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 the tiny apartment that he lived in during the 1990s to Stalin’s dacha and Romanov palaces, the leader of the largest country on Earth has quite a few places to work and relax in. This is the ...

The Motherland Calls is enormous. The tallest statue in Europe, it is 85 meters tall and weighs 8,000 tons! It is the best-known World War II monument in Russia. Every year, thousands of tourists come ...

From chaos and crime to freedom and opportunity - this period in Russian history was sort of a roller coaster ride - one we commonly refer to as the “wild 90s”. Do you remember a time before iPhones ...

Reuters During the eighties and nineties, Russians generally thought the true extent of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-38) was never revealed, with many claiming far more people were killed than ...

These so-called vory v zakone - or zakonniki (‘Thieves in Law’) are the kings of the criminal underworld. This group of respected bigshots, who control the majority of the criminal world, both in ...

This is the story of how the mastermind behind MMM, Russia’s biggest financial pyramid scheme, managed to get elected to parliament while behind bars, how he declared war on the oligarchs and how he ...

These rebel artists broke the classical canons of the Imperial Academy of Arts and became the forerunners of Russian avant-garde. The Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions was registered in 1870 and ...

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?

This is the architectural complex inside the Kremlin walls, which includes the early 19th-century Palace, the Terem Palace (the Tsars residence in 17 th century), the Palace of Facets (the hall for ...

The expression ‘Potemkin villages’ means anything made for the sole purpose of concealing the truth. The legend goes that during Catherine the Great’s journey to Crimea in 1787, Grigoriy Potemkin, the ...

According to one theory, ‘Russian roulette’ emerged in the Tsarist army as a relatively “safe” trick that easily impressed onlookers. Wulich […] invited us to sit around in a sign. [We] silently ...