The founder of pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi said he was joking when he claimed to have funded a liberal-leaning news site, saying his humor was mistaken as a serious comment. The founder of pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi said he was joking when he claimed to have funded a liberal-leaning news site, saying his humor was mistaken as a serious comment. Vasiliy Yakimenko said on...

It was the end of an era, the kind of moment when a Twitter buff might unleash a barrage of 140-character spurts of sentiment, humor or self-aggrandizement. It was the end of an era, the kind of moment when a Twitter buff might unleash a barrage of 140-character spurts of sentiment, humor or self-aggrandizement. But Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's one-time Tweeter-in-chief, was characteristically...

... exhibits — balloons trapped in a cage, a six-foot wooden fish, a motoring machine with all kinds of crazy moving parts, a purple spiked throne, a plastic man trapped in a plastic, computerized world — simply made Moscow smile. This was humor and fun at its sublimely silliest. Moscow doesn't believe in tears? You're damn right. It believes in laughter and mirth. Wit has emerged as a major component in the current socio-political dialogue. Russians are proving themselves to be the possessors...

... fruitcake exhibits — balloons trapped in a cage, a six-foot wooden fish, a motoring machine with all kinds of crazy moving parts, a purple spiked throne, a plastic man trapped in a plastic, computerized world — simply made Moscow smile. This was humor and fun at its sublimely silliest. Moscow doesn't believe in tears? You're damn right. It believes in laughter and mirth. Wit has emerged as a major component in the current socio-political dialogue. Russians are proving themselves to be the possessors...

... economic ideas. The only problem is, where are all those ideas now? Perhaps all these new ideas and proposals will find expression through Medvedev's Open Government, and if they do not find any practical application, they will at least be good for humoring the public. There is even a special minister for relations with this Open Government, Mikhail Abyzov. This indicates that PR and putting the right spin on the work of the government is being given greater attention than usual. But the government...

... dissimilar approaches to a single work. Fokin's take on the play was grandiose and somber. Shumilkina staged the piece as if it were an 18th-century folk play performed by skomorokhi, the old Russian itinerant clowns. She and her cast brought warmth and humor to the story of a woman who, as Russian Wikipedia puts it so eloquently, lived 45 years of "voluntary madness" in the second half of the 18th century. In Levanov's version, at least, the reason for that choice was that a certain Ksenia...

... has garnered such a reputation in itself that it should be pronounced on its own. So that is a task that we are trying to sort out. Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a charity in Russia? A: To have patience, irony, a sense of humor — to know beforehand that you're not going to found it in your head, that you will always be swimming against the current, whether having discussions with authorities or trying to get responses from them. You need to be ready for the fact...

... Established in 1925, the reserve got its name — which can be translated as "pillars" — because of its picturesque rock formations, many of which have names, like Pharaoh's Tomb, A Knight's Castle and Blue Gates. Some of the names are humorous: Kartoshka ("Potato"), Tsypa ("Chick"), Bukhanki ("Loaves of Bread") and Rukavichki ("Mittens"). Stolby occupies nearly 50,000 hectares on the right bank of Yenisei, with a stunning view of the city, the...