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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

According to the Bolsheviks, the red color of the Communist banner symbolized the blood of the people who fought for freedom. This explanation goes back to the revolutionary France of the late 18th ...

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 ...

Did you know that only 4 km divide Russia and the U.S.? Check out some interesting facts about Russian borders. Officially, Russia borders 18 states, and this is the biggest number of neighboring ...

Conflict, comedy, drama, engaging characters, fatherless children and ideal love — some Soviet movies depicted the relations between men, women, parents and other family members better than a thousand ...

Russia is famous for its extra cold winters, but in some places, summer temperatures are unbelievably high. People who live in these cities spend every summer in conditions of incredible heat. So, ...

Some saw him as a charlatan, others a “saint”, who foretold the fall of the Russian Empire shortly before his own death. His descendants had had to live in the shadow of the ‘tsarist monk’ for years ...

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 ...