According to the Bolsheviks, the red color of the Communist banner symbolized the blood of the people who fought for freedom. This explanation goes back to the revolutionary France of the late 18th ...

Turns out the patriotic Soviet critters played a massive role in the major shift in the balance of power in World War II. The important and necessary contribution that horses and dogs made during ...

At various times during his reign, Uncle Joe trusted these guys almost as much as himself; he created a cult around them, naming streets, cities, and, in one case, even the Moscow Metro after them.

These days it's hard to believe that thousands of people would be willing to stand out in the cold for hours on end just for a Big Mac. But when the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the ...

The 1970s saw the first Russian vodka appear on American shelves. And it was all thanks to PepsiCo. If one thinks about Russian vodka, Stolichnaya (or Stoli) is one of the key brands that pops to mind ...

The expression ‘Potemkin villages’ means anything made for the sole purpose of concealing the truth. The legend goes that during Catherine the Great’s journey to Crimea in 1787, Grigoriy Potemkin, the ...

To see 4 out of Russia’s 5 main rivers, you need to travel to Siberia, while the famous Volga snakes through the European part of the country. President Putin's favorite band, LUBE, has a song with ...

In Russia, church bells were treated as persons: they had ears, tongues - and names. And, albeit not having their own volition, bells could be… executed and exiled for sounding at the wrong time or ...

Apart from being filled with the Communist symbolism, it was a straight-forward work of art. Here’s all you need to know about the coat of arms of the USSR. In the late 1990s in Russia, passports with ...

Every top-performing factory worker in the USSR - or ‘stakhanovеts’, as they were known - could replace 10 regular workers, it was believed. Their popularity was so widespread that the name given to ...

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near the city of Pripyat (now Ukraine), poisoning the air and soil in several districts of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. We ...

Conflict, comedy, drama, engaging characters, fatherless children and ideal love — some Soviet movies depicted the relations between men, women, parents and other family members better than a thousand ...