The Soviet sniper girl Kyra PetrovskayaKyra was born in 1918 on the coast of the Black Sea in the Crimea. Some sources say that her original name was "Cyrus." Her father was a decorated pilot in the Imperial Russian air force, receiving the Order (Cross) o…
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made "once-famous personalities vanish" and crafted photographs …
Nowadays it's hard to believe that thousands of people would be willing to stand out in the cold for hours just to try a McDonald’s hamburger. But when the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the whole city went mad. The Moscow McDonald’s initia…
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union used more women in combat than any other country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women sprang to join the war effort, enlisting as nurses, clerks, cooks, manufacturing etc. Among them were hundreds of remarkab…
On April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, and several hundred staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers wer…
At the end of 1950s a real sensation happened in Moscow: Christian Dior models came to visit the capital of the Soviet Union. Muscovites who wandered into GUM, the USSR’s premier department store, were treated to an extraordinary scene: a trio of willowy F…
In June 1941 Hitler ordered a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, and for most of the next year the German army routed the Soviet troops, capturing thousands of square kilometers of their country in the process. In August 1942 the German VI Army had pus…
The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, …
Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the German codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which commenced on June 22, 1941. It was to be the turning point for the fortunes of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, in tha…
The Soviet War in Afghanistan was a nine-year period involving the Soviet forces and the Mujahideen insurgents that were fighting to overthrow Afghanistan's Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government. The Soviet Union supported the go…
In December of 1991, as the world watched in amazement, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superiority…
"Politruk" (political commissar) Alexey Yeremenko (220th Rifle Regiment/4th Rifle Division) encouraging his men to counterattack against German positions moments before being killed, in the village of Khorosheye, near Woroschilowgrad, today Luhansk, Ukraine.…
It was the night of June 29, 1941 in the foothills of Murmansk, Soviet Union. Commander Oberleutnant Rode ordered some officer candidates "Gruppe Ostermann" to climb "Ridge Musta" to a height of 122m and scout the situation and then report back to him and hi…
These photos taken by Johannes Hähle depict the civilian population of Kharkov under occupation by Nazi Germany (all pictures are taken on October and November 1941). As a member of Construction Battalion 146, Hähle participated in the invasion of France. …
Boris Yeltsin, who became president of Russia in 1991, was one of the most complex political leaders of his time. A longtime Communist Party leader, he was an important leader in the reform (social improvement) movements of the late 1980s and 1990s. Yeltsin …
On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin) was born. The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child. At a…
The 872-day Siege of Leningrad, Russia, resulted from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad in the Eastern Front of World War II. The siege lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944 and was one of the longest and most destru…
Beauty pageants (a mainstay in Western culture, particular America) were banned in the Soviet Union since 1959 - no scantily clad ladies, no cheeky fashion, no celebration of beauty and poise. However, the landscape changed in 1985 with the appointment of Mi…