Russia: Other Points of View

MOSCOW: FROM AIRPORT TO RED SQUARE

 

Friends,

 Our 25 YouTubes are now ready.  You will receive the URLs, one or two at a time, with the hope you will study them and get a "feel" for each Russian city we visited.  We didn't intend flashy, fast paced, "knock-your-socks-off" travelogues. Our intention is to give you an actual sense of Russia's people, streets, sidewalks, metros, culture and what motivates them as individuals and collectively.  Note that Russians dress the same as we (China makes both of our countries' apparel) and they drive the same makes and models of cars that we drive.

 This first Youtube shows Moscow where we landed. It spans our first nine actual hours on ground, during which over two hours of video was shot––and the footage has been reduced to this 13-minute impression of Russia's largest city.  Mel Van Dusen, our pro bono videographer, was seeing Russia for the first time.  He is the editor and voiceover for the series (with a little assistance from me). In addition he spent two months pro bono sifting through 60 hours of footage to provide a glimpse into today's Russia.

 

THE 'SPY' SCANDAL: A DOG THAT COULDN'T BARK

by Gordon Hahn

The present ‘spy’ scandal is a tempest in a teapot that will have no effect on the thaw in U.S.-Russian relations, the balance of power within Russia’s ruling tandem of President Dmitry Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin, or the Barack Obama administration’s credibility.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY FROM RUSSIA IN THE EARLY 1900s

The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, are spectacular and delightfully revealing. They show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russian people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He travelled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900’s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting. To learn more about the Prokudin-Gorskii, the process he used to create the color photographs, and see his collection, you can visit the Library of Congress, who purchased his glass negatives in 1948 after his death in 1944. Source: Blogs.denverpost.com

COLOURS OF RUSSIA

Colours of Russia is a benchmark production designed to herald a new era of understanding of modern Russia through representative imagery not usually presented in the popular foreign mass media. To learn more about the project, please check www.coloursofrussia.com