History & Persons

Tony Rocchi04.10.2025

From Multi-Party State to One-Party State: the disintegration and collapse of non-Bolshevik parties and movements in the Russian Revolution. The former Russian Empire was the most multi-party country in Europe. However, by the early 1920s, the Soviet Union, its successor state, had become Europe’s biggest one-party state. The history of how the Bolsheviks or Communists […]

Andrey Vedyaev25.09.2025

September 19 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov, whose name is associated with an entire era in the history of the KGB’s underground intelligence service. It was under his leadership that the Vympel special forces group was created, and the first Heroes of the Soviet Union emerged among the KGB’s […]

Tony Rocchi22.09.2025

Nobody really ruled Russia between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. A governmental and legal vacuum opened in Russia in 1917 with the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in the February Revolution. Neither the Provisional Government nor the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies showed much enthusiasm in establishing themselves as rulers of […]

Andrey Vedyaev20.09.2025

On December 5, 2024, Colonel Ivan Pavlovich Evtodyev, a veteran of the illegal special purpose intelligence service, an honorary employee of the state Security Service, celebrated his 100th birthday. The last of the surviving employees of General Sudoplatov. Ivan Pavlovich was born in 1924 in the village of Subbottsy in the very center of Ukraine […]

Yuri Chekalin09.09.2025

The famine of the early 1920s affected about 40 provinces of Soviet Russia. In the summer of 1921, the ARA (American Relief Administration) and other international public organizations responded to the appeal of the RSFSR government for assistance. The ARA staff (300 employees from America and about 10,000 from the local population) worked from September […]

Tony Rocchi09.09.2025

Every European revolution had a counter-revolution. Russia in 1917 was a huge exception to this historical pattern because there was no counter-revolution in the former Russian Empire between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. In fact, the conditions for a counter-revolution were completely absent. Russian revolutionaries prided themselves on their understanding of revolutions of […]

Yuri Chekalin02.09.2025

From the report: “Only six portraits of Stalin were published in Pravda in 1952, while 147 portraits of Khrushchev were published in the same newspaper in 1964.” Nikita Khrushchev is usually associated with the “thaw”, space flights and the mass migration of people from communal slums to relatively comfortable five-story Khrushchev buildings. It is believed […]

Klim Zhukov27.08.2025

Francois-Dubois-The-Saint-Bartholomews-Day-Massacre.jpg

On the night of August 24, 1572, an event occurred that went down in history as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, also known as the Night of Saint Bartholomew — the mass murder of Huguenots by Catholics in Paris. Let’s leave the tales of Huguenot propaganda to the writers and historians of the century before […]

Yuri Chekalin10.08.2025

A partisan movement began to form on Belarusian territory as early as the end of the summer of 1941 during World War II. More than one generation will remember these heros — from surviving photographs in family albums, from videos on tablets. Time passes, but the memory of our relatives — veterans of the war […]

Yuri Chekalin08.08.2025

Vasily Martekhov had an interesting fate. Vasily was born into a family of Russian immigrants at the Bukron mine in the American state of Ohio and became the fifth child. By birthright, the boy received US citizenship. His father, a miner, worked 12 hours a day, but received negligible amounts. The Martekhovs lived on a […]

From Multi-Party Russia to One-Party State

Illegal Anniversary

Reluctant Rulers in Russia, February to October 1917

One of the Last Intelligence Officer Survivors

The ARA and Espionage

Why Was There No Counter-Revolution in Russia in 1917?

A Little About Khrushchev

Catholic’s Genocide: St. Bartholomew’s Night

As Father Alexander Was a Partisan Priest During WWII

The Only American Hero of the Soviet Union

The Michael Jackson Biopic is Missing its Most Controversial Story

Madama Butterfly and the Japan of the Western Imagination

The Spanish Civil War at 90: the Republic’s Response

Terminator Is about 80 Years Old