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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Some saw him as a charlatan, others a “saint”, who foretold the fall of the Russian Empire shortly before his own death. His descendants had had to live in the shadow of the ‘tsarist monk’ for years ...

Both paternal and maternal ancestors of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, have something to do with Russia and its Imperial family. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (born Prince Philip of Greece and ...

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 ...

Deportations are one of the most tragic pages in Soviet history, and continue to be a sensitive issue for many members of the repressed ethnic and social groups. So what was the goal of that policy?

The world is enjoying a boom in chess playing following ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ TV series’ sweeping success. We’ve boiled down a list of Soviet chess legends who proved that chess is mental ...

This is one of the most terrifying pages in Soviet history, devoted to the forced industrialization and remote lands’ development at the expense of human lives. R504 Kolyma Highway isn’t a popular ...

Even Queen Elizabeth II has some old pieces of jewelry that once belonged to the Russian royal family. The diamond, emerald and sapphire tiaras of the Romanov dynasty were remarkable for their beauty ...

At various times during his reign, Uncle Joe trusted these guys almost as much as himself; he created a cult around them, naming streets, cities, and, in one case, even the Moscow Metro after them.