Russians couldn’t even make proper bricks before they hired Italians to work for them. The Italian engineers were proficient in war and architecture, and for lavish salaries, helped build the ...

Russian church architecture is very diverse, and the look of Orthodox churches has changed over the centuries. However, their domes serve as an indication of the period and the region to which a ...

Roscosmos Life as a cosmonaut is not as romantic as it seems. Anyone who has been in orbit will tell you that it’s very difficult work, leaves you with little free time, and is enormously stressful ...

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 ...

Russia sells more wheat than any other country in the world. At the same time, its domestic grain consumption is growing, too. So how did Russia manage to achieve this breakthrough in wheat exports?

The square in Moscow has been associated with executions, violence and torture in the 20th century. It however has a dark past that goes back all the way to the 18th century. For Russians, the word ...

Even Queen Elizabeth II has some old pieces of jewelry that once belonged to the Russian royal family. The diamond, emerald and sapphire tiaras of the Romanov dynasty were remarkable for their beauty ...

For some Russians of the 18th-19th centuries, French grammar was the first kind of grammar they learned; on the other hand, it was first often taught by fraudsters and former convicts. How did French ...

Sarah Welch/wikipedia.org Here’s a toast to the explorers and archaeologists who discovered the plant used to produce the drink of the ancient Indians. One of the most mysterious drinks in the history ...

Adidas sneakers were a mainstay in the Soviet Olympic team. Then, the shoes were sold under a completely different name. Later, however, they were seen being worn by the Spetsnaz in Afghanistan.

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 ...

Some of them not only followed their owners into exile but also lost their lives on the same tragic night in July 1918 when the Romanovs were killed. Interestingly, though, one dog managed to survive ...