Scholars of the Soviet Union have written at length about the consolidation of Soviet state control over the media, the establishment of Glavlit and other…
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The picture of “Comrade Lenin Sweeps the World Clean of Filth” (below) is a perfect illustration of Soviets’ axiological orientations: they felt a moral duty…
In this essay, I analyze political abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union by exploring Andrei Snezhnevsky’s diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia—a fictional branch of schizophrenia….
Despite its distance from the hotbed of Russian revolutionary violence, the city of Vladivostok and the Russian Far East experienced their own challenges and intrigue…
April 26, 1986 began like any other day for the Soviet citizens of Pripyat, a little-known city of 50,000 in the Ukrainian SSR. At the…
Just as the leadership, citizens, and politics of the USSR changed drastically between 1917 and 1991, so too the Soviet kitchen underwent innumerable changes from…
Former New York Times correspondent Harrison E. Salisbury worked in the Soviet Union from 1949 until 1953 and covered the 1955 U.S.-Soviet Agricultural Exchange, in which twelve…
Even though we have lived in harsh conditions we the community of Koryo Saram[3] have helped each other like brothers. We have provided each other…
The following text was written by Aleksei Rudevich and originally appeared in Russian on the website “Russian 7.” To read the original Russian, click here….
In 1917, following the fall of the Russian empire, Alash Orda, a provisional Kazakh government formed by members of the Alash nationalist party, partially filled…
“Are you talking about the Russians or the Udmurt?” “There’s no difference. The two cultures have been intertwined for so long that it’s really impossible…
The following piece is taken from The Russia Reader edited by Bruce Grant and Adele Barker (Duke University Press, 2010). The book is part of…
In a Komsomolskaya Pravda article dated April 13, 1993, O. Karmaza wrote that “in recent times, we have destroyed everything that could be destroyed. This applies to…
Africa’s drive for independence came to a head by the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. It was seen by the Soviet Union…
The subject of collaboration and resistance in occupied Europe is one of the most controversial issues related to the history of the Second World War….
From the time of the October Revolution in 1917, the United States had a tense relationship with the Soviet Union. The United States was, after…
Geography and history have made Russian identity hard to define. Russia spans both Europe and Asia and is split between East and West. The Soviet-era…
Michael Doyle defines empires as follows: “Empires are relationships of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies.”[1]…
Since the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, the Moscow nightclub “Golodnaya Utka,” or “The Hungry Duck,” has been dubbed “Moscow’s first rape camp.”[1]…
From the time of the Russian Revolution onward, the Bolsheviks were often portrayed in mainstream American media as the “enemy.”[1] Many Americans, however, chose to…