The Festival was held at the beginning of October 2006 - from Thursday, October 5th through Sunday October 8th, at the Karl Anatol Center on the campus of the Cal State, Long Beach.

Thursday , October 5th was reserved for accommodation of guests, followed by a sight-seeing tour of the city and a welcoming reception in the evening.

The events started on Friday, October 6th early afternoon, with mornings being reserved for informal meetings between participants, guests, and members of the Organizational Committee, and concluded on Sunday evening, October 8th, by an invitational banquet.

The idea of holding a festival about Russian culture intended for American youth of various backgrounds required much thought and a studied approach. Fortunately, the Organizational Committee had enough time to elaborate on how to present Pushkin’s multifaceted literary work and theatrical achievements -novels in verse and historical tragedies transposed into opera.

A three day Festival was considered adequate to address the immense and extremely diversified cultural heritage left by Pushkin, and to assess his determining role in Modern Russian Literature.

It was decided that daily sessions will be a mix of reading excerpts from his poems, singing romances based on his verses, acting scenes from theatrical adaptations of his works, and showing movies based on his historical and lyrical novels and narrative poems, followed by introductory and explanatory speeches.

Participation of professional actors from Russia brought the necessary artistic level to the program as to present, especially to the American audience, the achievements by the greatest Russian poet in the most comprehensive way.

The Festival had the opportunity to be the first in the States to present the newest movie “Pushkin - Last Duel” focusing on the last days of the poet, introduced by its director Nataliya Sergeyevna Bondarchuk and Igor Dnyestyanskiy, the actor who played the role of A. S. Pushkin.

Nataliya Sergeyevna Bondarchuk (Russian: Наталья Сергеевна Бондарчук) was born in 1950 in Moscow, in a family of famous Russian actors from Soviet era: Sergey Bondarchuk, also leading director and film producer (“War and Piece,” “The Destiny of a Man,” “And Quiet Flows the Don”) and Inna Makarova, regarded, in her time, as the queen of the Soviet Cinema.

Nataliya Bondarchuk followed his father’s footsteps, both as an actress and film director. She is best known for her leading role of Hari in Andrei Tarkovsky's “Solaris” (1972), but her career as an actress spans over 20 years (“Fulfillment of Desires,” “The Star of Captivating Happiness,” “The Youth of Peter the Great,” “The Childhood of Bambi,” just to mention the best). She started to direct films and wrote screen plays in her later career, while still acting. In more recent period, an important part of her creative energy was directed towards life and achievements of the greatest Russian poet, A. S. Pushkin. After seven years of TV series reflecting his life, she felt ready for a major challenge – the movie about his last days, with the emphasis on causes and circumstances leading to his death: “Pushkin – Last duel,” the premiere of which happened to be on the Pushkin Festival in Long Beach.

Another performance which attracted well deserved attention was Dmitri Stepanovich. Born in 1974 in Moscow, Stepanovich exhibited diverse musical talents from an early age. Stepanovich is an eclectic and prolific musician with wide-ranging tastes - from Bach to contemporary music. He possesses an unusual mix of skills: as a composer, pianist and vocalist (bass) - a rare combination indeed.

Stepanovich won the 1998 Rachmaninov International Vocal Competition. He has been a soloist with the Stanislavsky Opera since 1996. His operatic work has taken him throughout Russia, France, Poland, and to the regions of the former Yugoslavia.