Sochi opening ceremony: from Peter the Great to Putin

3. Matryoshka nesting dolls

Sergei Grits / AP
A giant matryoshka doll looms over the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park.

An outsized nesting doll sits on the slopestyle course in the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park that hosts skiing and snowboarding events, and matryoshkas – the dolls’ names in Russian – are certain to make an appearance during the opening ceremony.

Matryoshkas are a set of ever-smaller wooden figurines nested inside each other. They have an old tradition in Russia, though not as old as you might think. The first set of dolls was produced by a Russian craftsman in the late 1800’s and was likely inspired by nested dolls from Japan or China. But this didn’t stop matryoshkas from quickly becoming the most recognizable and sought-after Russian souvenir. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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