Worldcrunch
Updated August 20, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. The Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troops in an invasion of Czechoslovakia on this day in 1968. Why did the Soviet Union invade Czechoslovakia? The Soviet Union, along with other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the reforms of the Prague Spring. The Prague Spring was a […]
Updated March 23, 2024 at 12:40 p.m. On this day in 2021, a large container ship called the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, obstructing the waterway and causing a major traffic jam of ships waiting to pass through. The obstruction lasted for six days. What caused the Ever Given to run aground? […]
Updated Nov. 9, 2023 at 12:45 The beginning of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which allowed East Germans to cross into the West, marked a new epoch in world history. Amid revolutions that led to the collapse of the Soviet-led communist bloc, the tearing down the wall on Nov. 9, 1989, is considered the […]
As Russia loses in influence in Central Asia, Ukraine has an opportunity to take over a key role in relations between countries in the region and the European Union.
The war in Ukraine has launched an epidemic of denunciations in Russia: 145,000 individual reports to the security services in just the first six months of the war. It’s the latest evidence of the current regime’s Stalinist approach.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians have begun a radical revision of their cultural habits and beliefs, casting off the relics of Russian colonialism. How Ukrainians see themselves and their country’s past will directly affect how they fight for the future.
Ukrainian journalist Anna Akage looks back on the glory days of post-Soviet, high-quality journalism, which captured her ima and how quickly it was bound to be replaced by a “new truth” permeating Russian society.
Vladimir Putin has been upfront about his desire to rebuild Russia’s influence in the region. Former Soviet states are watching developments in Ukraine closely, with many trying to ensure futures free of interference by Moscow.
Experts in geopolitics and the workings of world leaders have accelerated a two-decade long quest to understand the motivations of the enigmatic man in the Kremlin.
As with Ukraine and Belarus, Kazakhstan is falling under the grip of Moscow as a response to disorder and threats to align with the West.
To succeed in withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan White House will need the active help of the Central Asian countries. However, with these post-Soviet republics in play, Russia wants a say.
Western media like to run headlines warning of a “new Cold War” every time a new conflict or act of repression occurs in post-Soviet authoritarian, But Belarus’ brazen intercepting of a Ryanair jet is something that never would have happened on either sid
Political chaos in Kyrgyzstan, revolution in Belarus, war in Nagorno-Karabakh: three decades after the collapse of the USSR, Vladimir Putin’s “near abroad” is currently marred by instability.
While the U.S.-China rivalry is not yet a repetition of the Cold War, it will have repercussions for Latin American states at a time of acute regional weakness.
Beijing seems to be abandoning the very strategy that allowed it to not only survive the collapse of the USSR, but also prosper.
May marked the 25th anniversary of the ceasefire that ended Armenia and Azerbaijan’s war for the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. It wouldn’t take much to reignite fighting.
In the background, one of Treptower Park“s massive monuments commemorating Soviet soldiers fallen during World War II. In the foreground, real-life Soviet soldiers still trooping around the USSR-occupied section of Berlin.
Etienne Mallard has spent a lifetime venturing far and wide. A retired high-school philosophy teacher, he has always considered himself nothing more or less than an amateur photographer — with decent equipment.
He was born three years before Russia’s October Revolution, and served in the Red Army during World War II. But in 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin, and spent eight years in a labor camp. The experience reshaped his political opinions and inspired his most famous works, including The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but was hounded by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He remained in exile for 20 years, before being allowed back in Russia in 1994 — after the fall […]
Techno scene in Belarus faces a youth tempted by emigration, pricey vinyls and the KGB lurking in the shadows. But the nights in Minsk are still something truly remarkable.
Strange to think that only five years before we toured the Baltic states, the spire of St. Olaf’s church — which ranks among the tallest in the world — was still used as a radio tower and surveillance point by the KGB in the Estonian capital.
MOSCOW — Alexander Prokhanov loves to play the bad guy. But he’s no character actor. He is editor-in-chief, since its founding in 1993, of Zavtra (Tomorrow), a Russian ultra-nationalist newspaper that is fiercely anti-Western and anti-American, as well as clearly anti-Semitic and homophobic. In his mess of an office, Prokhanov, 77, invites us to sit […]
Five years after Latvia’s independence was recognized by the Soviet Union (one of the last things the dying Union got to do), we toured the Baltic states, still then in the early stages of painstaking de-Russification. But from above, Riga, the largest city in the three Baltic republics, looked as beautifully Latvian as ever.
In 1962, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was at its height. It was hard enough to get into Czechoslovakia (we had to wait three hours at the border), but getting out was where things got dicey. From a watchtower, a guard had seen me take pictures of the Iron Curtain, and asked me to open […]
It took more than five years to build Prague’s gigantic Stalin Monument, which was eventually unveiled in 1955. And only seven years later: BOOM, the Soviets dynamited what they thought was an outrageous display of Stalin’s cult of personality. We were lucky enough to see it in all its might when we went to then […]
A Russian settlement in remote Norway has impressive roads, schools and monuments. But not a soul lives in this ice-preserved community, after its residents mysteriously left one day in 1998.
At the end of WWII, several monuments were built across Berlin to commemorate the Soviet soldiers fallen during the war. As imposing as this memorial in Treptower Park seems, I was unimpressed: I’ve always been circumspect about soldiers. So was my wife Claudine, who looks like she’s turning her back to these Soviet occupiers, who […]
Much more freedom is allowed in Lithuania than across the border in Belarus, where strongman Alexander Lukashenko shut down top universities.
-Editorial- SAO PAULO — It’s the image that became the symbol of Nelson Mandela’s memorial in Soweto: the handshake between U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro. And it’s only fitting that this is the image that remains. The United States and Cuba have been living in open animosity since the Cold War. […]
MOSCOW – Russia’s history is not going to be just “political” anymore. Publishers of new history textbooks for Russian schools have been charged with the task of “encouraging patriotism in the younger generation.” That is not all: History is now going to include “religious history,” especially the history of Eastern Orthodoxy. These are the backbones […]