After the Crimean War in 1856, the Russian Black Sea Fleet was defeated, the state coffers were depleted and, according to the Treaty of Paris, Russia was no longer allowed to have a fleet in the ...

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 ...

Getty Images Commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Nobel Prize winner on December 11, Russia Beyond has prepared a list of Solzhenitsyn’s most important books. Long prohibited in the ...

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 ...

From the Arctic Circle to Kazakhstan, from the western borders to the Far East — the Gulag system in Stalin's time encompassed the entire USSR. “Gulag” is often used to describe any Soviet prison or ...

Before all else in St. Petersburg, there was a log cabin along the Neva River. Peter I was no stranger to modest accommodation, and when he moved out of the cabin in 1712, this new summer “palace” ...

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 ...

Why visit Tobolsk? Well, for one, to look at the ancient capital of Siberia, feel what the great exile Fyodor Dostoevsky and Romanovs royal family experienced here and also admire how the city has ...

The world is enjoying a boom in chess playing following ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ TV series’ sweeping success. We’ve boiled down a list of Soviet chess legends who proved that chess is mental ...

These majestic royal residences with their splendid parks were occupied by the Germans and almost completely destroyed. It took many years for them to be painstakingly restored, and now we can admire ...

The Bolsheviks were in at the beginning of the Communist movement in China. However, it wasn’t the followers of Mao Zedong who became the USSR’s main allies in the country. In 1949, the Communists won ...

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 ...