendered by the Russian word starets, from Old Church Slavonic starĭtsĭ, "elder", derived from starŭ, "old". The Greek tradition has a long unbroken history of elders and disciples, such as Sophronius and John Moschos in the seventh century, Symeon the Elder and Symeon the New Theologian in the eleventh century, and contemporary charismatic gerontes such as Porphyrios and Paisios. Sergius of Radonezh and Nil Sorsky were two most venerated startsy of Old Muscovy. The revival of elders in the Slavic world is associated with the name of Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–94), who produced the Russian translation of the Philokalia. The most famous Russian starets of the early 19th century was Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833), who went on to become one of the most revered Orthodox saints.
The Optina Pustyn near Kozelsk used to be celebrated for its startsy (Schema-Archimandrite Moses, Schema-Hegumen Anthony, Hieroschemamonk Leonid, Hieroschemamonk Macarius, Hieroschemamonk Hilarion, Hieroschemamonk Ambrose, Hieroschemamonk Anatole (Zertsalov)).[1] Such writers as Nikolay Gogol, Aleksey Khomyakov, Leo Tolstoy and Konstantin Leontyev sought advice from the elders of this monastery. They also inspired the figure of Zosima in Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. A more modern example of a starets is Archimandrite John Krestiankin (1910-2006) of the Pskov Monastery of the Caves who was popularly recognized as such by many Orthodox living in Russia.
Sergei Magnitsky
An official investigation was ordered in November 2009 by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Russian authorities had not concluded their own investigation as of December 2009, but 20 senior prison officials had already been fired as a result of the case. In December 2009, in two separate decrees, Medvedev fired Alexander Piskunov, deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, and signed a law forbidding the jailing of individuals who are suspected of tax crimes. Magnitsky's death is also believed to be linked to the firing of Major-General Anatoli Mikhalkin, formerly the head of the Moscow division of the tax crimes department of the Interior Ministry. Mikhalkin was among those accused by Magnitsky of taking part in fraud.
Opalesque TV released a video on 8 February 2010, in which Hermitage Capital Management founder Bill Browder revealed details of Sergei Magnitsky's ordeal during his 11 months in detention. On 25 June 2010 radio-station Echo of Moscow announced that Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs "Department for Own Security" started investigations against Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov, who has been accused of improper imprisonment of Magnitsky. The investigation was in response to appeal by the Hermitage Capital Management and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In February 2011, the investigation, which had not yet identified any suspects, was extended to May.
Alexander Alexeyevich Gorsky
Alexander Gorsky (August 6, 1871 – 1924), a Russian ballet choreographer and a contemporary of Marius Petipa, is known for restaging Petipa’s classical ballets such as "Swan Lake", "Don Quixote", and "The Nutcracker". Gorsky “sought greater naturalism, realism, and characterization” in ballet. He valued acting skills over "bravura" technique ( a showy display of skills such as many turns or high jumps.) His interpretations of ballets were often controversial and he often used artists outside the dance world to create sets and costumes.
Sergey Urusevsky
During the 1930s, he began early work as a cinematographer and in 1937 he began work at the Gorky Film Studio. The film studio is well known for have producing the first Soviet sound film Road to Life and for producing the first Soviet color film "Grunya Kurnakova." During the Great Patriotic War, Urusevsky was a frontline cameraman and filmed much of the war on the Eastern Front. It was during the war when he realized that being a cameraman was his vocation.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
"The Well-Meant Speeches" (Blagonamerennyie retchi, 1876) featured characters belonging to new Russian bourgeoisie. On January 2, 1881, Saltykov wrote to the lawyer and author Evgeny Utin: "I took a look at the family, the state, the property and found out that none of such things exist. And that those very principles for the sake of which freedoms have been granted, were not respected as principles any more, even by those who seemed to hold them." "The Well-Meant Speeches" initially contained several stories about the Golovlyov family. In 1880 Saltykov-Shchedrin extracted all of them to begin a separate book which evolved into his most famous novel, showing the stagnation of the land-based dvoryanstvo. "The Golovlyov Family" (Gospoda Golovlyovy, 1880; also translated as "House of Greed" or "A Family of Noblemen"), a crushingly gloomy study of the institution of the family as cornerstone of society, traced the moral and physical decline of three generations of a Russian gentry family. Central to it was the figure of Porfiry 'Little Judas' Golovlyov, a character whose nickname (Iudushka, in Russian transcription) became synonymous with mindless hypocrisy and self-destructive egotism, leading to moral degradation and disintegration of personality.
