Following the horrifying nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union initially lagged in the atomic arms race. However, thanks to successful, dedicated espionage activities, the Soviets rapidly caught up,

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has died at age 91, Russian state media reported and his personal press secretary Vladimir Polyakov confirmed to CBS News. His cause of death was not immediately released, but Gorbachev's office had ...

For years he lived a double life, secretly making anti-Communist paintings. He found fame in the late 1980s, once his work was shown outside the Soviet Union.

In 1949, the USSR shocks the world by detonating its first atomic bomb far sooner than expected. This episode reveals how Stalin’s regime mobilized captured German scientists, forced Soviet researchers into secret closed cities,

The often misunderstood history of the Soviet dissident movement. In To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, historian Benjamin Nathans sheds light on how the protest movement reinvented itself at key junctures and eventually to great effect. Why do some ...

The secret Cold War role played by a giant radio telescope in the middle of the Cheshire countryside has been revealed. Jodrell Bank Observatory monitored Soviet missiles as nuclear tensions between the USSR and Nato powers escalated in the 1960s.

As the Kremlin’s hard-line Communist ideologist, he initially embraced his boss’s modernizing reforms before turning against them as threats to the Soviet order.

Built on the perimeter of an open pit mine or on the permafrost fringes of a massive car factory, the company towns of the former Soviet Union are urban developments of economic extremes. With Brutalist concrete buildings tinted by fading pastel paint and ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a ...