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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

From ancient times, different peoples living on Russian territory practiced a wide variety of burial rites. There were the Slavic kurgans, the underground house tombs of Altai, the above-the-ground ...

Every Russian is the bearer of at least three names. Here’s how not to get confused when searching for the correct form to use. Official situations dictate the use of the full form of a person’s name, ...

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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 ...

When everyone thought they were seeing the elderly “leader of the peoples”, they were actually seeing a 24-year-old Degaestani! By the time young Feliks Dadaev, who hailed from a Dagestani village, ...

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 ...