Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Soviet Union
The award-winning photojournalist broke gender barriers and was the first American female reporter killed in combat in Vietnam.
Editor's Note: Cultural critic and historian Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and politics.
The former foreign minister of Russia provides a unique look inside his country's leadership and reflects on the prospects for democracy there.
Vladimir Putin and his clique ruthlessly took over Russia’s assets and used their billions to undermine Western institutions and democracies.
Editor’s Note: Catherine Belton is a London-based correspondent for Reuters who was Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times from 2007 to 2013.
Much of what we know today about the leadership of the Soviet Union during the Cold War is attributable to the late son of Nikita Khrushchev.
Ser
Twenty-two years ago, the Soviet parliament suspended the Communist Party after the failure of a dramatic coup attempt to remove Gorbachev.
Largely unknown to his cabinet, Ronald Reagan broke with previous U.S. policy and initiated a global campaign of economic and political warfare against the Soviets.
The Soviet Union was erased from world maps not because of a reform process or a series of diplomatic arrangements. It simply could not sustain itself. Historians will debate for decades, perhaps centuries, which factors weighed most on the Soviet system. Was it the bankruptcy of State ideology?
To bring their nation to the leading edge of technology, Soviet leaders are turning to the United States. Their grandfathers did the same thing.
Our usual picture of the Soviet Union and its history is strictly political and economic. We trace the many struggles for leadership power and the ups and downs of the Soviet economy.
The Cuban Missile Crisis as seen from the Kremlin
During the
Setting the record straight about my father.
On May 1, 1960, my father was shot down while flying a U-2 over the Soviet Union. After the SAM-2 missile exploded near the fragile tail section of his aircraft, everything appeared to be in order until the plane nosed down and didn’t respond to the controls.
Nikita Khrushchev’s son recalls a world in which the United States was the Evil Empire, and the Soviet superpower was a carefully maintained illusion.
Sixty years ago this month, the Soviet Union orbited a “man-made moon” whose derisive chirp persuaded Americans that they’d already lost a race that had barely begun.
American self-interest was involved, of course, but the Marshall Plan remains what some have referred to as a rare example of “power used to its best end.”
In an exchange of letters, a man who had an immeasurable impact on how the great struggle of our times was waged looks back on how it began.
Seen in its proper historical context, amid the height of the Cold War, the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable.
The first American to leave the Earth's atmosphere recalls the momentous flight that put us on a course for the Moon.
THE SHRILL RINGING WOKE ME from deep sleep early in the morning of April 12, 1961. I was confused for a moment, but only a moment. I was in my room in the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, Florida.
The Cold War was an anomaly. More often than not, the world’s two greatest states have lived together in uneasy amity. And what now?
Exactly 200 years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States and 300 years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest states of the wor
In 1932, the Communist International paid to send a cast of American blacks to Moscow to make a movie about American racial injustice. The scheme backfired.
In 1932, while Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
SENT ON A HOPELESSLY VAGUE ASSIGNMENT BY WOODROW WILSON, AMERICAN SOLDIERS FOUND THEMSELVES IN THE MIDDLE OF A FEROCIOUS SQUABBLE AMONG BOLSHEVIKS, COSSACKS, CZECHS, JAPANESE, AND OTHERS
During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War.
The fallout-shelter craze of 1961
It all began on the evening of July 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy went before television cameras to explain to his countrymen the grave meaning and still graver consequences of the deepening crisis over Berlin.
The American Experience With Foreign Aid
Imagine a person of great wealth with a habit of giving away vast sums and lending more. In order to understand his character, we should examine how the money is dispensed and why. Who are the recipients? What does the donor expect of them in return?
The U-2, Cuba, and the CIA
In the still of the October night, the slender, birdlike plane lifted into the sky from its base in California, climbed sharply on a column of flame, and headed east through the darkness.
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
During World War II, Tunner led the effort to fly supplies from India “over the Hump” of the Himalayas to supply nineteen Chinese divisions, and later commanded the Berlin Airlift operation.
In the summer of 1918, with Russia removed from World War I as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, the United States sent troops into Russia at two points. It did so only after the greatest soul-searching on the part of President Wilson, who had said that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will …” Two factors influenced the decision. In the Far East, Japan had made a move to occupy Siberia, apparently threatening America’s “open door” policy for China. In North Russia, English and French leaders had hopes of reviving the eastern front against Germany. In addition, large stores of Allied war supplies had been left at the port of Archangel. The expedition to North Russia resulted in fierce combat between American and Soviet soldiers and throws significant light on the forty years of difficult relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that were to follow.
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