Russia sells more wheat than any other country in the world. At the same time, its domestic grain consumption is growing, too. So how did Russia manage to achieve this breakthrough in wheat exports?

During the 70 years of the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the number of constituent parts changed, but most of the time there were 15 of them. Here is the list. In the beginning ...

These so-called vory v zakone - or zakonniki (‘Thieves in Law’) are the kings of the criminal underworld. This group of respected bigshots, who control the majority of the criminal world, both in ...

From the Arctic Circle to Kazakhstan, from the western borders to the Far East — the Gulag system in Stalin's time encompassed the entire USSR. “Gulag” is often used to describe any Soviet prison or ...

Why visit Tobolsk? Well, for one, to look at the ancient capital of Siberia, feel what the great exile Fyodor Dostoevsky and Romanovs royal family experienced here and also admire how the city has ...

Reuters During the eighties and nineties, Russians generally thought the true extent of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-38) was never revealed, with many claiming far more people were killed than ...

The Russian state received a huge territory stretching to the upper Oka and Dnepr rivers with 19 border towns, including Chernihiv, Gomel, Novgorod-Siversky, and Bryansk. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania ...

Adidas sneakers were a mainstay in the Soviet Olympic team. Then, the shoes were sold under a completely different name. Later, however, they were seen being worn by the Spetsnaz in Afghanistan.

The Khanate of Sibir was an ancient Turkic state on the territory of present-day Siberia. It was older than Russia, but in the end, it was absorbed and destroyed… Siberia is a region in North Asia, ...

To describe the Soviet penal system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, wrote a massive book titled ‘Archipelago Gulag’ after collecting hundreds of memoirs of ...

Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II who was shot dead by the Bolsheviks together with his family, could have escaped this grim fate and left Russia after the abdication in March 1917. His cousin King ...

The expression ‘Potemkin villages’ means anything made for the sole purpose of concealing the truth. The legend goes that during Catherine the Great’s journey to Crimea in 1787, Grigoriy Potemkin, the ...