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 Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was the trusty rearguard of the USSR both in peacetime and in war. It was here that the country's industrial potential was cultivated, nuclear weapons were tested, ...

During Napoleon’s winter campaign of 1812, the Russians and the French experienced the same freezing cold. However, it wasn’t the low temperatures that destroyed Napoleon’s Grande Armee as it is often ...

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 ...

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 ...

Many people dream of making a journey on the world's longest railway, but spending nearly seven days looking out of the train window at the melancholic landscape and endless taiga is not easy. We ...

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? During the Soviet times, the USSR was often called ...

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 ...

From ancient times, different peoples living on Russian territory practiced a wide variety of burial rites. There were the Slavic kurgans, the underground house tombs of Altai, the above-the-ground ...

Why is its color red? What does the ‘hammer and sickle’ emblem represent? And what about the five-pointed star? Red flags and banners have been used by rioters, protesters and insurgents since ancient ...

Green eyes, a large nose and big tufted ears - social media users have used a photo of a cat named ‘Big Floppa’ to create memes, doctored images, T-shirts, statuettes and even mobile phone apps. In ...

Often, these summer houses had no running water, sanitation or any other amenities for that matter, but, every weekend, their happy owners would make their way to their dachas, usually having to take ...