Mikhail Skobelev
Mikhail Dmitriyevich Skobelev (29 September 1843 – 7 July 1882) was a Russian general famous for his conquest of Central Asia and heroism during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Dressed in white uniform and mounted on a white horse, and always in the thickest of the fray, he was known and adored by his soldiers as the "White General" (and by the Turks as the "White Pasha"). During a campaign in Khiva, his Turkmen opponents called him "goz zanli" or "Bloody Eyes". British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery wrote that Skobelev was the world's "ablest single commander" between 1870 and 1914 and called him a "skilful and inspiring" leader.
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (; ; 27 April 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous musical genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard works as the March from "The Love for Three Oranges," the suite "Lieutenant Kijé", the ballet "Romeo and Juliet"—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and "Peter and the Wolf." Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created – excluding juvenilia – seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas.
Nikolai Sorokin
Nikolai Evgenievich Sorokin (; February 15, 1952 – March 26, 2013) was a Russian theatre and film actor, theatre director, educator, and People's Artist of Russia (1999). He was artistic director of the Rostov-on-Don academic drama theatre of a name Maxim Gorky and a deputy of the State Duma of the 3rd convocation.
Moscow Elegy
Moscow Elegy () is a 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov, about the later life and death of Soviet Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was originally intended to mark the 50th birthday of Tarkovsky in 1982, which would have been before his death. Controversy with Soviet authorities about the film's style and content led to significant delays in the production.
Sergey Fedorov
Sergey Petrovich Fedorov (Russian: Серге́й Петро́вич Фёдоров, alternative English spelling Sergey Petrovich Fyodorov) was a Russian surgeon-urologist, professor of the Imperial Military Medical Academy (1903) and the Imperial Court Surgeon (1913). He is considered the founder of the largest national school of surgery and "the father of Russian urology".
Sergey Kalmykov
Sergey Kalmykov was born in October 1891 in the Central Asian city of Samarkand, then a part of the Russian Empire. Soon after his birth the family moved to Orenburg where he studied in a gymnasium. In 1909-1910 Kalmykov lived in Moscow where he attended the Moscow Art School (studio of Konstantin Yuon, and from late 1919 in St.Petersburg where he was a member of the art studios of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. It is widely believed that it was Kalmykov who inspired Petrov-Vodkin to create his famous painting.
Sergey Grankin
Sergey Grankin started playing volleyball at the age of 7. Sergey Grankin captained the Youth team of Russia at the victorious European Championship in 2004 in Croatia, and the 2005 World Championships in India, where he first confidently made himself known. Mostly due to the mood of their captain, the Russians won the final match over Brazil in the first set when the score was 23:16 in favor of their rivals, the Russian scored 7 points in a row with Grankin serving , pulled out a losing set and broke down the Brazilians who lost the following two sets. He competed at the 2008 Summer Olympics where Russia claimed the bronze medal and at the 2012 Summer Olympics where Russia won the gold. He married his fiance Bruna de Araujo on 19 August 2012. At the 2013 European Volleyball Championship - where Russia won the gold medal and was awarded as the best setter of the tournament.
Vladimir Proskurin
He is most notable as the co-top scorer of the 1969 Soviet Top League with 16 goals. He was not awarded the top scorer prize as the Trud newspaper which was awarding said prize suspected that the last game of the season, in which he scored a hat-trick to catch up to Nikolai Osyanin on the scorers list, was fixed (his team FC SKA Rostov-on-Don played FC Torpedo Kutaisi with a score of 3-3, Kutaisi's Dzhemal Kherhadze, who also scored a hat-trick to catch up with Osyanin, was not awarded the prize either). Formally the decision was justified by Osyanin scoring in "more important" games.
Mikhail Lesin
During Putin's first term as Russian president with Lesin as Minister of the Press, Vladimir Gusinsky's private media holdings, , came under intense scrutiny resulting in numerous charges filled against Gusinsky. In an agreement for the charges to be dropped, Gusinsky's immense private media holdings, "Media Most", were to be transferred to Gazprom-Media, which, at the time, had recently acquired NTV, the only nationwide state-independent television in Russia and a highly critical opponent of the War in Chechnya, the Kremlin's handling of the Kursk incident, Vladimir Putin, and the Unity block. Gusinsky subsequently was brought under arrest as a fugitive from Russia and, while incarcerated, refused to agree to the terms for the transfer. However, in 2001 with Lesin acting as mediator, "Media Most" assets were transferred to Gazprom-Media under the terms of Protocol No. 6, which allowed oligarchs to escape prosecution and be given the freedom to leave the country if they turned over their assets to the state.
