On January 13, 1863, the "eminent poet" Kozma Petrovich Prutkov passed away. Except he never really was alive.

In 1703 Peter the Great founded the first Russian newspaper. This is what it looked like and what it covered.

Tchaikovsky's now classic holiday ballet debuted in December 1892, but it was far from as popular in its debut as it is today. And it has gone through some interesting changes over the past 120 years.

In December 1962, Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw was drawing to a close, only no one quite knew this yet. It would take a contrived showdown at a Moscow art exhibition to bring things to a head.

The assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, was used as the pretext for the launching of the Red Terror, a wave of repression and killing aimed at wiping out the Bolsheviks' opponents, real and imagined.

On the world's worst nuclear disaster prior to Chernobyl, when, in 1957, nuclear waste exploded at the Mayak plant in Ozyorsk. The damage has yet to be fully recognized or accepted.

On the founding of the first Russian railroad, between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. Service began October 30, 1837.

A look back at the re-taking of Moscow from the Poles 300 years ago, by a couple of unlikely heroes.

The arrive of telephones in Moscow in 1882 fundamentally changed the way citizens interacted with one another.

We read history through the eyes of the victors, and in June 1762, the victor was a German-born princess newly ascended to the throne with her husband, Peter III. To history she became known as Catherine the Great.

A noted actor, writer and director, Yevgeny Vakhtangov led a very strange and extraordinary life indeed.

A pathbreaking scientific investigator of Slavic linguistics, Sreznevsky nonetheless helped fan the flames of nationalism and pan-Slavism.