Countless words will be dedicated in the following days to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who died Aug. 30 at the age of 91. But throughout his obituaries, two specific words will likely be ...

Communist Party supporters laid flowers at Stalin’s grave in Moscow this month, marking the anniversary of his birth. Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times Supported by By The New York Times ...

Long before the World Wide Web, the Soviets tried to save the USSR with a computer network. Why did their project never make it? For 12 year-old Oleg Guimaoutdinov, learning to programme a computer in ...

During the Cold War, the Soviet military undertook a secret mapping program that’s only recently come to light in the West. Military cartographers created hundreds of thousands of maps and filled them ...

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand. Illustration: Ryan Kelly Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Just before dawn on the morning of November 15, 1988, the Energiya ...

Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the ...

The Soviet/Russian space program achieved numerous "firsts" in human spaceflight, including the first human in space (Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1), the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, Voskhod 2), and the ...

It was a cold and grey afternoon in early November, 1984, when I, a first grader in Kharkiv—a city in what was then Soviet Ukraine—walked home after school with high spirits and feeling ready to ...

Royce Williams was a real-life “Top Gun” 10 years before Tom Cruise was even born. On a cold November day in 1952, Williams shot down four Soviet fighter jets – and became a legend no one would hear ...

The enormous scale of this particularly ferocious war is hard to comprehend. It started with Russia totally disadvantaged, but the turn-around was awesome, as Stalin's war machine revved into action.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER workers erected a new structure in Tiananmen Square. It is 18 metres tall, resembling a basket of fruit and flowers. Similar floral-themed displays have sprung up across Beijing in ...