When he came back to Earth, Gagarin was looked upon as not just a hero, but the very embodiment of the Soviet Union’s power.

Pro-Soviet Union groups active since the Cold War are part of a movement pushing for softer U.S.-Cuba relations. Activist ...

About a year into my field research in Kazakhstan, I went to the city of Kurchatov, once the secret command center of the ...

While other countries around the world employed Mendelian genetics to increase agricultural yields, Lysenko touted a debunked dogma based on theories of inheritance of acquired traits. His views, ...

Of course it would take years (even after Stalin’s death) for the USSR to acknowledge such persecutions. One suspects Putin ...

In 1965, a group of Israeli amateurs shocked the Soviet chess elite, securing a moral victory in the Cold War arena. The ...

Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 you’d be forgiven as a proud Soviet citizen for thinking that the USSR’s technology was on par with the decadent West. After the Iron ...

The Soviet Union began with a policy of promoting minority languages through nativization, encouraging education and administration in local tongues. In the 1920s, dozens of languages were ...

Many in the West today imagine the Soviet Union as it’s portrayed in Call of Duty games: a land of prisons and labor camps, where every citizen marched to the tune of the Party and its all-seeing ...

On March 11, 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to declare its independence from the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. did not accept Lithuania’s independence and imposed an economic blockade ...

The usual perception of Soviet Jewish literature after World War II is that there was none. The conversation around the decades after the Holocaust usually focuses on the refuseniks and large waves of ...

Mikhail Gorbachev had been the leader of the Soviet Union for just 13 days when he was suddenly faced with an international crisis. On March 24, 1985, a Soviet sentry shot and killed U.S. Army Maj.