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 ...

Gaunt, pale and emaciated, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army looked like a hunted animal to the Soviet military commanders. On the night of January 31, 1943, units of the 64th Army’s 38th ...

Large parts of northern Russia don’t get to see any sunrises or sunsets during the winter. How does darkness аround the clock affect the lives of ordinary people? Imagine this: You wake up, and it's ...

Fedor Jeftichew had a rare disease — hypertrichosis. He earned fame in the 19th century as a circus freak, displaying his unusual condition to the public. The producer of the show even made the poor ...

After Lenin died, St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad. Soon, several other cities would also be renamed after famous Bolshevik leaders. But why and how did Moscow escape this fate? It all began with ...

Archive photo When the Nazis occupied the USSR in the early 1940s, they used millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians as forced labor. My great-grandmother, Yevgenia Mechtaeva, was 22 years ...

Vasily Kamotsky, a 28-year-old farmer from Krasnoyarsk, has become an online sensation and meme machine – completely by accident. After going to a fitness contest to get an autograph from his favorite ...

To bury or not to bury, that is the question currently being hotly debated in Russia. Arguably the most famous (dead) figure on display in the world, Vladimir Lenin survived multiple assassination ...

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 ...

When the Germans advanced towards Moscow in 1941, Soviet troops were in a nearly hopeless situation because they lacked effective anti-tank weapons. Out of desperation, highly trained military dogs ...

There is no shortage of sporting greats in the Soviet and Russian pantheon, but one world record-breaking finswimmer literally earned his hero’s badge by risking his life twice to save more than 20 ...

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 ...