It’s Vladimir Putin’s 57th birthday today! The patriarch called to congratulate the prime minister, as did Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, affectionately known as “Europe’s last dictator.” Even dissidents marked the occasion. Nezavisimaya Gazeta published a mocking ode (“I love you so tenderly and so sincerely.") wishing the prime minister would trade up titles, from “prime minister” to “God.”

British novelist Tom Rob Smith plays CSI: Moscow in his new detective novel

Reagan, long viewed as the consummate Cold Warrior, was hesitant to rush into war, a new book persuasively argues.

An otherwise intriguing account of a train trip through Central Asia is marred by careless, overwrought prose.

We interrupt your blog to briefly note how damn proud we are that not one but two regular Russia! contributors, Daria Vaisman and Boris Kachka, have landed major book deals... within days of each other. Let’s dive under the jump and meet them properly.

Victor Pelevin’s latest fantastical satire is an occasionally delightful mess.

Anathema to the Soviet government, poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was hounded by the authorities for “parasitism,” sentenced to a stint in a remote northern village, and finally forced to leave the country in 1972. Once in the U.S., conversely, he was hounded by the adoring press, sentenced to a teaching stint in Ann Arbor, and finally forced to leave the country to pick up his Nobel Prize in 1987. Now that he’s dead, Russia, as usual, has realized its loss and wants a piece of J-Bro, too. And, soon enough, it should be getting one.

This past Friday the 13th marked exactly 68 years since the completion of Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus, The Master And Margarita. It is, in a way, the only clear birthday one can celebrate for his cult masterpiece, a decidedly un-Soviet fantastical satire in which the devil comes to Moscow and torments the sinners (i.e., everyone). Bulgakov died in 1940, leaving the novel unfinished. His wife completed it in 1941, but the government refused to publish it until the Thaw, although by that time it was already an underground sensation. Bulgakov’s old flat, the very same "no good apartment" haunted by the devil's minions in the novel, has become a Mecca for M&M devotees. This is all by way of telling you that RIA Novosti has made a spooooky video about the place, complete with swinging lamps!

A sincere and insightful dig through Russia’s past and present.

Remember our man, Alexander Pushkin? Russia’s greatest quill, Pushkin was publishing epic poems by age 15, authored what is arguably the world's finest novel in verse (Eugene Onegin), but famously managed to die like an idiot at 37, after challenging his wife’s alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Here’s the silver lining to that story. The bloody sofa he died on was never sold on eBay — or, for that matter, cleaned. Now, some CSI: St. Petersburg types are looking at swabs and blood samples taken from the sofa in order to more precisely evaluate Pushkin’s demise. No, dying in peace is not an option.

A sober, extensive and resonant account of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.