Vagankovo Cemetery
Vagankovo Cemetery (russian: Ваганьковское кладбище, Vagan'kovskoye kladbishche), established in 1771, is located in the Presnya district of Moscow. It started in the aftermath of the Moscow plague riot of 1771 outside the city proper, so as to prevent the contagion from spreading. Half a million people are estimated to have been buried at Vagankovo throughout its history. As of 2010, the existing cemetery contains more than 100,000 graves. The vast necropolis contains the mass graves from the Battle of Borodino, the Battle of Moscow, and the Khodynka Tragedy. It is the burial site for a number of people from the artistic and sports community of Russia and the old Soviet Union. William Taubman claims that during the Great Purge "alcohol-soused guards would execute weeping prisoners" after they had dug their graves in the cemetery. The cemetery is served by several Orthodox churches constructed between 1819 and 1823 in the Muscovite version of the Empire styl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vasily Agapkin
Vasily Ivanovich Agapkin (russian: Васи́лий Ива́нович Ага́пкин; 3 February 1884 – 29 October 1964) was a Russian and Soviet military orchestra conductor, composer, and author of the well-known march "Farewell of Slavianka" (composed in 1912). Agapkin was born in Ryazan Governorate in 1884. From 1912 to 1915, he studied at the Tambov musical school, where he composed the popular Russian patriotic march, ''Farewell of Slavianka'', he later served in the army. After the victory of the October Revolution, Vasily Agapkin voluntarily entered the Red Army in 1918 and organized a brass band in the 1st Red Hussar Regiment. In 1920, Agapkin returned to Tambov directed the music studio and the orchestra of the GPU troops. On August 5, 1922, Agapkin and his orchestra gave a farewell concert in Tambov, after which they moved to Moscow. In January 1924, the Agapkin Orchestra took part in the funeral ceremony during the funeral of Vladimir Lenin. In 1928, Ag ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vasili Oshchepkov
Vasiliy Sergeyevich Oshchepkov (russian: Васи́лий Серге́евич Още́пков); (January 7, 1893 - October 10, 1938) was a Russian researcher of different types of national wrestling and martial arts. He was ranked as a Merited Master of Sports of the USSR and an Honored Coach of the USSR. He was one of the founders of Sambo, a martial art developed in the Soviet Union. During the political purges of 1937, Oshchepkov was accused of being a Japanese spy, and was executed in prison as a result. Early life Very little is known about Vasili Oshchepkov earlier life before adulthood. Although he became an orphan by 8. Education at the Kodokan After the transfer of South Sakhalin to the Japanese in 1905 under the Treaty of Portsmouth, who remained a complete orphan in 1904, Vasily came to the attention of the Russian Orthodox mission in Japan. He was sent to study on the island of Honshu in Japan, where he first studied from September 1907 at a seminary in Kyoto ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bulat Okudzhava
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (russian: link=no, Булат Шалвович Окуджава; ka, ბულატ ოკუჯავა; hy, Բուլատ Օկուջավա; May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called " author song" (''авторская песня'', ''avtorskaya pesnya''), or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folk song traditions and the French ''chansonnier'' style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political, the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give him official recognition. Life Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924, into a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Andrei Mironov (actor)
Andrei Aleksandrovich Mironov (russian: link=no, Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Миро́нов; March 7, 1941 – August 16, 1987) was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor who played lead roles in some of the most popular Soviet films, such as ''The Diamond Arm'', ''Beware of the Car'' and '' Twelve Chairs''. Mironov was also a popular singer. Early life Mironov was born in Moscow to Maria Mironova, a Russian, and Aleksandr Menaker, a Russian Jew. Both his parents were also actors. Career Mironov studied in the Vakhtangov Theatre School during the early 1950s. From 1958 to 1962, he studied acting at the Moscow Shchukin School. From June 18, 1962, to 1987, Mironov was a permanent member of the trope at the Moscow Theatre of Satire. In 1961, he acted in his first film ''What If This Is Love?'' On December 18, 1980, he was awarded the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR. He also received the Medal "For Labour Valour". Andrei Mironov is known and loved for h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Egor Makovsky
Egor Ivanovich Makovsky (14 April 1802 – 9 August 1886) was a Russian accountant and artist, one of the founders of the forerunner of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Early life Born in 1802 in Zvenigorod (although other sources say in 1800), Makovsky was the son of Ivan Borisovich Makovsky, a Russified Pole from Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Poland-Lithuania who served as a protocol officer in the Court of Noble Guardianship under D. A. Olsufiev. He grew up in Zvenigorod, until the age of eleven mostly in the house of his godfather Vasily Markovich Korotkov. In 1813, he was enrolled in the service of a Zvenigorod magistrate, but when the family moved to the Dankovsky District Makovsky found himself serving in the district court. While in Dankov, he took drawing lessons from an artist named Naumov. In 1818, he arrived in Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. There, he became assistant to an accountant in the office of the Commission for the co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Georgian Mafia
