Yuri Chekalin

Yuri Chekalin13.09.2026

I met her in a laundromat in Nakano at half past midnight. Not the most promising place to meet someone. But then, if you think about it, there really aren’t any promising places. People meet wherever they happen to be when they least want to meet anyone. I was fifty-four, and I’d been living alone […]

Yuri Chekalin07.09.2026

A earthly platform. Do not grieve, Nor cry aloud. To all our wails he’s deaf. One of us has left for paradise— He’ll meet God there, for surely God exists. — V. Vysotsky Time flows, time rushes on, dragging us into its whirlpools, shattering the fragile little boats of our memories into splinters. Sometimes it […]

Yuri Chekalin07.09.2026

Mathias Rust: The Trial of the Man Who Landed a Plane Beside the Kremlin. On September 4, 1987, one of the most extraordinary trials of the late Soviet era came to an end in Moscow. Standing before the court was nineteen-year-old West German citizen Mathias Rust—a young man who, only months earlier, had accomplished something […]

Yuri Chekalin01.09.2026

The rain had not stopped in Tokyo for four days. It did not fall in sheets. It simply hung in the air—a fine, sticky mist that blurred the neon signs of Shibuya and turned pedestrians beneath transparent umbrellas into slow-moving, sexless half-ghosts. In weather like this, the city lost its depth. It became flat, like […]

Yuri Chekalin31.08.2026

The story of Grigori Rasputin has long existed somewhere between history and legend. Hundreds of books have been written about him, countless myths have grown around his name, and “Rasputin” itself has become almost a byword. Far less is known, however, about the lives of his children. Yet the story of his eldest daughter, Maria, […]

Yuri Chekalin30.08.2026

Of all the languages I know, the Japanese word baishun—meaning prostitution—seems to me among the most evocative. There is something strangely melancholy and gentle in its sound, an echo of the feeling that sometimes overtakes us on a rainy day, when the damp scent of the earth makes us pause and think about eternal questions. […]

Yuri Chekalin28.08.2026

In summer Tokyo, the heat never falls from the sky. It rises from below—from the sun-baked asphalt, the blank concrete walls, the metal shells of vending machines. That evening, the air was thick and heavy. It seemed to drift reluctantly from one dark alley to another. I was walking through Nakano without any particular destination […]

Yuri Chekalin27.08.2026

Japan is usually associated with cutting-edge technology, neon-lit Tokyo, bullet trains, and the triumph of corporate capitalism. Yet for more than a century, Japan has also been home to one of the most unusual political phenomena in the modern world: the Japanese Communist Party, or JCP. Its story began on July 15, 1922, when a […]

Yuri Chekalin22.08.2026

The first thing I did in Tokyo was get lost. The labyrinth of Shinjuku Station swallowed me whole, the moment the train doors slid open with a soft, quiet sigh of sympathy. A massive river of people lifts you up and carries you through subterranean passageways, illuminated by endless billboards. You dissolve into this current […]

Yuri Chekalin20.08.2026

On August 19, 1991, an event began that would enter history under a dry bureaucratic acronym: the GKChP — the State Committee on the State of Emergency. Thirty-five years later, it is easy to look back and see those events as inevitable. The Soviet Union, it seems, was already doomed; the August coup merely added […]

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The Last Train

Shards of My Memory

A Hard Landing

The Cat

Rasputin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Maria Rasputin

Priestesses of Love

August 17

Japanese Communism: A Century of Revolution, Underground Struggle, and Parliamentary Politics

The Backwards Clock

The GKChP: The Day the Soviet Union’s End Began

The Last Train

See the Pentagon and Die

Vance Has a Problem: His Friendship with Tucker Carlson

Who Will Inherit Old Europe’s Tab?