Gennadiy Prashkevich
Gennadiy Martovich Prashkevich (born May 16, 1941 in Pirovskoye, Krasnoyarsk Krai) is a Russian science fiction writer and International PEN member. He won the Aelita Prize (1994) and Garin-Mikhaylovsky Prize (1999). He is also a poet, translator and essayist. Some of his works ("Razorvanoye chudo" ("The Torn Miracle", 1978), "Pyat kostrov rombom" ("Five Bonfires In A Rhomb", 1989), "Shpion protiv alkhimikov" ("A Spy Versus Alchemists", 1994), "Shkatulka rytsarya" ("The Knight's Casket", 1996) became popular.
Alexander Nevsky
In 1938, Sergei Eisenstein made one of his most acclaimed films, "Alexander Nevsky", on Alexander's victory over the Teutonic Knights. The soundtrack for the film was written by Sergei Prokofiev, who also reworked the score into a concert cantata. Today, the film is renowned for its extraordinary battle on ice sequence, which has served as inspiration for countless other films. In the picture, Nevsky used a number of Russian proverbs, tying Nevsky firmly to Russian tradition
Mikhail Prokhorov
Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov (; born 3 May 1965) is a Russian self-made billionaire, political activist, and owner of the Brooklyn Nets, an American basketball team. After graduating from the Moscow Finance Institute, he worked in the financial sector and subsequently went on to become one of Russia's leading industrialists, owning major stakes in multinational corporations in the precious metals sector. While he was running Norilsk Nickel, the company became the world's largest producer of nickel and palladium. He is the former chairman of Polyus Gold, Russia's largest gold producer, and the former President of Onexim Group. He resigned both positions to enter politics in June 2011.
Sergei Prokhanov
Sergei Borisovich Prokhanov (; born December 29, 1952, Moscow) is a Soviet and Russian theater and film actor, theater director, artistic director of . People's Artist of the Russian Federation (2005). The most famous for him was the role Kesha Chetvergov in the Vladimir Grammatikov's comedy Mustached Nanny (1977).
Stanislav Belkovsky
Belkovsky is a commentator on a variety of political issues, including Russian oligarchs, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky He has published allegations about Vladimir Putin's personal wealth, according to which Putin "controls a 4.5% stake in Gazprom, 37% in Surgutneftegaz" as well as 50% in the oil-trading company Gunvor run by his close friend Gennady Timchenko. He authored the journalistic cliché "Puting" ("Путинг"), derived from the name of Russia's president from 2000-2008 and 2012–present, to denote the process of the renationalisation of Russia's oil industry assets.
Sergey Kalugin
In 1995 the FoZ.D. foundation run by an association of well-known Moscow-based rock musicians named Sergey Kalugin Russia's Best Acoustic Guitarist 1994.
Mikhail Agursky
Mikhail Samuilovich Agursky (; 1933 – 21 August 1991), real name Melik Samuilovich Agursky (), was a Jewish sovietologist, cybernetic and historian of National Bolshevism. Agursky was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 
Mikhail Agursky was the pen name of Melik Agursky. Other variations of the name are "Melir" () and "Melib" ().
He was the son of a famous revolutionary, a historian and party leader Samuel (Shmuel) Haimovich Agursky (1884-1947). In 1955 he married Vera Feodorovna Kondratieva.
Mikhail Morgulis
Mikhail Morgulis () (October 1, 1941– ) is a Russian-language writer, editor and theologian. He was among the first Americans to broadcast sermons in Russian to millions of people living behind the Iron Curtain in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other former republics of the Soviet Union and to Russian-speaking audiences in the United States and Canada.
Sergo Grigorian
Dr. Grigorian is best known for his collection of Soviet Political Propaganda Posters (The Sergo Grigorian Collection), which he has meticulously constructed over 15 years. The collection boasts over 2000 Soviet posters or “communist posters” as they are known in the West. The time frame of the collection spans the whole Soviet era, from February 1917 to December 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. This historical period of Russia attracts a lot of interest as an experiment to build a fair and equitable society. The Soviet communist poster has shown a successful past application of visual propaganda in political strife. The primary focus of the collection is on political propaganda, hence such famous categories as cinema, theatre, circus, sports and advertisement have been deliberately missed out unless they have a clear underlying political meaning. Apart from the vast collection of posters, Grigorian is also collecting the literature about Soviet graphics and poster art.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in what is now Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast. His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history. They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorsky enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts.
