Reactions to Mikhail Bulgakov have changed so radically over the past hundred years, it is sometimes hard to believe that they all pertain to the same man – the revered author of The Master and Margarita we know today.

In May 1821, Tsar Alexander had a decision to make. Support an ally, and thus revolution, or support monarchy and betray and ally.

Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov lived several completely different lives.

In an odd way, it was only after watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl that I fully appreciated just how great a catastrophe threatened mankind on that April day in 1986.

In the Soviet era, NEP had always been regarded as a strange, only vaguely understood, and not very sensible chapter in Soviet history: a pause between the heroic Civil War and the no less heroic Five-Year Plans.

The rises and falls of the esteem in which Russians have held Mikhail Gorbachev over the years have been dizzying.

Mikhail Romm is remembered by everyone who ever worked with him with tenderness and affection. Yet it is hard not to wonder how differently his life and work might have turned out had it not been for the exigencies of Russian and Soviet history.

On the life and mysteries of one of history's most famous sleeper spies, Konon Molody.

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov holds a somewhat odd place in Russian literature. He is at once a famous writer, a recognized classic, yet he has not won the same honors granted to the “first tier” writers.

The extraordinary life and times of one of Russia's most important doctors.

War Communism was on the ropes in the fall of 1920. What's a dictator to do?

As Europe boiled and revolutions fomented, the rulers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia granted themselves the authority to invade other countries in order to maintain calm and protect the power of the ruling monarchs.