History & Persons

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 […]

Yuri Chekalin27.01.2025

German worker August Landmesser, whose wife was Jewish, refused to salute Hitler. This famous photograph was taken in 1936. The photo shows workers giving the Nazi salute during the launch of the training ship Horst Wessel. Only August Landmesser crossed his arms instead of saluting. This photograph is a historical document of that era when […]

Yuri Chekalin26.01.2025

Traffic control is a difficult task, but, if necessary, even a baboon can do it. Can a baboon be trained to manage the passing trains? Yes, with the help of a human friend! Railway signalman James Wide, who lost both his legs in an accident on the job and was forced to use awkward prosthetics, […]

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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

The Man Who Refused to Salute Hitler

Baboon Railwayman

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