Russia

Greg Carleton explains how disastrous defeats for the Soviet Union and the US in 1941 were transformed into positive national narratives by the two emerging superpowers.

Nikita Khrushchev died on September 11th, 1971. He was made First Secretary after Stalin's death in 1953 and gradually established himself as supreme Soviet leader. Ian D. Thatcher explains how he dealt with Stalin's legacy.

Russel Tarr compares and contrasts the rise to power of two Communist leaders.

Leon Trotsky was attacked at his home in Mexico on 20th August, 1940. He died the following day. Richard Cavendish explains how he had been sentenced to exile for life in November 1906.

The Russian prime minister was shot during festivities to mark the centenary of the liberation of Russia's serfs on September 14th, 1911.

The death of Stalin in 1953 marked a shift in the Soviet Union. Robert Hornsby discusses the underground groups that mushroomed in the aftermath and how the state responded to them.

Roger Moorhouse revisits a perceptive article by John Erickson on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, first published in History Today in 2001, its insights born of a brief period of Russian openness.

On a research trip to Moscow in the late 1990s, Deborah Kaple was given a package of papers by a former Gulag official who believed its contents would be of great interest to a western audience.

Richard Cavendish remembers Ivan Pavlov who died on February 27th, 1936. Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1904.

John Etty shows the vital importance of aviation in the Stalinist Soviet Union.

The philosophical writings of the author of War and Peace inspired followers from Moscow to Croydon and led to the creation of a Christian anarchist reform movement. Charlotte Alston examines the activities and influence of Tolstoy’s disciples.

The great Russian author drew inspiration from the countryside and explored the practical and spiritual impact of trees on people, as well as on the environment and climate, Roland Quinault writes.

Almost everything written about and by Kim Philby is wrong, claims Boris Volodarsky. The Soviet spy and his KGB masters sought to exaggerate his successes against the West, beginning with the fictions that surround Philby’s first mission during the Spanish Civil War.