Yegor Yakovlev
Yegor Vladimirovich Yakovlev (Яковлев, Егор Владимирович ; 14 March 1930 – 18 September 2005) was one of the founders of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin's policy of "glasnost", and one of the most respected Russian journalists.
Robin Milner-Gulland
As well as being an author, Milner-Gulland has translated the works of numerous acclaimed Russian authors into English, the most famous being his publication of "Yevtushenko: Selected Poems" (originally published in 1962); an anthology of poems by the renowned Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This translation broke new ground by being a collaboration between Milner-Gulland and well-known poet Peter Levi. Milner-Gulland has also translated poetry by Russian poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, and translated his biography (written by Zabolotsky's son, Nikita) into English. More recently, Milner-Gulland has translated books by Russian art expert Oleg Tarasov into English; "Icon and Devotion - Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia" (2002) and "Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich" (2011).
Valery Gergiev
Gergiev has focused on recording Russian composers' works, both operatic and symphonic, including Mikhail Glinka, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky and Rodion Shchedrin. Most of his recordings, on the Philips label, are with the Kirov Orchestra, but he has also recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic. A recent undertaking, the complete Prokofiev symphonies, is with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Grigory Bongard-Levin
Grigory Maksimovich Bongard-Levin () (1933–2008) was a Russian historian specializing on Ancient India and the history of Central Asia. He also published on the history of Russian emigration. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1988. In 2006 he was awarded India's Third Highest civilian award Padma Bhushan which ranked below Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan for his contribution in the field of Ancient India history
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
While Rimsky-Korsakov is best known in the West for his orchestral works, his operas are more complex, offering a wider variety of orchestral effects than in his instrumental works and fine vocal writing. Excerpts and suites from them have proved as popular in the West as the purely orchestral works. The best-known of these excerpts is probably "Flight of the Bumblebee" from "The Tale of Tsar Saltan," which has often been heard by itself in orchestral programs, and in countless arrangements and transcriptions, most famously in a piano version made by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Other selections familiar to listeners in the West are "Dance of the Tumblers" from "The Snow Maiden", "Procession of the Nobles" from "Mlada", and "Song of the Indian Guest" (or, less accurately, "Song of India") from "Sadko", as well as suites from "The Golden Cockerel" and "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya".
Maxim Gorki Theater
In response to Brecht's Epic Theater in Berlin Ensemble Theater in 1949. Sing-Akademie in 1952 was re-named the "Maxim Gorki Theater", "as a place for the care of Russian and Soviet theater art". As a "sozialistisches Modelltheater" (a socialist model theatre). It was founded under its first director, a Stanislavsky student Maxim Vallentin, a committed socialist realist. The originally planned opening of the theater with Maxim Gorky's Night Asylum (also known as "The Lower Depths") was stopped by the State Art Commission. Instead, the building opened on 30 October 1952, with the German premiere of the Soviet piece "Für die auf See" (For the lake) by Boris Lawrence.
Modest Mussorgsky
Mussorgsky's works, while strikingly novel, are stylistically Romantic and draw heavily on Russian musical themes. He has been the inspiration for many Russian composers, including most notably Dmitri Shostakovich (in his late symphonies) and Sergei Prokofiev (in his operas).
In 1868/1869 he composed the opera "Boris Godunov", about the life of the Russian tsar, but it was rejected by the Mariinsky Opera. Mussorgsky thus edited the work, making a final version in 1874. The early version is considered darker and more concise than the later version, but also more crude. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated the opera in 1896 and revised it in 1908. The opera has also been revised by other composers, notably Shostakovich, who made two versions, one for film and one for stage.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
On 30 August 2018, to commemorate what would have been his 155th birthday, Google released a Google Doodle celebrating him.
