History & Persons

Alexander Palladin28.02.2025

80 years ago, on February 26, 1945, a national mourning was declared in the USSR in memoriam of Alexey Tolstoy, an outstanding writer who passed away just a few months before the Great Victory over Nazi Germany. Official cause of his death was lung cancer, diagnosed a year before. In lots of photos and portraits, […]

Yuri Chekalin24.02.2025

On February 11, 1829, a tragedy occurred in the capital of Persia that still causes controversy among historians. An angry crowd stormed the Russian embassy. As a result, almost all of its employees died, including the head of the mission, Alexander Griboyedov, the author of the immortal “Woe from Wit”. The last hours of the […]

Alexander Palladin21.02.2025

Over 70 years ago, in June 1954, the United States overthrew the first democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history, Jacobo Arbenz, and Washington’s protégé, Colonel Castillo Armas, seized power in Central America’s most populated country. Armas established a military dictatorship, which sparked a civil war that lasted for 36 years and caused genocide of the […]

Andrey Vedyaev19.02.2025

Soviet intelligence officer, Hero of Russia Colonel Alexander Semenovich Feklisov can be counted among the most important witnesses of our atomic age without any exaggeration. He was a participant in Operation Enormous, an operation of the NKVD foreign intelligence service to obtain American atomic secrets. It was to him that the outstanding physicist Klaus Fuchs […]

Egor Yakovlev09.02.2025

Sergio Leone’s ‘900 Days’ — The Story of a Grand Project on the Siege of Leningrad. Sergio Leone, the author of the best Western films in history, was not very popular in the USSR. Soviet film critics criticized the Italian director for the aestheticization of violence, caustic irony and the lack of a moral compass […]

Vladimir Golstein04.02.2025

What a strange deja vu one experiences reading Tchaikovsky’s letters provoked by Russian confrontation with Ottoman Empire in defense of Bulgarians and Serbs, butchered by the Turks for their rebellion. For a while, western press, led by British, didn’t want to hear anything bad about Turks or anything good about their victims or the Russians […]

Egor Yakovlev03.02.2025

On April 30, 1945, street fighting was at its height in Nazi Berlin. Soviet troops were preparing to storm the Tiergarten district, which was defended by the SS. Both soldiers and civilians were dying in the bloody meat grinder in the center of the densely populated city. On this day, Red Army sergeant Nikolai Masalov, […]

Alexander Palladin01.02.2025

As I mentioned recently in my The End of an Era previous piece, in October of 1990, I got an offer to head the Presidential Information Service (PIS) post, reporting directly to Valery Ivanovich Boldin, Chief of Staff of the USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev. Each morning we would prepare digests of the latest mass media […]

Yuri Chekalin30.01.2025

Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev first met in person in 1855 in St. Petersburg. Before that, they had already known each other in absentia through friendly letters to each other and through published works. Ivan Sergeevich was 10 years older than Leo Nikolayevich and, at the time of their first meeting, was the most famous […]

Alexander Palladin28.01.2025

On January 27, 1944, the military blockade of Leningrad, the 2nd largest city in the USSR, by German and Finnish troops was finally broken. It lasted for 872 days and ranks as the longest and most lethal siege in world history, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths. Some historians speak of the siege operations in […]

History & Persons

Alexey Tolstoy In Memoriam

Bloody February in Tehran

Uncle Sam in Banana Republic of Guatemala

Confession of an Intelligence Officer

Sergio Leone’s ‘900 Days’

The More Things Change!

Prototype on the Liberator Soldier monument in Berlin

Eyewitness Report on August ’91 Events At Kremlin

Why Did Tolstoy Challenge Turgenev to a Duel?

German and Finnish Siege Could Not Silence The Voice of Leningrad

Alexey Tolstoy In Memoriam

Count the Gold!

The Brave New World of Trump

Resistance to Trump-Vance-Musk Regime Grows