Russian History
How the Soviet Union's Fall Pushed Putin to Try and Recapture Russia's Global Importance
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union stood for nearly half a century as one of the two lodes of global power. When it dissolved in 1991, Russia found itself losing relevance. Russian President Vladimir Putin was a young KGB officer during this era, and the events of that time ...read more
The Mysterious Fate of the Romanov Family's Prized Easter Egg Collection
In 2010, an American scrap-metal dealer visited an antiques stall somewhere in the United States and purchased a golden egg sitting on a three-legged stand. The egg was adorned with diamonds and sapphires, and it opened to reveal a clock. Intending to sell the object to a buyer ...read more
Russian forces enter Chechnya
In the largest Russian military offensive since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks pour into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. Encountering only light resistance, Russian forces had by evening pushed to the outskirts of the ...read more
Why Catherine the Great's Enemies Turned Her into a Sex Fiend
She ruled over all of Russia for more than three decades, expanding its borders and making it one of the most powerful players in global politics. But that power is what made Catherine the Great the victim of notorious misogynistic myths ever since. Nymphomania, bestiality, ...read more
How a Five-Day War With Georgia Allowed Russia to Reassert Its Military Might
In early August 2008, after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into the rebellious province of South Ossetia, Russia came to its defense, beginning a five-day-long conflict that ended with Russian troops within striking distance of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. ...read more
Lenin vs Stalin: Their Showdown Over the Birth of the USSR
The question of where Russia begins and ends—and who constitutes the Russian people—has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 turned these concerns into a big “Russian question” ...read more
Why Peter the Great Tortured and Killed His Own Son
Many monarchs throughout history have killed family members. England’s Henry VIII, for example, beheaded two wives and several cousins. Cleopatra engineered the murder of two siblings (one of whom was also her husband). And Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, ordered the execution ...read more
Pogroms
Pogrom is a Russian word which, when directly translated, means “to wreak havoc.” Pogroms typically describe violence by Russian authorities against Jewish people, particularly officially-mandated slaughter, though the word has been extended to the massacres of other groups as ...read more
Romanov Family
The Romanov family was the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia. They first came to power in 1613, and over the next three centuries, 18 Romanovs took the Russian throne, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution ...read more
Soviet Union
After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of ...read more
755 Staff Ordered Out: Putin’s Crippling Blow to the U.S. Embassy in Russia
In case you haven’t noticed, relations between the U.S. and Russia are pretty tense. Last year, former President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats as retaliation for a series of cyber-attacks during the 2016 election. And on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ...read more
The Russian Revolution, Through American Eyes
On a muggy July night in 1917, American journalist Arno Dosch-Fleurot joined the protestors parading along Petrograd’s Nevsky Prospekt when gunshots suddenly rang out. Banners pleading for liberty and freedom crashed to the ground as blood stained the Russian capital’s most ...read more
The Cold War Race to Build the Concorde
Fifteen years after American test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier, a new front opened in the Cold War. With the Americans and Soviets still engaged in an all-out sprint to win the Space Race, both sides of the Iron Curtain launched a battle for supersonic ...read more
5 Things You May Not Know About Leo Tolstoy
1. Tolstoy was a self-improvement junkie. Inspired in part by the 13 virtues Benjamin Franklin spelled out in his autobiography, Tolstoy created a seemingly endless list of rules by which he aspired to live. While some seem pretty accessible by today’s standards (in bed by 10 ...read more
The Mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin
The Potemkin uprising was sparked by a disagreement over food, but it was anything but accidental. Morale in Russia’s Black Sea fleet had long been at rock-bottom lows, spurred on by defeats in the Russo-Japanese War and widespread civil unrest on the homefront. Many navy ships ...read more
9 Things You May Not Know About Vladimir Lenin
1. Lenin’s brother was hanged for plotting to kill the czar. Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, a university zoology student, was arrested in March 1887 for participating in a bombing plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Some of his co-conspirators begged for clemency and ...read more
7 Amazing Rags to Riches Stories
1. Catherine I The life of Empress Catherine I of Russia could easily be confused with something out of a fairy tale. The future queen was born in 1684 into a family of Lithuanian peasants, and was orphaned at the age of 3 after both her parents died from the plague. Taken in by ...read more
From Sputnik to Spacewalking: 7 Soviet Space Firsts
1. First artificial earth satellite: Sputnik The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first manmade object to orbit the earth, on October 4, 1957, to little fanfare. In fact, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, didn’t announce the launch until the next day. Global reaction to ...read more
Did any of the Romanovs survive?
In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II—the last monarch of the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia for 304 years—was reportedly executed along with his wife, Alexandra, and their five children by their Bolshevik captors in the basement of a house in ...read more
Remembering History’s Last Major Cavalry Charge
With sabers drawn, about 600 Italian cavalrymen yelled out their traditional battle cry of “Savoia!” and galloped headlong toward 2,000 Soviet foot soldiers armed with machine guns and mortars. On August 23, 1942 (some sources say August 24), the cavalrymen—part of the Axis ...read more
8 Things You Didn’t Know About Catherine the Great
1. Catherine the Great’s name wasn’t Catherine, and she wasn’t even Russian. The woman whom history would remember as Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, was actually the eldest daughter of an impoverished Prussian prince. Born in 1729, Sophie von ...read more
Why Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia Was the Beginning of the End
After taking power in 1799, French leader Napoleon Bonaparte won a string of military victories that gave him control over most of Europe. He annexed present-day Belgium and Holland, along with large chunks of present-day Italy, Croatia and Germany, and he set up dependencies in ...read more
Red Square
Built directly east of the Kremlin, Moscow’s historic fortress and the center of the Russian government, Red Square is home to some of the country’s most distinctive and important landmarks. Its origins date to the late 15th century, when the Muscovite prince Ivan III (Ivan the ...read more
Collapse of the Soviet Union
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. Representatives from Soviet republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) had already announced that ...read more