Sergey Kurginyan
After unsuccessful attempts to offer his services to the Secretary Central Committee Alexander Yakovlev (1987), chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme RSFSR Vitaly Vorotnikov and the chairman of the KGB Victor Cherbrikov (1988) Kurginyan was close to the second (later the first) Secretary of the CPSU MGK Yuri Prokofiev and was introduced into groups of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee. In September 1990, at the brainstorm in the Council of Ministers Kurginyan proposed rigid confiscatory measures and mass repressions against "speculators informal economy", calling the remark Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Abalkin "we already went through it in 1937". He supported in this period close contact with the "Union".
Sergei Prokofiev
A graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos. In 1915, Prokofiev made a decisive break from the standard composer-pianist category with his orchestral "Scythian Suite", compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev—"Chout," "Le pas d'acier" and "The Prodigal Son"—which at the time of their original production all caused a sensation among both critics and colleagues. Prokofiev's greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including "The Gambler" and "The Fiery Angel". Prokofiev's one operatic success during his lifetime was "The Love for Three Oranges," composed for the Chicago Opera and subsequently performed over the following decade in Europe and Russia.
Sergei Gorchakov
Sergei Petrovich Gorchakov (; 10 February 1905 – 4 July 1976) is a Russian classical music composer. Gorchakov is best known for his uniquely 'Russian' orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" by "Modest Mussorgsky"
Sergey Karaganov
Sergey Alexandrovich Karaganov (, born 12 September 1952 in Moscow) is a Russian political scientist who heads the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a security analytical institution founded by Vitaly Shlykov. He is also the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow's Higher School of Economics. Karaganov was a close associate of Yevgeny Primakov, and has been Presidential Advisor to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
Sergei Gordeev
Sergei Gordeev (Russian: Серге́й Эдуа́рдович Горде́ев) is a Russian billionaire property developer and president of the Russian real estate company, PIK Group. His net worth is estimated to be $1.94 billion, according to Forbes.
The Golden Cockerel
Rimsky-Korsakov had considered his previous opera, "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya" (1907) to be his final artistic statement in the medium, and, indeed, this work has been called a "summation of the nationalistic operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five." However the political situation in Russia at the time inspired him to take up the pen to compose a "razor-sharp satire of the autocracy, of Russian imperialism, and of the Russo-Japanese war." Also, Rimsky-Korsakov’s previous works inspired by Alexander Pushkin's poems, especially "Tsar Saltan", had proved to be very successful.
Sergey Nikolsky
Sergey Mikhailovich Nikolsky (; 30 April 1905 – 9 November 2012) was a Russian mathematician. He was born in Talitsa, which was at that time located in Perm Governorate, Russian Empire. He had been an Academician since November 28, 1972. He also had won many scientific awards. At the age of 92 he was still actively giving lectures in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 2005, he was only giving talks at scientific conferences, but was still working in MIPT, at the age of 100.
Short story
In Russia, Ivan Turgenev gained recognition with his story collection "A Sportsman's Sketches". Nikolai Leskov created his first short stories in the 1860s. Late in his life Fyodor Dostoyevski wrote "The Meek One" (1876) and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877), two stories with great psychological and philosophical depth. Leo Tolstoy handled ethical questions in his short stories, for example in "Ivan the Fool" (1885), "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886) and "Alyosha the Pot" (1905). The greatest specialist of the Russian short story, however, was Anton Chekhov. Classic examples of his realistic prose are "The Bet" (1889), "Ward No. 6" (1892), and "The Lady with the Dog" (1899). Maxim Gorky's best known short story is "Twenty-six Men and a Girl" (1899).
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semionovich Vygotsky (; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of an unfinished Marxist theory of human cultural and bio-social development commonly referred to as "cultural-historical psychology" (although the phrase never actually occurred in Vygotsky's writings), a prominent advocate for a "science of the Superman", a new psychological theory of consciousness, and leader of the Vygotsky Circle (also referred to as "Vygotsky-Luria Circle").
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
But instead of following this path, he exploited "quasi-official and often extra-legal business opportunities" and began to make a business career for himself. With partners from Komsomol, and technically operating under its authority, Khodorkovsky opened his first business in 1986, a private café. The enterprise was made possible by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's programme of perestroika and glasnost.
Igor Podgorskiy
Igor Vladimirovich Podgorskiy ( (September 4, 1922 – December 26, 1975) was one of The Greatest Soviet Animators, who worked in the "Golden Era" of Soviet animation. He contributed to more than one hundred cartoons. Many of these cartoons have become The International and The National Classics.
