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 ...

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 ...

Cross a burning stream, fight a dragon, find the city of Russian Atlantis – Slavs had it all in their ancient mythology. Now, all we have left are the names of the sacred places. This sacred town ...

Many international car companies not only assemble their vehicles in Russia, but also modify them specifically for local drivers. In Russia, every third resident has their own vehicle. At 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 ...

Emperor Paul I tried to change Russia in one go and forcibly. Although he only wanted the best for the country, his chaotic actions led to disastrous treason, and Paul was murdered. Here are the main ...

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 ...

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 ...

Russian church architecture is very diverse, and the look of Orthodox churches has changed over the centuries. However, their domes serve as an indication of the period and the region to which a ...