She ruled over all of Russia for more than three decades, expanding its borders and making it one of the most powerful players in global politics. But that power is what made Catherine the Great the victim of notorious misogynistic myths ever since. Nymphomania, bestiality, ...read more
In early August 2008, after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into the rebellious province of South Ossetia, Russia came to its defense, beginning a five-day-long conflict that ended with Russian troops within striking distance of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. ...read more
Many monarchs throughout history have killed family members. England’s Henry VIII, for example, beheaded two wives and several cousins. Cleopatra engineered the murder of two siblings (one of whom was also her husband). And Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, ordered the execution ...read more
History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history’s most fascinating questions. Dominant at home and feared abroad, Vladimir Putin has come a long way since 2000, when he took over an ailing Russia still ...read more
Pogrom is a Russian word which, when directly translated, means “to wreak havoc.” Pogroms typically describe violence by Russian authorities against Jewish people, particularly officially-mandated slaughter, though the word has been extended to the massacres of other groups as ...read more
The Romanov family was the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia. They first came to power in 1613, and over the next three centuries, 18 Romanovs took the Russian throne, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas II. During the Russian Revolution ...read more
After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of ...read more
In case you haven’t noticed, relations between the U.S. and Russia are pretty tense. Last year, former President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats as retaliation for a series of cyber-attacks during the 2016 election. And on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ...read more
To their neighbors in Montclair, New Jersey, Richard and Cynthia Murphy appeared to be typical suburbanites, living with their two young daughters, Kate and Lisa, in the two-story beige house at 31 Marquette Road. But on June 27, 2010, a dramatic raid of the house by the FBI ...read more
On a muggy July night in 1917, American journalist Arno Dosch-Fleurot joined the protestors parading along Petrograd’s Nevsky Prospekt when gunshots suddenly rang out. Banners pleading for liberty and freedom crashed to the ground as blood stained the Russian capital’s most ...read more
Fifteen years after American test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier, a new front opened in the Cold War. With the Americans and Soviets still engaged in an all-out sprint to win the Space Race, both sides of the Iron Curtain launched a battle for supersonic ...read more
1. Tolstoy was a self-improvement junkie. Inspired in part by the 13 virtues Benjamin Franklin spelled out in his autobiography, Tolstoy created a seemingly endless list of rules by which he aspired to live. While some seem pretty accessible by today’s standards (in bed by 10 ...read more
The Potemkin uprising was sparked by a disagreement over food, but it was anything but accidental. Morale in Russia’s Black Sea fleet had long been at rock-bottom lows, spurred on by defeats in the Russo-Japanese War and widespread civil unrest on the homefront. Many navy ships ...read more
1. Lenin’s brother was hanged for plotting to kill the czar. Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, a university zoology student, was arrested in March 1887 for participating in a bombing plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Some of his co-conspirators begged for clemency and ...read more
1. Catherine I The life of Empress Catherine I of Russia could easily be confused with something out of a fairy tale. The future queen was born in 1684 into a family of Lithuanian peasants, and was orphaned at the age of 3 after both her parents died from the plague. Taken in by ...read more
1. Michael (1613-1645) The first Romanov to be crowed czar, Michael is remembered for the sense of stability he brought to Russia during one of its darkest periods. For more than 20 years during the so-called Time of Troubles, the country had suffered a devastating series of ...read more
1. First artificial earth satellite: Sputnik The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first manmade object to orbit the earth, on October 4, 1957, to little fanfare. In fact, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, didn’t announce the launch until the next day. Global reaction to ...read more
In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II—the last monarch of the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia for 304 years—was reportedly executed along with his wife, Alexandra, and their five children by their Bolshevik captors in the basement of a house in ...read more
With sabers drawn, about 600 Italian cavalrymen yelled out their traditional battle cry of “Savoia!” and galloped headlong toward 2,000 Soviet foot soldiers armed with machine guns and mortars. On August 23, 1942 (some sources say August 24), the cavalrymen—part of the Axis ...read more
1. Catherine the Great’s name wasn’t Catherine, and she wasn’t even Russian. The woman whom history would remember as Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, was actually the eldest daughter of an impoverished Prussian prince. Born in 1729, Sophie von ...read more
After taking power in 1799, French leader Napoleon Bonaparte won a string of military victories that gave him control over most of Europe. He annexed present-day Belgium and Holland, along with large chunks of present-day Italy, Croatia and Germany, and he set up dependencies in ...read more
Built directly east of the Kremlin, Moscow’s historic fortress and the center of the Russian government, Red Square is home to some of the country’s most distinctive and important landmarks. Its origins date to the late 15th century, when the Muscovite prince Ivan III (Ivan the ...read more
On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. A few days earlier, representatives from 11 Soviet republics (Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and ...read more
Two months after signing an agreement to establish a 24-hour-a-day “hot line” between Moscow and Washington, the system goes into effect. The hot line was supposed to help speed communication between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union and help prevent the ...read more