Russia

In 1748 Sweden embarked on the construction of an elaborate island fortress. This was her last attempt, writes Anthony Wood, to check the Russian thrust westwards.

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

Far more interesting than Byron's romantic hero, who also inspired a celebrated circus act, is the real Mazeppa, as described in this article by L.R. Lewitter.

J.W. Newmarch Holmes transports the reader to Novgorod, the hub of a mercantile empire in medieval Russia.

Christopher Lloyd asserts that the first contacts between Elizabethan England and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible mark the true birth of the British Empire.

David Footman assesses the death and legacy of a White Russian leader.

The impact of the Soviet Revolution in October 1917 has been so overwhelming that we seldom look back to the February days when the Tsar was compelled to abdicate forty-eight hours after the outbreak of disturbances, and even more seldom to the First Revolution of 1905. Yet, A.J. Halpern writes, October came as a culmination of the February crisis, and 1905 was the necessary prologue to the 1917 drama. 

The great Russian dynasty was founded on July 22nd, 1613.

Gerald Morgan recounts how, towards the mid-nineteenth century, Russian expansion in Central Asia prompted the authorities in India to send British Missions in reply.

In 1897 The Gadfly was published in English by Ethel Lilian Voynich - ‘E.L.V.’ to her friends. Anne Fremantle introduces this revolutionary novel, set in nineteenth-century Italy, which has sold 5 million copies in Russia.