History of Russia
Why do Russian churches have onion-shaped domes?
The child points at the screen and laughs. On the loading screen for the game, there's a building with bright, winding turrets, and the child...
Koshchei the Deathless. The main villain of Russian fairy tales
People have done all sorts of things with death in fairy tales: they've hidden from it, tricked it, begged for extensions. But one character went further...
The Cold War. Causes, events, and who won
There are wars that leave behind ruins and mass graves. And there once was a war in which the two main armies of the planet...
Yuri Gagarin. The first man in space
On April 12, 1961, at a cosmodrome in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, a man in a spacesuit said one short word. "Let's go." And the rocket took off...
USSR. What it was, when it was created, and how it dissolved
Grandma drops «we didn't have that in the Soviet Union» into conversation, Grandpa recalls a Pioneer camp and the first satellite, in the old...
Dmitri Mendeleev and the Periodic Table. The History of the Discovery
There's a scene in the history of science that one wants to retell endlessly. A Petersburg professor compiled a table of all known elements and left in it...
The Russian Revolution of 1917: Causes, Events, Consequences
History has several pivotal years that act as turning points, after which a country awakens to a different reality. For Russia, such a year is 1917. And it's a rare case:…
Nicholas II and the downfall of the Romanov family
The story of the last Russian Tsar is, above all, a story of family, and it is easier to understand if one keeps this in mind from the very beginning...
Peter the Great: How the Tsar Changed Russia
Imagine this for a moment. The sovereign of a vast empire, who is supposed to be seated on a throne in gold and receiving ambassadors, instead...
Ivan the Terrible, biography, reforms, and cruelty
It's a strange thing: about the first Russian Tsar, we know both too much and frustratingly little at once. Too many frightening images,...
All tags