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 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, ...

Historian and architecture expert William Brumfield discovers the connections between the Russian monarchy and this monument to the Orthodox faith. Moscow Kremlin. South view from Sophia Embankment ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Central Asia became the arena of the ‘Great Game’ between the Russian and British empires. It was the arrival of the British in the region that, to a large extent, pushed Russia into conquering it.

The Soviet ‘Leniniana’ of 1910s-1980s combines an enormous amount of images of the revolutionary leader. Just the Lenin museum alone contains 470 paintings featuring him. Let’s take a look at how the ...

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 ...