News you may have missed: this week in Russian culture

A sleek and futuristic new tram has been unveiled in Yekaterinburg; the camera used to take a famous World War II photograph will go up for auction; and a “gay kiss-off” is held outside the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires. Here’s a look at some of this week’s biggest cultural stories from Russia.

The camera used by Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei to take the famous World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag in Berlin is going up for auction at Bonham’s auction house in London in November, with many expecting the camera to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000.

Over 50 key design objects from the 1950s in the Soviet Union have come together in a new exhibition entitled Work and Play Behind the Iron Curtain at GRAD in London.

One of the winner at this year’s Moscow Film Festival, Valeria Gai Germanika, had her film Yes & Yes dropped from the line-up at the Voices Film Festival in Vologda this week due to its use of expletives, making the flick one of the first to suffer from the law banning the use of profanity in the arts which came into effect on 1 July.

A Russian priest and member of the Russian Writers Union this week called the FIFA World Cup a “homosexual abomination” because of the colourful footwear of the players, suggesting that non-standard colours help to promote the “gay rainbow”.

A futuristic new tram was unveiled in Yekaterinburg yesterday to mixed reviews. Testing on the sleek black tram, which is kitted out with Star Wars-style interiors, will begin in February 2015, with plans under discussion to develop more trams to be distributed in Omsk, Moscow and then abroad.

A collection of handwritten copies of KGB documents ranging from the early days of the Soviet Union to its collapse — called the Mitrokhin Archives — is now open to the public in the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge.

And… Gay rights activists staged a “kiss-off” outside the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires on Thursday two days before the Russian president’s arrival in the country in protest at Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law.