Yulia Mulino Making bliny or crepes is not rocket science. This dish is world famous, but have you ever tried to make tiny meat wraps with them? Have a look at how we do it in Russia. Bliny are known ...

The Bolsheviks were in at the beginning of the Communist movement in China. However, it wasn’t the followers of Mao Zedong who became the USSR’s main allies in the country. In 1949, the Communists won ...

Russian church architecture is very diverse, and the look of Orthodox churches has changed over the centuries. However, their domes serve as an indication of the period and the region to which a ...

From the Arctic Circle to Kazakhstan, from the western borders to the Far East — the Gulag system in Stalin's time encompassed the entire USSR. “Gulag” is often used to describe any Soviet prison or ...

Natalya Nosova Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1997. But for centuries prior to that, the state was busy killing criminals or those it proclaimed as such - often using rather ...

This is one of the most terrifying pages in Soviet history, devoted to the forced industrialization and remote lands’ development at the expense of human lives. R504 Kolyma Highway isn’t a popular ...

Sarah Welch/wikipedia.org Here’s a toast to the explorers and archaeologists who discovered the plant used to produce the drink of the ancient Indians. One of the most mysterious drinks in the history ...

During Napoleon’s winter campaign of 1812, the Russians and the French experienced the same freezing cold. However, it wasn’t the low temperatures that destroyed Napoleon’s Grande Armee as it is often ...

These so-called vory v zakone - or zakonniki (‘Thieves in Law’) are the kings of the criminal underworld. This group of respected bigshots, who control the majority of the criminal world, both in ...

Cossacks are not a race, nation, profession, nor a term for a particular location. They are all of those, combined. Let’s debunk the myths about what the Cossacks were and what they are now. They ...

The square in Moscow has been associated with executions, violence and torture in the 20th century. It however has a dark past that goes back all the way to the 18th century. For Russians, the word ...

We have traced how the architecture of Russian churches changed from ancient times to present day, in line with “fashion trends” and technological progress. Historically, church architecture always ...