A significant part of Russia remains unknown to many of its citizens — mainstream media have no interest in the provinces. This photoblog captures a provincial life otherwise left behind. Русский

A Soviet underground classic is back in print. In a school for fools, fighting conformity requires confronting the Soviet system—and our inner demons.

Grozny Blues is a haunting, often dreamlike documentary about Chechen people caught between the contradictory pressures of manufactured realities and coerced silences.

The Mountain and the Wall is the first Dagestani novel to be published in English. Ganieva is very courageous to write about what is happening in her native country, thinly veiled in the traditional Russian literary use of fiction.

Valery Pavlukevich, who recently passed away, was a regular contributor to oDR. In his last appearance on these pages, he tells Michael Lawrence about the samizdat scene in his home city of Kuibyshev, now Samara.

As we end four days devoted to documentary cinema, theatre and debate in London, never have documentary forms had such an important role to play.

Mikhail Elizarov has written a highly imaginative satire on the dichotomy in the post-Soviet Russian psyche, populated by the detritus of modern Russia.

In times of war, what can Russian arts and culture do to withstand interventions by the Russian state? An exhibition at Garage in Moscow could provide an answer.

The EU's technocratic approach to Ukraine sleepwalked us into a crisis. We need popular culture to make foreign policy smart.

When it comes to loss, this city has form stretching back to the Soviet era. But is the scandal surrounding the city's Opera House just another page in this century-long saga?

Tangerines, an Estonian film about the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict, is up for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. What was it that caught the eye of the Academy?

Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov has been held in pre-trial detention for almost a year on charges of terrorism – most of it in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.

The key to understanding Putin is to recognise how he uses information to tell him who we think he is. But what does that tell us?

'Everything will be free. Everyone will be fucking high.' Between 1985 and 1990, Yegor Letov and his Siberian punk rock group Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defence) created some of the most powerful music to come out of the Soviet Union. And had a lot of fun upsetting the KGB...

Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible presents a Russia with no rules and no certainty in tomorrow, a place where you must live in the moment, because the moment is all you have.