Mikhail Pogodin
Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (; ) was a Russian historian and journalist who, jointly with Nikolay Ustryalov, dominated the national historiography between the death of Nikolay Karamzin in 1826 and the rise of Sergey Solovyov in the 1850s. He is best remembered as a staunch proponent of the Normanist theory of Russian statehood.
Sergey Trakhimenok
Trakhimenok is best known for his spy novel "Notes of a Black Colonel", psychological detective novel "Burnout Syndrome" (2008) and a dashingly twisted detective with mixture of different techniques of fantasy, conspiracy, detective fiction and dystopia "A Petri Bowl or Russian Civilization: the Genesis and Survival Problems" (2012).
As a screenwriter he is the member of BELVIDEOCENTER. 
In 2014, he was rewarded with the "Finalist Certificate" at the New York Festivals of World Best TV & Films in competition "Television – Documentary/Information Program" in the category "Docudrama" for his screenplay for the film "Albert Veinik's Attraction".
Sergey Grishin (businessman)
After receiving his degree in Physics, Grishin began his career as an entrepreneur in 1987 by baking cookies and hot dogs in his Moscow apartment for 2 cents apiece and selling them for 10 cents. This was the start of a small business in the retail food industry. He later became founding partner of the RosEvro Group, a large consortium of businesses which include National Logistic Company (NLK), the largest Russian logistic company, which was sold to a well known international Logistics Company in 2008;
White Sea–Baltic Canal
A carefully prepared visit in August 1933 to the White Sea–Baltic Canal may have hidden the worst of the brutality from a group of 120 Russian writers and artists, the so-called Writers Brigade, including Maxim Gorky, Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Viktor Shklovsky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, who compiled a work in praise of the project, the 600-page "The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal" (), published at the end of 1934. Shklovsky visited the White Sea Canal on his own and did not travel there with the group organized by Gorky. Gorky himself did not travel with the Brigade but instead organized the trip. Gorky had previously visited the Solovetski Islands labor camp in 1929 and wrote about it in the Soviet journal "Our Accomplishments".
The Golden Cockerel
The work on "The Golden Cockerel" was started in 1906 and finished by September 1907. On February two symphonies were performed in Saint Petersburg. By the end of the month the director of Imperial Theatres Vladimir Telyakovskiy passed it to the censorship agency in order to get an approval for the Bolshoi Theatre. It was returned unedited, yet suddenly taken back the next day. This time many changes were requested to be made to the libretto as well as the original Pushkin's text. Rimsky-Korsakov suspected someone's denunciation and resisted any changes. He continued the work on orchestration while fighting with progressive illness. On June Telyakovskiy informed him that the Moscow Governor-General Sergei Gershelman was highly against the opera. In his last letter Rimsky-Korsakov asked his friend and music publisher Boris Jurgenson to contact Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and suggest him to stage "The Golden Cockerel" in Paris. He passed away two days later and thus never witnessed the premiere of his last opera.
Mikhail Gluzsky
One of the most recognizable faces of Soviet and Russian cinema, Mikhail Gluzsky continued to work as an actor even amid the economic crisis of the 1990s, which hit Boris Yeltsin's Russia hard and affected the film industry harshly. He appeared in more than 130 roles between his debut in 1939 and death in 2001. He died in Moscow at the age of eighty-two.
Gennady Spirin
Gennady Spirin (born 25 December 1948) is a Russian painter and children's book illustrator. A graduate of the Surikov School of Fine Art in Moscow and the Moscow Stroganov Institute of Art, he is noted for his unique style of watercolor illustration. He has illustrated works by classic authors such as William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy as well as children's books by contemporary celebrities. He is perhaps best known for his illustration of Madonna's "Yakov and the Seven Thieves" and Julie Andrews' "Simeon's Gift". His oil paintings hang in public and private galleries throughout the world. He has been profiled by "The New York Times". His depiction of "The Nutcracker" was selected by Saks Fifth Avenue as the centerpiece of their famous Christmas display in 1997 and 1998. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, Spirin immigrated with his wife and sons to the United States, ultimately settling in Princeton, NJ, where he has lived and worked since.
Gennady Gorelik
Gennady Gorelik (born 1948, Lviv) is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. A physicist by education and historian by occupation, he published ten books and many articles on popular science and history of science, including in-depth biographies of 20th-century Russian physicists, Matvei Bronstein, Andrei Sakharov, and Lev Landau.
