By Drew Grant 8/27/12 4:41pm

Music and Martyrs

Shout it out, Pussy Riot (Twitter)

Pussy Riot Takes to the Tweets: Two Members of Punk Band Flee Russia with Digital Trail

Fearing the same prosecution as their band mates, the remaining 12 members of Russia’s Pussy Riot are running scared. Some of them literally.

Ever since three of the punk performance artists–Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina– were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for singing a satirical hymn about Vladmir Putin in a Moscow cathedral, the rest of the 15-woman collective have been keeping a low profile as the Moscow police comb the streets in search.

But two of them made a break for it: Rumor has it a couple members escaped Russia in disguise, and are seeking asylum in a safer country. How do we know that? Well, how do we know anything these days? They wrote an update on Twitter. Read More

By Laura Gilbert 7/28/11 1:02pm

Art

Court Calls Russia’s Fear of Chabad Art Seizure Legitimate

The U.S.-Russia art wars are again center stage in Chabad v. Russian Federation, the case that triggered Russia’s current embargo on lending art to U.S. museums.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the federal District Court in Washington, D.C. acknowledged that Russia’s fear that its art might be seized by Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Jewish Orthodox sect, Read More

By Emily Witt 4/12/11 4:46pm

Cosmos

Your Very Own Antique Space Pod

This evening, 50 years after Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned flight into space, Sotheby’s New York will be auctioning a prototype of his spaceship, the Vostok 3KA-2. Test-driven with a “cosmonaut-mannequin” named Ivan Ivanovich only 18 days before Mr. Gagarin’s historic flight, it’s the only privately owned Vostok spaceship outside of Russia. The Read More

By Brett Forrest 1/26/11 3:48am

The Russians

The Little Oligarch in Exile

“I’m afraid to go back to Russia,” said Pavel Khodorkovsky. The 25-year-old is the oldest son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch whom the Kremlin had sent back to prison several days before on new charges of embezzlement.

“If anything happened to me,” he said, pausing, as if to contemplate the inscrutable darkness of the Read More