On October 1, 1937, as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's brutal purge raged, a brilliant, one-handed Russian linguist penned a complaint from Moscow's notorious Butyrka prison about his treatment by the ...

More than 100 Belarusians, including 22 writers and poets, were executed by the NKVD secret police (the predecessor to Belarus's present-day KGB), overnight on October 29, 1937. While not officially ...

This episode traces the Soviet secret police from the Tsarist Okhrana to the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, and finally the KGB, showing how a security apparatus evolved into a system built on surveillance, ...

Poland, along with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, became an independent republic after World War I. As a consequence, Russia’s territory in the west shrank, as did Germany’s in the east.

There was a lapse of five years between the first time that the FBI’s heat came on Stalinist agent Mark Zborowski, in 1953, and when he finally appeared before the court for perjury in 1958. His ...

As Russia prepares to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory in World War II, President Vladimir Putin is stepping up his defense of Josef Stalin and digging in against calls to open up secret ...