This is the Bronze Horseman, a statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, Russia, commissioned by Catherine the Great and completed in 1782 (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
While monuments to World War II are present throughout Russia and the former Soviet territories, this one in Saratov, Russia, is particularly unusual, as its central element is a stone column featuring flying cranes (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
This is a view of the back end of Red Square, the Kremlin, and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, capturing some of Moscow’s daily life as well (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
This is the Russian eternal flame, dedicated to the memory of World War II, by the Kremlin in Moscow (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
This is a newly-constructed statue of Saints Cyril and Methodius, two Byzantine missionaries assigned the task of converting the Slavic peoples, who also invented an alphabet for the Slavic languages that eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet. This statue was placed in front of Saratov State University, one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the Russian provinces, and speaks to the religious and nationalist turn in current-day Russia (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
This photo of a traditional church on the foreground with a bank building in the background in Saratov’s main square captures both the continuities and the changes in current-day Russia (The photo is from the personal archive of Dr. Gleb Tsipursky).
This is the Rosetta Stone, perhaps the most important historical artifact in the British Museum, which allowed us to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.