http://rbth.ru/rubrics/history.html Russia Beyond the Headlines en http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/08/30/churchill_was_pleasant_to_talk_to04903.html Starting in 1948 Yuri Sergeyevich Sokolov, now a colonel in foreign intelligence, worked in the United States for five years under diplomatic cover. His purview was scientific and technological intelligence. He was the liaison for the now famous Fisher-Abel, who went on to become a symbol of Soviet intelligence. He also made contact with Morris and Lona Cohen, who many years later went to England under the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Kroger. They aided another famous Soviet illegal resident, Gordon Lonsdale, with whom they were eventually arrested and went on to spend years in the prisons of Her Majesty. But it turns out that Yuri Sergeyevich, who knew all these characters well, associated with people of a completely different kind as an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sokolov died several years ago. This year, the 65th anniversary of the Victory over fascism, it seems fitting to finally publish this frank conversation with him: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/08/02/solovetskii_transfiguration_monastery.html Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/06/23/what_did_the_romanovs_do.html The recent death of the last Romanov born before 1917 brings Russians to more soul searching about the family and its impact on Russian society. Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/04/29/allies_united_for_victory_day_parade_on_red_square.html British veterans of the Arctic convoys during WWII, appreciated more in Russia than at home, will this year view the Victory Parade in Moscow’s Red Square. Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/04/29/from_the_elbe_to_red_square_a_soldiers_story.html The Russian government hopes that inviting American veterans to Victory Day celebrations in Moscow will help inform young Americans about the U.S.S.R.'s critical role in World War II. Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/04/26/elbe_day_commemorated.html Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/04/05/the_empire_that_was_russia.html Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/02/24/240210_ww2.html Something has changed in Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the values on which Soviet society was based – and after two decades of hard times – the search is on for a firm footing in values and ideology. Attention has focused on the Second World War, especially the question of what we were fighting for. Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/25/251209_kononov.html Vasily Kononov is surrounded by his family in an apartment outside Riga. His daughter by his side, this 87-year-old WWII veteran maintains a sense of humour despite the many tragedies he has experienced. The European Court of Human Rights is to rule on an event that happened in 1944, with potential repercussions for all veterans across European. Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/25/251209_archives.html Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/25/251209_trap.html This year’s calendar contains two memorable dates for Russia’s Afghan veterans. February 15, 2009, was widely celebrated as the 20th anniversary of the day Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan. On December 27, veterans will mark the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion. Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/23/241209afghanistan.html Is Afghanistan the new Vietnam? From the White House to the Pentagon and the Beltway glitterati, historical analogies are all the rage. Legions of strategists are beefing up their Iraqi-inspired schemes with lessons from the Vietnamese jungles. Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/16/161209_afghan.html The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a fateful turn of history, occurred thirty years ago, on Dec. 27, 1979. It would be almost ten years before the army extricated itself, on Feb. 15, 1989. The pervasive view is that the decade-long war contributed greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union, though other theories in Russia are gaining in popularity. One critical question remains: Why did Soviet leadership choose to invade Afghanistan in the first place? Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/03/031209_jelalabad.html In the latest part of our special series, war correspondent Vladimir Snegiryov discusses popular military misconceptions about the skill of Afghan soldiers and their ability to be self-reliant on the fields of battle. His final piece will be in the next issue. Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/12/02/021209_wall.html Most of the world’s media see the fall of the Berlin Wall in simplistic terms. They write that East Germans, who could no longer tolerate the Soviet occupation, embraced the rich West. But little, if anything, is said about the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian democrats. Was it, in fact, a clear victory of the Western civilisation over the Eastern barbarians? Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/11/26/261109_stalin.html In the early 1990’s, when Edward Radzinsky began writing his biography of Stalin, people told him that only grandmothers would read it. To this Radzinsky replied that by the time he finished his book, Stalin would be back in the limelight. Radzinsky finished his portrait in May 1995, on May 9, to be exact. In Moscow it was Victory Day, the fiftieth anniversary of the triumph over fascism, and 50,000 communists were marching through the streets. And for the first time since his death, portraits of Stalin fluttered above the procession. Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/11/19/191109_stalin.html Other surveys put Peter the Great or the poet Alexander Pushkin on top, but Stalin has always made third place among the great. Over the last decade, when asked their view of Stalinґs contribution to Russian history, most people register approval, not condemnation. Apart from the fact that Stalin cannot be a great Russian, for he was a Georgian, and leaving aside what the word `greatґ means historically, you wonder how a man with the deaths of tens of millions and the suffering of whole countries on his conscience can possibly be revered. The reply is that Stalin created a powerful industrial country: but why was the price of modernisation the extermination of the better part of the peasantry? Stalin is praised for saving the Soviet Union from Hitler: but military historians know that the Soviet peoples won the war despite, not thanks to, Stalin, who in 1938 annihilated all the talented generals in the Red Army and who so perversely interpreted Hitlerґs thinking. The best ton be said of Stalin the Generalissimus is that he finally realised that he must not meddle in military strategy, and that Hitler, who never stopped meddling, lost the war, not that Stalin won it. Stalin is called an excellent personnel manager: absurd nonsense if you consider how many good industrialists, biologists, physicists and scholars he shot. Yet the shelves of Moscowґs bookshops are crowded with books asserting that the Polish officers shot in Katyn forest were murdered by the Germans, not the Russian secret police, that the repressions of the 1930s were a necessary part of a great plan to save the USSR from a fifth column of traitors. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/30/301009_khruschev.html Forty-five years ago, in October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed as the party leader and chairman of the Soviet government. In the political lexicon, his era is dubbed as one of "subjectivism" and "voluntarism", while ordinary people mostly associate this period with the Thaw, Khrushchevki apartment buildings, corn and a shoe. Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/16/161009_stalin.html The Basmanny district court ruled against Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, who demanded 10 million roubles in damages from the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper. Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/15/151009_solzh.html Extra! Extra! The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a symbol of Stalinґs Terror the world over, the book whose publication caused its author to be expelled from the Soviet Union, the great and awful Gulag, the reading of which could lead to problems with the authorities and the distribution of which could end in a prison term, that very same Gulag has now been made required reading for all high school students in Russia. By the Ministry of Education! True, only excerpts. But this monumental three-volume work is so soaked in suffering and horror, that based on any one passage the readerґs imagination, like that of Cuvier (the famous French paleontologist who could reconstruct a rhinoceros, say, from a single tooth), will be able to reconstruct the nightmarish whole. Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/02/021009_dejavu.html When I was invited to dine with the British Embassyґs minister plenipotentiary in Moscow, I was surprised. Why would a British diplomat want to see me? His assistant explained: "Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, our special representative in Afghanistan, is visiting Russia. Weґre inviting you as an expert on Afghan affairs." Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/02/021009_hitler.html Albert Axell, the American military writer, historian and author of Marshall Zhukov: The Man Who Beat Hitler, explains just how much the West has undervalued the Soviet Unionґs contribution to victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/10/02/021009_dorman.html For years, Oleg Dorman could not sell his documentary on the epic life of Lilianna Lungina, a popular Russian Jewish translator who bore witness to Lubyanka, Stalin and the Thaw. Today, "Translation" is a TV hit on Rossiya, but only after novelist Boris Akunin intervened on Dorman's behalf. Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/09/03/030909_arrival.html Fifty years ago this summer, the American National Exhibition opened in Moscow. It turned out to be critical; a breakthrough in relations between a superpower (the United States) and an aspiring superpower (the U.S.S.R.) Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/28/280809_afghan.html Russia Now begins a series about the Soviets in Afghanistan, with an account of a secret mercy mission by a noted Russian journalist. There are important parallels and differences with the present situation involving international forces. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/28/280809_ww2.html Seventy years ago, the world was falling into an abyss that would engulf between 50m and 70m lives. World War II dwarfed all previous wars, and raised questions not yet satisfactorily answered. What was the rationale behind the German-Soviet Treaty of Nonaggression? What did those who signed the pact hope for? We talked to American military historian and writer Albert Axell about these unresolved issues. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/28/280809_beslan.html On September 1, 2004, I urged my three nervous children into school. We had just arrived in Moscow and everything was new to us. It was a magnificent summer day, nothing to suggest autumn except for the Russian children walking purposefully to school. As journalists, my husband and I had lived in Europe for six years already and squeezed a lot of wonderful as well as scary and confusing times out of those years. Here we were lucky enough to begin a new adventure, in one of the most epic countries in the world. