In Case of Emergency: The Washington-Moscow Hotline Turns 50
It had its origins in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it’s still in use today. In the decades after World War II, officials in both the U.S. and USSR sought to find ways to improve communication between...
View ArticleThe Lone Soviet Space Shuttle Launch, 25 Years Ago
The launch of Buran (Russian for “snowstorm”) from the same patch of central Asia from which Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin rocketed into space marked a new milestone in the Soviet space program. The first...
View ArticleCIA Used “Dr. Zhivago” as Cold War Weapon
Born in 1890, Pasternak (like his protagonist Yuri Zhivago) belonged to an older, cultured Moscow class that by the 1950s was well out of favor with contemporary Soviet culture. In addition to a...
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What Really Happened to Yuri Gagarin, the First Man in Space?
Becoming the First Man in Space The son of a carpenter, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino in Smolensk, Russia in 1934. At 16, he moved to Moscow to apprentice as a foundry...
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The Soviet Union’s Final Hours
By December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was a president without a country. Three of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics had already declared independence, and days earlier the leaders of 11 others agreed...
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Russia and U.S. Relations: Lessons of the “X Article”
After meeting with President Vladimir Putin this week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters that the “current state of U.S.-Russia relations is at a low point.” Contributing to the tense...
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Meet the Night Witches, the Daring Female Pilots Who Bombed Nazis By Night
They flew under the cover of darkness in bare-bones plywood biplanes. They braved bullets and frostbite in the air, while battling skepticism and sexual harassment on the ground. They were feared and...
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The Bizarre ‘Sausage War’ That Inspired Hitler
It was an invasion worthy of a massive adversary. On November 30, 1939, half a million Soviet soldiers swarmed north, armed with tanks, bombs, machine guns and an astonishing number of troops. The...
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These Historic Military Parades Turned Heads
Whether a victory march, a commemoration of past conflict or a showy flexing of military muscle, the tradition of soldiers publicly parading with their weapons goes back for millennia. Long designed to...
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The California Activists Who Scared the Soviets Away From the 1984 Olympics
The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics have been the first Games in 34 years that Russia has not, technically, attended. After a years-long doping scandal, the International Olympic Committee stripped...
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The Humiliation that Pushed Putin to Try and Recapture Russian Glory
History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history’s most fascinating questions. Dominant at home and feared abroad, Vladimir Putin...
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Why Poland Wants Germany to Pay Billions for World War II
If you’d visited Warsaw in 1945, you might not have recognized it as a city at all. Destroyed by the Nazis in retribution for a 1944 uprising, the city was pocked by craters and reduced to miles and...
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Was the Soviet Union’s Collapse Inevitable?
“We’re now living in a new world.” On Christmas Day 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shocked the world with these words, announcing the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation from...
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How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge
Now you see him—now you don’t. Compare a 1934 photo of four Communist Party officials in the USSR and you’ll see Avel Enukidze, photographed next to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov and others. But...
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The Chernobyl Cover-Up: How Officials Botched Evacuating an Irradiated City
History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history’s most fascinating questions. In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the world...
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