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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Ancient chronicles called Kiev the “mother of Russian cities” highlighting its pre-eminence over other population centers in ancient Rus’. In contemporary Ukraine, however, the adjective “Russian” is ...

Sarah Welch/wikipedia.org Here’s a toast to the explorers and archaeologists who discovered the plant used to produce the drink of the ancient Indians. One of the most mysterious drinks in the history ...

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 ...

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 ...

From chaos and crime to freedom and opportunity - this period in Russian history was sort of a roller coaster ride - one we commonly refer to as the “wild 90s”. Do you remember a time before iPhones ...

From the tiny apartment that he lived in during the 1990s to Stalin’s dacha and Romanov palaces, the leader of the largest country on Earth has quite a few places to work and relax in. This is the ...

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?

These majestic royal residences with their splendid parks were occupied by the Germans and almost completely destroyed. It took many years for them to be painstakingly restored, and now we can admire ...