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 ...

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 ...

Everything you wanted to know about the USSR’s notorious security apparatus. From its inception and until the end of the Soviet Union, the KGB was a prominent force in Soviet politics and society. Its ...

Yulia Mulino If you’re looking for a simple and delicious recipe for traditional pumpkin pies, then “chudu” is for you. Minimum ingredients and maximum taste. For many years, the rugged culture of 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 ...

We have traced how the architecture of Russian churches changed from ancient times to present day, in line with “fashion trends” and technological progress. Historically, church architecture always ...

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 ...

Nazi Germany and its allies sought to destroy the Soviet population on a monstrous scale. Thousands of towns and villages in the USSR were completely wiped out, together with their inhabitants. 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, ...

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 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 ...

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 ...