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/19/190809_chernobyl.html It is October 1990 and I am standing 150 yards from the "sarcophagus" ─ the concrete and steel structure hastily erected to entomb the remains of the exploded reactor. The dosimeter is frantically beeping, but the threat seems unreal ─ just as unreal as it must have seemed to a group of people fishing in a nearby canal when the blast occurred; their view of the accident was obscured by the other units, so they just kept watching their lines. Only later did they pay the price for that night. Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/19/190809_mall.html It is Monday morning, the nineteenth of August, 1991, and I am standing in front of the mirror in my room in Moscowґs newly renovated Metropole Hotel, knotting my tie in preparation to go down to breakfast. The radio announcer is muttering something about the "Union Treaty," which regulates regulations between the Soviet Union and its constituent republics. But Iґm in a hurry, so I ignore the voice. Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/08/19/190908_coldwar.html Fifty summers ago, the world witnessed a remarkable cultural face-off between its two superpowers: after months of protracted negotiations, on December 29, 1958, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a groundbreaking agreement providing for the exchange of major national exhibitions in New York and Moscow during the summer of 1959. Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/07/01/010709_mrno.html Known in Western circles as "Mr. No" for his characteristic caution and obstinance, Gromyko played a direct role in averting the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/05/26/260509_gorby.html Qian Qichen, former Foreign Minister of China, writes in his book "Ten Episodes in China's Diplomacy" published in 2006 that it took ten years to prepare the two leaders' meeting. By 1982, China formulated several principles for normalizing bilateral relations, which had been on ice since their confrontation in 1969-1979. Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/05/26/260509_nurse.html A square has been opened in Yakutsk (the north-eastern part of Siberia) in honour of British nurse Kate Marsden, and the first stone of a future memorial has been laid. The stone bears the inscription: "To a nurse, as a mark of gratitude from the citizens of Yakutiya." Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/03/02/020309_roderick.html A memorial to Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, the Scottish geologist who established the Permian archaeological period of the Mesozoic Era, has been unveiled on the bank of the Chusovaya River in the Ural Mountains. Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/02/13/130209_afghan.html Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2008/09/01/310808_saultry.html Forty years ago, in the small hours of August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Soviet forces comprised the overwhelming majority of the invasion - half a million troops and 5,000 tanks - though there were also Poles, East Germans, Hungarians and Bulgarians. Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2008/04/30/2008_04_WP_08_Two_Geniuses.html Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2008/04/24/2008_04_DT_07_Genius.html When Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, came to Moscow his lecture was translated by Yevgeny Lifshits, Lev Landauґs student and co-author, who was fluent in English. When someone from the audience asked Bohr how he had managed to build such a wonderful school of physicists, he replied that his secret was that he didnґt mind telling his students that he was a fool. Misunderstanding, Lifshits told the audience that Bohr never minded telling his students that they were fools. He promptly corrected himself, but the future Nobel Prize-winner Pyotr Kapitsa, who was at the lecture, remarked that the slip of the tongue reflected the difference between the schools of Bohr and Landau. Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2008/03/20/dress.html The first Russian invasion was in 1814, when Cossacks and hussars flooded Paris after the defeat of Napoleon. Culturally, however, it was a century later that France began to feel the Slavic influence, when Diaghileffґs Saisons Russes set a trend that saw Russian style dominate the era. Here Alexander Vasilyev, historian of fashion and Russian emigre, gives us his take on the Russian haute couture, the parallel reality behind the Iron Curtain. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2008/02/27/stalingrad.html Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/12/19/US_Russia.html Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/11/29/lion_and_bear.html Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/11/28/National_Sport.html Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/11/14/holiday.html Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/11/14/Purge_Victims.html Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0300 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/10/25/In_Search.html In October 1942, people in Siberia were surprised to see unfamiliar-looking aircraft appear seemingly out of nowhere. That was the beginning of the Soviet Aircraft Ferrying Division. Some of these aircraft crashed en route to the Soviet-German Front Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/10/25/Events_that_made_history.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/10/25/Convoy.html Over three days, from September 29 to October 1, 1941, delegates from Britain and the United States met Soviet officials in Moscow. An agreement was reached to supply the Red Army and bolster the Soviet war effort against the Axis. The three powers signed the pact under the First Russian Protocol. Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/09/26/sputnik.html Fifty years ago, on October Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0400 http://rbth.ru/articles/2007/09/26/this_month.html Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0400