Raisa Semenovna, 89, former employee of the USSR Ministry of the Chemical Industry At the Ministry of the Chemical Industry I was in charge of the oversight of the state technical standards (known ...

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.

Starting in the 1960s, the USSR was a net grain importer. For example, in 1963, it bought 10.4 million tons of grain and 2.1 million tons of flour from the U.S. Furthermore, the amount of imports ...

Theater was a source of palpable joy and jubilation to the tall, handsome and charismatic Konstantin Stanislavsky. A foremost actor, director and theater practitioner, he devoted his entire life ...

The KGB was known for its highly creative methods for eavesdropping on the U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow. Once, Soviet agents modified typewriters used by the embassy staff. “Inside that ...

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?

Throughout the filming of Come and See, real bullets were used. At times, they flew just above the heads of actors, making their terrified looks genuine. And the scene where machine gun fire takes ...

The contents of the tomb were embedded in ice. As the archaeologists carefully melted the ice, they saw a burial of some very important person – six horses in full harnesses were sacrificed and ...

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 ...

“It was impossible to count the money, we estimated it by eye, by the roomful,” Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of MMM, recalled in 1994, talking of the scale of his company’s operations. The ...

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 ...

R504 Kolyma Highway isn’t a popular destination on Russia’s map, which attracts mostly only thrill-seeking tourists. The highway is covered with a mix of dirt and gravel, so traveling here is ...