It stands as one of the more unusual turning points of the Cold War, thanks mostly to the surprise appearance of several naked middle-aged women. Taking The Cure: How a group of British Columbian anarchists inspired democracy in Russia.
posted on May 13, 2008 - View this thread

Soviet Museum has some great retro photography, industrial, postcards, propaganda, "Soviet Union" magazine, aspects of moscow, red army, etc [did I mention erotic too?]. It even has 'Vladimir Putin Favourite Places' (which as far as I can tell, is one place). Set aside some time if this sort of thing interests you.
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread

"The "American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918-1919," nicknamed the "Polar Bear Expedition," (wikipedia) was a U.S. military intervention in northern Russia at the end of World War I." The ostensible purpose was to open an Eastern Front following the Russian withdrawal from World War I, but in practice the unit stayed to fight Bolshevism. An archive of the expedition, which gives wonderful insight into early Bolshevik Russia as well as war-weary United States, is online.
posted on Jan 25, 2008 - View this thread

The Alexander Palace Time Machine. This deep site on pre-revolutionary Russia was not at all unearthed as a result of noting this bit of news today. The site was linked in passing previously this past August, in a post about the exact news the Times is reporting today.
posted on Nov 24, 2007 - View this thread

"Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him."
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

Russia in photos: 1941-1945.
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread

Zvukovye Pis'ma: Musical letters from the Soviet Union during the 1950s, with images and audio. More information for those that can decipher it.
posted on Dec 31, 2006 - View this thread

Diary of a Collapsing Superpower - "Seventeen years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, and two years later the Soviet Union broke apart. More than 1,400 minutes published earlier this month in Russia from meetings that took place behind the closed doors of the Politburo in Moscow read like a thriller from the highest levels of the Kremlin. They reveal Mikhail Gorbachev as a party chief who had to fight bitterly for his reforms and ultimately lost his battle. But in doing so, he changed the course of history and helped bring an end to the Cold War."
posted on Nov 28, 2006 - View this thread

Sechtl-Vosecek. A collection of photographs taken over the last 150 years are in the process of being digitized. Check out the Sokol costume ball Šibřinky or take a trip from Bechyně to Tábor. Also available is a selection concentrating on Bukhara from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection. And much, much, more.
posted on Apr 17, 2006 - View this thread

Benny's Postcards "is devoted to the postcards my grandfather collected from approximately 1906-1918. The collection is comprised of 435 postcards, most of which were produced in Russia, Poland and Germany." [coral cache]
posted on Nov 3, 2005 - View this thread

Pobediteli: Soldiers of the Great War. In this year of the 60 Anniversary of the Victory we wish to personally thank the soldiers of the Great War living among us, and tell the story of their heroism.
posted on Oct 18, 2005 - View this thread

The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life". "The Sun", the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy after the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "Taurus" (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted on Sep 13, 2005 - View this thread

The Amber Room : [flash] Stolen by the Nazis in WWII from the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Amber Room remains one of the greatest missing treasures of Europe. The room has now been reconstructed, and the search for the original may have come to an unhappy end.
posted on Apr 23, 2005 - View this thread

The Lost Worlds of the Romanovs
posted on Mar 24, 2005 - View this thread

The mathematician Anatoly Fomenko is one of a number of Russian academics advancing revisionist chronologies which portray a greatly foreshortened view of European history. He argues that mediaeval and classical histories as we know them today were fabricated in Renaissance times. In his book 'History: Fiction or Science', he 'proves' that Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086, and that the Old Testament refers to mediaeval events... Fomenko's theories have been debunked, but his ideas have nevertheless gained some currency in Russia: among his supporters is the former chess champion Garry Kasparov. Of course, Fomenko is by no means the first mathematician to grapple with the subject of chronology: indeed, any history must be founded in part on a calculus of dates... Are there any parallels, I wonder, between the spread of theories like Fomenko's and the renewed prevalence of Biblical chronologies in the US, for example: is there some kind of psychological solace in perceiving history on a smaller scale than current academic orthodoxy allows? (more inside).
posted on Mar 2, 2004 - View this thread

Exhibition of Deportation 14 June 1941. Some history, moments and life stories. Via the Estonian National Museum.
posted on Aug 5, 2003 - View this thread

Was Stalin assassinated to prevent him from launching a nuclear attack on the United States? "'The circumstantial evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of non-fortuitous death,' said Jonathan Brent, a professor of Russian history at Yale University. 'And to support this further, we now have solid evidence, non-circumstantial evidence, of a cover-up at the highest level.'"
posted on Mar 6, 2003 - View this thread

Early (around 1910) amazing COLOR photographs from Russia by Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for the Czar. He essentially had three cameras, each with a separate Red, Green, or Blue filter, and snapped the same shot at the same time. So all the "reds" were recorded, in B&W, on one photographic plate, and likewise down the line. Then he could use the filters to recreate the scene and project it onto a screen in color. (more inside) (props to slashdot for the link)
posted on May 7, 2001 - View this thread