Soviet History

An employee of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant walks in the control room of the destroyed 4th block of the plant on February 24, 2011, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the meltdown of reactor number four.

You Can Now Visit Chernobyl's Control Room, if You're Quick About It

Visitors will have five minutes to look around the contaminated spot where the worst nuclear disaster in history took place

Renia Spiegel in Przemyśl circa 1930

The Poignant Wartime Diary of a Jewish Teenager Living in Poland Has Been Published in English

Renia Spiegel was killed by the Nazis when she was 18 years old

Several years after traveling through the South with fellow writer Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes wrote an essay about an encounter with a young man escaping chain gang labor.

A Lost Work by Langston Hughes Examines the Harsh Life on the Chain Gang

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race. It has never been published in English—until now

A woman looks at wreckage of trucks in the ghost city of Pripyat during a tour in the Chernobyl exclusion zone on June 7, 2019.

HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Miniseries Is Driving Tourists to the Nuclear Disaster Site

Chernobyl tourist agencies have reportedly experienced a 30 to 40 percent jump in bookings since the show’s premiere

“The Soviet exhibition strives for an image of abundance with an apartment that few Russians enjoy,” reported the New York Times, “with clothes and furs that are rarely seen on Moscow streets.”

When the United States and Soviet Union Fought It Out Over Fashion

The Russians may have been winning the space race in the 1950s, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the sophistication of Western dress.

Simcha and Leah Fogelman both endured World War II and took two different paths of surviving the Holocaust.

How the Definition of Holocaust Survivor Has Changed Since the End of World War II

For decades, Jews who were forced east into the uneasy confines of the Soviet Union were excluded from the conversation about the trauma of genocide

The planned museum is set to be built in Poissy, home of Le Corbusier's famed Villa Savoye

The Controversy Over the Planned Le Corbusier Museum

Scholars, architects have accused France’s culture ministry of “complicity in an attempt to rehabilitate” Le Corbusier's legacy

Shortly after the first human space flight, the Soviet Union began planning to send a woman to space.

The First Group of Female Cosmonauts Were Trained to Conquer the Final Frontier

Two decades before the first American woman flew to space, a group of female cosmonauts trained in Star City of the Soviet Union 

Woman's shoe found at the site of the March 1945 massacre

400 Artifacts Unearthed at Site of Nazi Massacre Targeting Polish, Soviet P.O.W.s

In March 1945, German soldiers shot 208 Polish and Soviet forced laborers in a series of three mass executions across the Arnsberg Forest

Belarus' servicemen excavate a mass grave for the prisoners of a Jewish ghetto set up by the Nazis during World War II in the city of Brest.

Nazi-Era Mass Grave Found in Former Jewish Ghetto in Belarus

So far, authorities have recovered 730 sets of remains, though there may be many more

Items on display at the recently opened KGB Spy Museum in New York

The Incomplete History Told by New York's K.G.B. Museum

Designed to be apolitical, the attraction offers whiz-bang tech without the agency's brutal past

President Kennedy declassified images like this one that showed medium-range ballistic missile launch sites in the Cuban countryside

How CIA-Backed Spies Detected Soviet Nukes First During Cuban Missile Crisis

A report from <i>Yahoo News</i> lays out how a network of agents detected Soviet operations on the island before a U-2 spy plane snapped the famous photos

1960s science fiction illustration of lunar exploration.

The Missions to the Moon That Never Left the Drawing Board

From pioneers of science fiction to the height of the space race, these are the ideas for lunar flight that never launched

Laima Vince in Lithuania in July 2018

The Translator Who Brought a Lost Jewish Poet’s Words to the English-Speaking World

Raised in the U.S. but a lifelong speaker of Lithuanian, Laima Vince became enamored of Matilda Olkin’s writing

Writers’ Resort, Sevan

Tour Armenia's Enduring Soviet-Era Architecture

Armenia's unique flavor of Soviet Modernism combined socialist design ideals, classical stonework and pink volcanic rock

Interior view of the House of Culture.

Photos Document What Remains of a Soviet Atomic City

A new book explores the architectural history of Metsamor, Armenia, once a planned utopia for nuclear power plant workers

Nine men's morris is a strategy game that dates back to the Roman Empire and is similar to modern-day checkers

Excavations at Medieval Vyborg Castle Reveal Secrets of "Hidden" Passageway

The finds include a game board etched into the surface of a clay brick that was likely used to play a variation of the strategy game nine men’s morris

The project will also feature the world premiere of a controversial Ilya Khrzhanovsky film, produced from 2009 to 2011 on another simulated set.

An Immersive Art Installation Will Temporarily Resurrect the Berlin Wall

This fall, event organizers plan on constructing a pseudo-city within a block of Berlin in order to emulate life in an unfamiliar country

In the spring of 2018, Angeline Nanni revisited Arlington Hall, where the Venona team got cracking. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Women Code Breakers Who Unmasked Soviet Spies

At the height of the Cold War, America’s most secretive counterespionage effort set out to crack unbreakable ciphers

How to Cipher Like a Soviet

See if you can figure out how the American code-breakers unraveled the complexities of the Russian codebook

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