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 ...
How did the vatnik become the most popular clothing in the USSR – and why is it now a term of abuse?
We explain how an ordinary cheap jacket united the Soviet Union as the ultimate equalizer, and then became a slur that can get you sued. Warm, windproof and, most importantly, cheap. This was the ...
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 ...
In old Russia, the steam bath, aka ‘banya’, was a place where people washed themselves, while these days, it’s rather a popular attraction, especially among foreigners. Let’s take a peek at what it ...
For two centuries in a row the country has been ruled by men. However, that was not always the case, and Russia remembers the glory (and turbulent) days of women in power. The 10th century's Olga is ...
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 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 ...
From all across the country, people used to make different types of dough and stuff it with various fillings.This way, the many “faces” of Russian dumplings appeared. Not just ‘pelmeni’, as you might ...
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 ...
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