Vladimir Putin’s appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic “union” of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today’s Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the 1970s. That economy, too, was fueled by then-record [...]

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The Red Square, St. Basil`s Cathedral, Tretyakov Gallery, the Bolshoi Theatre are amongst the “standard” must-see attractions in Moscow for a foreign traveller. However, there are a number of places in Moscow foreign tourists are rarely shown. One of them is restricted USSR military object – Secured Command Post «Taganskiy» (GO-42), located 65 meters underground.
Kotelnicheskii [...]

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The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold war nuclear submarines.
When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of [...]

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Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political analyst, says beefing up the Victory Day parade is just one of many steps that Putin has taken toward resurrecting the hallmarks of the Soviet empire and the country’s former glory.
“He gives free rein to the Soviet dream,” Oreshkin says. “The huge number of people who were brought up in [...]

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