Browse Items (158 total)

Alaska was the site of the first major Russian settlement in North America. Grigory Shelikhov (1747-1795), a fur trader, established the Three Saints Bay colony at Kodiak Island. For the next century this colony represented a core area for fur…

The figure of False Dmitrii I is, possibly, among the greatest mysteries of Russian history. His story is inherently related to the history of Russian-Polish struggle. False Dmitrii I, a pretender, who claimed to be the son of Ivan IV the Terrible,…

The recent controversy surrounding Edward Snowden has again tested the relationship between Russia and the United States. On June 23, 2013, Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked thousands of pages of classified…

The covers of American labor magazine paint a vivid picture of an evolving the leftist perspective on the Soviet Union. The 1919 cover of a pamphlet by Abner Woodruff depicts a single worker, symbolizing the mass of the proletariat, looming over a…

Construction on Moscow’s Cathedral of the Dormition began in 1326, the same year that the metropolitanate of Kiev and All Rus’ made its way to Moscow ("History of the Cathedral"). The relics of Metropolitan Peter, one of the metropolitans canonized…

This is a chart of the ruble denominated debt in Russia. It includes sovereign, municipal, and corporate debt. The scale on the right is billions of USD. The large run up in 1998 is of sovereign debt, which goes back to almost zero when the Russian's…

This video, titled “Who let her behind the wheel?” is of note because it marks a synthesis of Russian jokes, by both insider and outsider perspectives. It’s a viral video that has gotten 12 million views on Youtube, starring a young woman who hits a…

After the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s, the Chinese began to dispute the current borders on the argument that "unequal treaties" by the Russians had stolen Chinese territory. On March 2, 1969, the border units of the Soviet Union…