Just five years before Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR, the construction of a giant new tank factory was complete. Uralvagonzavod provided a strong production base for hastily evacuated factories ...

The disclosure of the files offered a unique insight into one of the most secretive organizations of the Cold War era. In the spring of 1992, a Russian man knocked on the doors of the UK Embassy in ...

The Russian Civil War opened a window of opportunity for Japan. Its ambitions extended not only to the Russian coast of the Pacific Ocean, but to the whole of vast Siberia, too. The large-scale ...

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 ...

You probably don’t think of Red Square as a cemetery, but part of it is. About 200 people are buried by the Kremlin Wall, including several Western politicians. Who are these people and why are they ...

Crowns were usually made individually for each emperor and then broken up afterwards. But some pieces of imperial regalia did survive and can now be seen in museums. Before Peter I, the Tsar's most ...

Vladimir Grebnev/TASS Over four million Germans were imprisoned, captured and interned for labor in the USSR after WWII. Not all of them managed to find the road back home. “If I do survive, I will be ...

Some sang odes to his “greatness and courage” for self-promotion. Others – out of fear for the lives of their loved ones. And there were those who thought they could be literally on the same page with ...

Victor Pelevin, author of the 1999 novel ‘Generation P’, is often referred to as one of the most important writers in modern Russian literature. But, while his wildly imaginative books are a fusion of ...

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 ...

Conflict, comedy, drama, engaging characters, fatherless children and ideal love — some Soviet movies depicted the relations between men, women, parents and other family members better than a thousand ...