In his biography of Sakharov, he provides the documentary explanation of Sakharov's metamorphosis from a secret father of the Soviet H-bomb to most prominent advocate of human rights in the Soviet Union.
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya
"Kitezh" is arguably Rimsky-Korsakov's finest opera, often being referred to as "the Russian "Parsifal"; however, it is not part of the standard operatic repertoire outside of Russia. Stylistically, it is more representative of Rimsky-Korsakov's work than the better-known "The Golden Cockerel". In its use of Russian history and legend, Oriental exoticism, and a mix of the real and the supernatural, the work has been called a "summation of the nationalistic operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five." Rimsky-Korsakov considered the work to be his final artistic statement, not planning to write another opera until unexpectedly inspired to write "The Golden Cockerel" as a satire of current political events in Russia. Alhough the composer often made use of fairy tale, "Kitezh" is the only one of his operas to make use of supernatural or religious themes. Simon Morrison points out that in spite of the Christian themes, "[t]his was a secular heaven."
Leonid Gaidai
Gaidai remains most famous for the outstanding string of comedies he directed between 1961 and 1975, when nine of the ten films he made became Russian classics, selling between 20 and 76 million film tickets each, and becoming box office champions for several years in a row. He is less known outside of the former Soviet Union, due to the specific nature of his comedies, intrinsically tied to Soviet culture and lifestyle – unlike the motives of the characters of Kramer's "Mad World" being easily understood by the Russian public, living in the highly materialistic world of late Soviet Union. Gaidai's only international recognition was a nomination for best short film at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival for "Dog Barbos and Unusual Cross".
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire.
Leonid Volodarskiy
Leonid Veniaminovitch Volodarskiy ( is a Russian translator, writer, and weekly radio show author. He is mostly known in Russia as one of the most popular home video voice-over translators of 1990s by a movies, such as "The Empire Strikes Back", "Terminator" dilogy, "Last Action Hero", "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and many others. Volodarskiy was also the first translator of Stephen King books into Russian.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (, ; born 26 June 1963) is an exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist and former oligarch, now resident in Switzerland. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia (with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion) and was ranked 16th on "Forbes" list of billionaires. He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of "glasnost" and "perestroika" in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares").
Dmitri Pokrovsky
Pokrovsky has lectured at America’s Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University and the Omega Institute, and was a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Directing his Ensemble, Pokrovsky wrote numerous scores for films and was an active musical director in Russian theatre. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev honoured Pokrovsky with the Government Award, the Soviet Union’s highest recognition for artistic excellence, a testament to the scholarship, musicianship and vitality with which he and the Ensemble had preserved Russian tradition, culture and customs.
Georgy Vitsin
His first film roles date to the 1940s. He gained nationwide popularity in the former Soviet Union with the emergence of a series of 1960s comedies by director Leonid Gaidai. He played the role of the Coward among a trio of colorful, scheming characters in such Gaidai movies as "Bootleggers" (1962), "Operation Y and Other Adventures of Shurik" (1965), and "Kidnapping, Caucasian Style" (1967). The last two subsequently beat the Soviet all time record of ticket sales. The trio of actors, including the late Yuri Nikulin and Yevgeny Morgunov, was "the most popular ensemble in the history of the national cinema." In 1990, he was awarded the top artistic title of the Soviet era, that of People's Artist of the USSR.
Vladimir Valutsky
Valutsky was among those few Soviet screenwriters who successfully continued their career after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His most famous work of this time period was a biographical war drama "The Admiral" (2008) about the fate of Alexander Kolchak. With a $38 135 878 gross it is among the highest-grossing films of the post-Soviet Russia. A longer version of the movie was made into a 10-part TV mini-series and showed by the Channel One Russia in 2009. Valutskiy also wrote a screenplay for another biographical mini-series "Yesenin" (2005) about one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century Sergei Yesenin. It was based on the book by the Russian actor Vitali Bezrukov; his son Sergey Bezrukov played the main part.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
By the time of Prokudin-Gorsky's death, the tsar and his family had long since been executed during the Russian Revolution, and Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. The surviving boxes of photo albums and fragile glass plates the negatives were recorded on were finally stored in the basement of a Parisian apartment building, and the family was worried about them getting damaged. The United States Library of Congress purchased the material from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs in 1948 for $3500–$5000 on the initiative of a researcher inquiring into their whereabouts. The library counted 1,902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives in the collection.