The Georgian mafia ( ka, ქართული მაფია, tr) is regarded as one of the biggest, most powerful and influential criminal networks in Europe, which has produced the largest number of "thieves in law" in all former USSR countries and controls and regulates most of the Russian-speaking and fully controls Russia and Georgia mafia groups. They are very active in Russia and Europe. The Georgian mafia has two major criminal clans from Tbilisi and Kutaisi. Georgia always had a disproportionately high number of crime bosses and still has a majority of the 700 or so still operating in the post-Soviet space and western Georgia (Kutaisi Clan) is particularly well represented. In many of its rules or "laws", the Georgian mafia parallels the Sicilian Mafia. History Soviet period Georgia is a small Eurasian state with a population of about four million, of whom two thirds are Georgians, and the national minorities are mainly Russian, Armenian, and Azeri. The geographical ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Otari Kvantrishvili
Otari Kvantrishvili ( ka, ოთარ კვანტრიშვილი, russian: Ота́ри Квантришвили; January 27, 1948 – April 5, 1994) was a Georgian mafia boss and one of Moscow's leading organised crime figures during the early 1990s. Biography Prior to his 1966 conviction for rape, Kvantrishvili was on his way to becoming a world-champion wrestler. In the 1980s he then founded the Dynamo Sports Club and later the 21st Century Association, an organisation ostensibly dedicated to funding sports but was widely regarded as a front for racketeering. During the chaotic transition to capitalism in the early 1990s, Kvantrishvili became something of a public face for the mafia, befriending politicians and celebrities such as Joseph Kobzon while also acting as a mediator between various underworld factions, including the thieves in law and Slavic and Chechen mobsters. The Podolskaya OPG (russian: Подольская организованная прест ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Leonid Kharitonov (actor)
Leonid Vladimirovich Kharitonov (russian: Леонид Владимирович Харитонов; 1930–1987) was a Soviet Union, Soviet and Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian actor. He played in the films ''Private Ivan'', ''Ivan Brovkin on the State Farm'' and ''Street Full of Surprises''. Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1972). Life He was born in Saint Petersburg, Leningrad on 19 May 1930, and died in Moscow on 20 June 1987, aged 57. Career Training In early life he was ambivalent about an acting career. Although he took part in amateur productions, and in the ninth grade applied to theatre school, he nevertheless chose to study law for a year at university, while continuing theatrical performance in his spare time. "In the play ''The Inspector'', he rocked the entire city of Leningrad; he played Bobchinsky and it was after this role that he again seriously considered an acting career." That summer, the Moscow Art ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sergei Grinkov
Sergei Mikhailovich Grinkov (russian: Сергей Михайлович Гриньков; 4 February 1967 – 20 November 1995) was a Russian pair skater. Together with his wife Ekaterina Gordeeva, he was the 1988 and 1994 Olympic Champion and a four-time World Champion (1986, 1987, 1989, 1990). Personal life Sergei Grinkov was born in Moscow to Anna Filipovna Grinkova and Mikhail Kondrateyevich Grinkov and had an older sister, Natalia Mikailovna Grinkova. He married Ekaterina Gordeeva in April 1991. They had two ceremonies because the USSR did not recognize religious ceremonies. The legal, official state-approved wedding was on 20 April, and a religious wedding in the Russian Orthodox Church took place on 28 April. On 11 September 1992, Gordeeva gave birth to their daughter, Daria "Dasha" Sergeyevna Grinkova, in Morristown, New Jersey. After the 1994 Olympics, they settled in Simsbury, Connecticut. Daria took up skating seriously at age 9, appearing with her mother in several ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vladimir Dal
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal ( rus, Влади́мир Ива́нович Даль, p=vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɨˈvanəvʲɪdʑ ˈdalʲ; November 22, 1801 – October 4, 1872) was a noted Russian-language lexicographer, polyglot, Turkologist, and founding member of the Russian Geographical Society. During his lifetime he compiled and documented the oral history of the region that was later published in Russian and became part of modern folklore. Early life Vladimir Dal's father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl (1764 – October 21, 1821), a linguist versed in the German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages. His mother, Julia Adelaide Freytag, had German and probably French (Huguenot) ancestry; she spoke at least five languages and came from a family of scholars. The future lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod (present-day Luhansk, Ukraine), in Novorossiya - then under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grigori Chukhrai
Grigory Naumovich Chukhray (russian: Григо́рий Нау́мович Чухра́й; uk, Григорiй Наумович Чухрай; 23 May 1921 – 28 October 2001) was a Ukrainian Soviet and Russian film director and screenwriter. People's Artist of the USSR (1981).Cinema: Encyclopedic Dictionary // main editor Sergei Yutkevich (1987). — Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 640 pages He's the father of the Russian film director Pavel Chukhray. Early life Grigory Chukhray was born in Melitopol (modern-day Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine) to Red Army soldiers Naum Zinovievich Rubanov and Claudia Petrovna Chukhray. He was of Ukrainians, Ukrainian origin.Grigori Chukrai, ''My Cinema''. Moscow, 2001, 98 p. [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |