Prisoners spent 20 years building the road, from 1932 to 1952, and after that the camp was closed. According to official data, there were roughly 700 thousand prisoners working in this Gulag ...

In the beginning there were four independent republics that signed the declaration of the creation of the USSR, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in 1922.

Aleksey Kravchenko, the teenage actor who played Florya, really went through hell while filming. Director, Elem Klimov, shot Come and See in chronological order over a nine-month period. Comparing ...

The USSR was obviously not the "evil empire" it was made out to be by capitalist propaganda. But it would also be wrong to portray it as a land of universal justice and plenty.

The origins of the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral are closely connected with the rise of Moscow’s power. In 1326, the leading Russian church prelate, Metropolitan Peter of Vladimir, made the Moscow ...

Russia before the 20th century was mostly an agricultural country, and the decisive majority of its exports were raw materials. Hemp, a plant of the genus cannabis sativa, was one of the biggest ...

Grigory Belov, in September 1965 - October 1967, commander of the Group of Soviet military specialists in Vietnam: “While assisting the Vietnamese in fighting, we just told them: Do like us, i.e ...

Don’t get me wrong, it’s very pretty in Listvyanka. But if you’ve only got 4-6 days to play around with, probably skip it and head straight for Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal’s top destination ...

Natives of Italy, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were very active in the U.S. labor movement. They were anarchists and, amid American strikes in the late 1910s, led a volunteer investigation ...

Millions of people in the USSR were caught up in the turmoil of political reprisals and deportations that swept the country in the 1930s-1950s.

Do you remember a time before iPhones and social media? In 90s Russia, the period of my childhood, we used to find joy in other things (like a new Barbie, a handheld Tetris game, or bubble gum ...

The sad story that happened to one of the first batches of those deportees became known as the Nazino tragedy. In May 1933, over 6,000 people were deposited from barges on a small deserted island ...