Germany and Russia have had a long relationship going back to the Medieval Period. During the thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights conquered much of the Baltic region in order to Christianize the pagans but stayed for centuries well into the… Read More ›
The first involvement of the United States in the wartime conferences between the Allied nations opposing the Axis powers actually occurred before the nation formally entered World War II. In August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston… Read More ›
On May 1, 1960, the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying through Soviet airspace. The fallout over the incident resulted in the cancellation of the Paris Summit scheduled to discuss the ongoing situation in… Read More ›
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. The crisis was unique… Read More ›
Joseph Stalin was one of bloodiest dictators in world history and one of the most significant people of the 20th Century. He was the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc of Eastern Europe. He killed millions… Read More ›
Joseph Stalin reacted extremely slowly to the invasion of his country by German forces in 1940. Indeed, not only did he react slowly, but he also ignored warnings that the Germans planned to attack his country. Stalin’s response to the… Read More ›
Nikita Khrushchev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union during the period following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Khrushchev served as a General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as a… Read More ›
From History New Network by Douglas Gilbert author of The Last Saturday of October: The Declassified Secrets of Black Saturday: “Vasili Arkhipov is arguably the most important person in modern history, thanks to whom October 27, 2017 isn’t the 55th… Read More ›
From the JSTOR Daily by Matthew Willis: Joseph Stalin died sixty-five years ago this month. But it wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, and then the breakup of the USSR, that the state archives were opened and the full… Read More ›
From Smithsonian.com by Alice George: With a pounding heart and rapid breath, Laika rode a rocket into Earth orbit, 2,000 miles above Moscow streets she knew. Overheated, cramped, frightened, and probably hungry, the space dog gave her life for her… Read More ›
From Aeon by Kristen R. Ghodsee author of Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century-Communism and Scott Sehon author of Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account: The public memory of 20th-century communism is a battleground. Two ideological armies stare at each… Read More ›
From Business Insider by Brad Howard: Since the United States entered World War II, the Department of Defense has engaged in the systematic surveillance of other nations by air to glean valuable intelligence on weapons capabilities and military movements. These… Read More ›
From The American Scholar by Sudip Bose: In July 1914, just before the First World War began, Igor Stravinsky took a hasty trip to his estate in the village of Ustyluh, very near the Polish border in western Ukraine. This… Read More ›
From the DailyBeast by Anna Nemtsova: The draft beer taps danced in the bartenders’ hands at Manneken Pis, a Belgian café on the Petrogradskaya Side, one of the oldest and most sophisticated neighborhoods of St. Petersburg. On the eve of… Read More ›
From National Security Archive: Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to… Read More ›
How and when did Joseph Stalin come to power? Stalin is remembered as one of the bloodiest tyrants in the history of the world. He was the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union and later of the Communist bloc in… Read More ›
During the Spanish Civil War, approximately 2,800 American men and women answered the call from the Communist party to defend the Spanish republic from fascist aggression. These men and women served in the Fifteenth International Brigade and formed the Abraham… Read More ›
Espionage in Russia, with its long history of political turmoil, developed to become one of the most effective espionage services by the 20th century when the Soviet Union emerged. The road to that development, however, was long and full of… Read More ›
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was perhaps the most important event in the twentieth century. It saw the world’s first Communist government and it led to a wave of communist inspired revolutions around the world and ultimately the Cold War…. Read More ›