Soviet history

In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was denounced

In 1966, American Dean Reed was the first western rock star to tour the Soviet Union

More than 500,000 people barricaded the streets of Riga in January 1991

The bloody conflict between Moldova and Russian-back separatists in the early 1990s

How a catastrophic trade deal between the US and Moscow sparked a global food price shock

Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world with his two-headed dog experiments

In 1990, a hunger strike led by Ukrainian students brought down the Soviet regime in Kyiv

The American fast-food chain was a huge hit when it opened in the Soviet Union in 1990

Artek, on the Black Sea coast, was the Soviet Union's most popular children's camp.

Eyewitness accounts of the Russian Revolution of 7 November 1917

In March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated ending centuries of autocratic rule in Russia

Alexander Kerensky, overthrown by Lenin in 1917, comments on the Russian Revolution

In 1917, a young girl watches the Russian Revolution unfold outside her window.

Photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii took the first colour photographs of Russia

In 1916, the infamous holy man Grigori Rasputin, was murdered by Russian aristocrats

Alexandra Kollontai was the leading Marxist feminist in Communist Russia.

Robert Robinson, a black American engineer, spent 43 years in the USSR against his will.

In 1930s Ukraine a famine exacerbated by Soviet policies left millions dead.

In 1935, Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner, became a Soviet celebrity.

Tens of thousands of Polish officers were executed in the USSR during World War 2.

In January 1944 the WW2 blockade of Leningrad finally ended after almost 900 days

In 1942 starving musicians in besieged Leningrad performed Shostakovich's Symphony

It is 70 years since German troops lost their battle to take the Soviet industrial city.

Esteban Volkov recalls the murder of his grandfather, Leon Trotsky, in Mexico in Aug 1940