Currently reading Yuri Slezkine's *The House of Government* because (1) @Scholars_Stage recommended it and (2) *The Jewish Century* was very good, and a striking thing I am finding is that quite a lot of the material is just not there on the main thoroughfares of the internet

I expect to be able to Google things mentioned in books and find more about them, but that fails surprisingly often with this book!

Exhibit A: Maria Denisova, introduced as Vladimir Mayakovsky's ill-fated flame. She has no English Wikipedia article and Mayakovsky's article /

does not mention her at all. There is a small personal web page about her on Stanford's servers maintained by an ex-Soviet professor emeritus, Gregory (Grisha) Freidin.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/isaac_babel/maria/denisova.htm

Exhibit B: Ilya Sats, father of Natalia Sats and composer for Stanisklavsky's production of Maeterlinck's *The Blue Bird*. There is again no English Wikipedia article but there is a Russian one which mysteriously? says nothing about his death https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B0%D1%86,_%D0%98%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%8F_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87

The book says that his production of *The Blue Bird* "[became] a required rite of passage for elite Soviet children and eventually the longest-running theater production of all time" — yet searching "Ilya Sats" on YouTube or Spotify comes up with essentially zilch

A YouTube search for Илья Сац does get some genuine results, at least

My recommendation to readers of this thread is to get yourself a Wikipedia account if you don't already have one and do your part to improve the situation. Fixing Wikipedia is fun, Wikipedia is nowhere near done, and the Wikimedia Foundation is a cool thing to help