As the world marks the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War, RBTH remembers the dramatic and heroic story of the Arctic Convoys, a period of unique collaboration between Russia and the ...

Russia is famous for its extra cold winters, but in some places, summer temperatures are unbelievably high. People who live in these cities spend every summer in conditions of incredible heat. So, ...

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 ...

Global Look Press, Legion Media, Public domain The Bolsheviks oppressed the Orthodox Church after seizing power in Russia – but Stalin, despite all his ruthlessness, changed things for better in this ...

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 ...

Russians couldn’t even make proper bricks before they hired Italians to work for them. The Italian engineers were proficient in war and architecture, and for lavish salaries, helped build the ...

The Motherland Calls is enormous. The tallest statue in Europe, it is 85 meters tall and weighs 8,000 tons! It is the best-known World War II monument in Russia. Every year, thousands of tourists come ...

The Bolsheviks were in at the beginning of the Communist movement in China. However, it wasn’t the followers of Mao Zedong who became the USSR’s main allies in the country. In 1949, the Communists won ...

There are no true members of the Skoptsy sect left in contemporary Russia. But in the 19th century, according to some sources, this organization that believed in the absolution of sins through ...

Natalya Nosova Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1997. But for centuries prior to that, the state was busy killing criminals or those it proclaimed as such - often using rather ...

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 ...