Browse Items (23 total)

The Gagauz people are an Orthodox Turkic people mostly living in Moldova. Originally living in Bulgaria, they were given incentives to re-settle to Moldova by the Russians following the Russo-Turkish wars in order to settle an under-cultivated…

The Katyn Forest Massacre occurred in 1940. Under orders from Josef Stalin, the Soviet NKVD executed approximately 20,000 Polish officers, landlords, officials and intellectuals whom they had previously been holding in prison camps. The victims…

Stalin was born in Gori, now a city in present-day Georgia, and spent his childhood there before traveling to Tbilisi to attend school on a scholarship. He was, however, expelled from the Georgian Orthodox Tiflis Spiritual Seminary after poor…

On April 9, 1991, a national referendum established Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union. The news came to the Georgian people on a day meant to remember the April 9, 1989 “Tbilisi Massacre.” It was reported in the Los Angeles Times that…

Alaska was the site of the first major Russian settlement in North America. Grigory Shelikhov (1747-1795), a fur trader, established the Three Saints Bay colony at Kodiak Island. For the next century this colony represented a core area for fur…

The recent controversy surrounding Edward Snowden has again tested the relationship between Russia and the United States. On June 23, 2013, Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked thousands of pages of classified…

After the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s, the Chinese began to dispute the current borders on the argument that "unequal treaties" by the Russians had stolen Chinese territory. On March 2, 1969, the border units of the Soviet Union…

After treaties in 1991 and 2001 were not able to complete define the disputed border between the Russian Federation and the Republic of China, the two states were party to the Complementary Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the…