The Battle of Kursk was a catastrophic defeat for Germany; the Wehrmacht suffered around 200,000 casualties and lost nearly 700 tanks and 1,000 aircraft. These losses were irreplaceable.

His mission, he insisted, had been to reform the Soviet Union and its empire, not to destroy it.In fact, he argued that only a sweeping program of political and economic renewal could have offered ...

PARIS — Mikhail S. Gorbachev believed the Soviet Union could be preserved without recourse to violence. This proved to be a misunderstanding of the nature of the repressive empire he ruled.

THE ultimate criterion of Soviet success will be the dynamic power of the system to sustain its revolutionary momentum. That is a dictum which will be disputed by few historians. But to maintain that ...

Within the Soviet Union itself, where both the state and the individual have long been under the control of the Party, the problem is largely one of managing this "decompression" so as to arrive at ...

Before the fall of the Iron Curtain and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1989-1992 period, the nations of the Soviet Empire produced a fascinating range of cars, trucks, and ...

An interview with Diana T. Kudaibergen on power, identity, and nation-building in Kazakhstan.

National Archives and Records Administration The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union stepped up a gear on May 25, 1961, when American President John F. Kennedy announced that his ...