Participants in the Grelka Fest at the Sheregesh resort in Tashtagolsky District of Kemerovo Oblast, Russia on April 22, 2017. Russian girls marked the end of the ski season with a record-breaking bikini ski festival at Siberia’s top winter resort, Sheregesh. Some 1,498 skiers and snowboarders undressed to impress in the annual event as they took to the pistes under blues skies and sunshine in a bracing temperature of just 5°C. (Photo by Grelka Fest/The Siberian Times)

“Russian singer Eduard Khil has died at the age of 77, following a stroke. Khil is apparently well known in Russia, though attained belated fame outside of Russia when a musical number he performed on Soviet television in the 1970s, in which he sung nonsense lyrics in a rich baritone over luxuriantly loungy background music, but above all with an infectious sense of good cheer, ended up on YouTube and became a meme”. ... (Listen to songs of Eduard Khil)

“Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, the French pronunciation of his initials, R.T. He was a diversely talented 20th-century artist and designer who flourished in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor”. – Wikipedia. Photo: Romain de Tirtoff (Erte) – “Symphony In Black” (please click to enlarge).

Ed Freeman was born and raised in Boston and majored in French and Russian at Oberlin College in Ohio. After college, he worked as a performing musician, arranger and record producer, creating dozens of pop and jazz vinyls, including Carly Simon’s debut album and Don McLean’s American Pie. Ed Freeman in 1990 and have watched him grow as an artist and a teacher. For the past eight years, Ed has been teaching a Photoshop class at Santa Monica City College and currently has large pieces of his work, Desert Realty, featured in a traveling museum.

A woman looks at traditional Ukrainian Easter eggs “Pysanka”, installed as part of the upcoming celebrations of Easter, in central Kiev, Ukraine, April 29, 2016. A pysanka is a Ukrainian Easter egg, decorated with traditional Ukrainian folk designs using a wax-resist (batik) method. The word pysanka comes from the verb pysaty, “to write”, as the designs are not painted on, but written with beeswax. Many other eastern European ethnic groups decorate eggs using wax resist for Easter. These include the Belarusians, Bulgarians, Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Sorbs. (Photo by Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

A woman argues with police officer during a protest in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Ulan-Ude, the regional capital of Buryatia, a region near the Russia-Mongolia border, Russia, Wednesday, April 21, 2021. Navalny's team has called for nationwide protests on Wednesday following reports that the politician's health was deteriorating in prison, where he has been on hunger strike since March 31. Russian authorities have stressed that the demonstrations were not authorized and warned against participating in them. (Photo by Anna Ogorodnik/AP Photo)

Rush-hour in Russia means one thing for this daredevil: train surfing! The 19-year-old daredevil who goes by the name Kobzarro started train surfing aged 15 as a way of escaping an oppressive family life. Here Kobzarro can be seen balanced on top of a train as it speeds through the wintery Russian environment. Kobzarro is so dedicated to train surfing that she rarely gets inside a train. Even in winter she prefers to travel in this less conventional way. It has resulted in a few run ins with the law, but Kobzarro says it has never resulted in anything more serious than a fine, with many police officers even being interested in the train surfing community. (Photo by Caters News Agency)