- Why did phage therapy survive in Soviet Georgia while falling out of use in the West after antibiotics arrived?
Soviet History
The history of the Soviet Union.
- Why did André Gide's account of his trip to the Soviet Union anger the French Communist Party he had once admired?
- What political deadline forced the Sputnik 2 mission to be assembled in under four weeks?
- Why was Landau imprisoned in 1938, and how did Pyotr Kapitsa secure his release?
- What sent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the gulag in 1945, and how long did he spend there?
- What sources did Solzhenitsyn draw on to compile 'The Gulag Archipelago'?
- Why couldn't Solzhenitsyn travel to Stockholm to accept his 1970 prize, and what happened when he finally collected it?
- Why did the Soviet government strip Sakharov of his security clearance and institute position?
- Why couldn't Sakharov travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize in person?
- What problem was Leonid Kantorovich solving for a Soviet plywood trust when he invented linear programming?
- Why was Kantorovich's work on resource allocation classified and ignored by Soviet planners?
- Why was Grigory Margulis barred from traveling to Helsinki to accept his own Fields Medal?
- What made the choice of Yevgeny Chazov as a laureate politically awkward for the Nobel Committee?
- What charge did a Leningrad court bring against Joseph Brodsky in 1964, and what was his defense?
- What sentence did Brodsky receive, and why did it provoke international outcry?
- What happened to Brodsky after his 1972 expulsion from the Soviet Union?
- What arguments did Sakharov make in his 1968 essay that led the KGB to revoke his security clearances?
- Why was Sakharov exiled to Gorky, and what changed to allow his return to Moscow in 1986?
- What was Sakharov still arguing for in the Congress of People's Deputies the day before he died?
- What did glasnost and perestroika each aim to reform, and why did pursuing both together destabilize the Soviet system?
- How did Gorbachev's response to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe differ from Soviet responses to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968?
- Why is it considered ironic that Gorbachev won the Peace Prize for restraint that hastened the dissolution he hoped to prevent?
- What did Viliumas Malinauskus do with the Soviet-era statues removed after Lithuanian independence?
- Why is Grūtas Park informally nicknamed 'Stalins World'?
- What kind of history does Alexievich's work record that encyclopedias leave out?
- What was Memorial's decades-long documentation project, and why was it dissolved by a Russian court in 2022?