Putin has again been elected president. This post was originally written/aired in November 2007. Apparently, it still seems relevant.

All this year, in connection with the centennial of the 1917 revolutions, Calendar has offered readers a view of that year through the eyes of contemporaries. This issue we conclude the series with a look at what was going on in the pivotal months of November and December 1917.

A good mystery begins unexpectedly in the unlikeliest of places. And then it takes you where you never imagined. This one took the author halfway around the world and more than a hundred years back in time.

In cooperation with the “Lived” Project, Arzamas selected personal diary entries written immediately before their authors were arrested during the Great Terror. Almost all of these diaries were kept in the FSB Archive – the principal source of information for historians working on the events of 1937 – 1938.

Catherine I held the title of Empress 40 years before her more famous, “Great” namesake. As the first woman to rule Russia, she had great qualities of her own.

On the Kremlin's Arctic flip flops.

Bob Blaisdell reviews Other Russias, an album of images and impressions of ordinary, unconnected Russian citizens who have unexpectedly found themselves activists. 

On February 23, 1917 the Revolution came to Petrograd. The Tsar abdicated and a long year of turmoil and political upheaval lie ahead...

Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev would have been 110 on December 19. There are plenty of fun facts and surprising jokes behind the eyebrows.

The body of Joseph Stalin was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square on October 31, 1961. It may not be as spooky as Halloween, but the former leader still haunts Russia today.

It's been over two decades since the coup of August 1991, and only half of Russians remember it. But that's not all...

Ballet great Rudolf Nureyev leapt out of Soviet jurisdiction and into the wider world of Western ballet on June 16, 1961. His leap was as much a political move as a dance move.