Russian Life
Russian Life, previously known as The USSR and Soviet Life, is a 64-page color bimonthly magazine of Russian culture. It celebrated its 60th birthday in October 2016. The magazine is written and edited by American and Russian staffers and freelancers. While its distant heritage is as a "polite propaganda" tool of the Soviet and Russian government, since 1995 it has been privately owned and published by a US company, Storyworkz, Inc. History In October 1956, a new English language magazine, The USSR, appeared on newsstands in major US cities. Given the level of anti-communist sentiment at the time, it would hardly have seemed an auspicious name under which to launch such a magazine title. The publication was edited by Enver Mamedov (born 1923), a polyglot native of Baku, who had the distinction of being one of the youngest Soviet diplomats when he was appointed the press secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Italy in 1943, and who had been the handler of the Soviet prosecutors' star witness, Friedrich Paulus, at the Nuremberg trials. Meanwhile, at newsstands in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other Soviet cities, Amerika magazine made its second debut. Amerika had been inaugurated in 1944, but in late 1940s