When the Russians built a new U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s, the KGB stuffed it with bugs at the bricklaying stage. “The only way to make that building secure was to chop off the top ...

The USSR was obviously not the "evil empire" it was made out to be by capitalist propaganda. But it would also be wrong to portray it as a land of universal justice and plenty.

Aleksey Kravchenko, the teenage actor who played Florya, really went through hell while filming. Director, Elem Klimov, shot Come and See in chronological order over a nine-month period. Comparing ...

Prisoners spent 20 years building the road, from 1932 to 1952, and after that the camp was closed. According to official data, there were roughly 700 thousand prisoners working in this Gulag ...

In the beginning there were four independent republics that signed the declaration of the creation of the USSR, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in 1922.

The sad story that happened to one of the first batches of those deportees became known as the Nazino tragedy. In May 1933, over 6,000 people were deposited from barges on a small deserted island ...

1. ‘The Forties’ by David Samoilov (1920-1990) Samoilov (born Kaufman) is regarded as one of the leading Soviet poets of WWII. His poems depicted the horrors of war and the struggle for peace ...

Soviet Union, the Congress of Soviets, Soviet of Federation – the word has been and is still widely used in Russia, but what does it exactly mean?

After the defeat of the Siberian khanate, Russian landlords were fresh out of rivals, and they moved to conquer new lands. The Cossacks had become the colonialist tsardom’s go-to mercenaries.

This is the only residence that officially belongs to Putin as a private individual. This 77-square-meter apartment is remarkably modest for Russia’s president.

Do you remember a time before iPhones and social media? In 90s Russia, the period of my childhood, we used to find joy in other things (like a new Barbie, a handheld Tetris game, or bubble gum ...

Russia before the 20th century was mostly an agricultural country, and the decisive majority of its exports were raw materials. Hemp, a plant of the genus cannabis sativa, was one of the biggest ...