On the Tragic Life and Death of the Master and Margarita Author. By Julie Lekstrom Himes. (Jan 23, 2017)

And five other unlearned lessons from leading experts about modern Russia and the death of an empire. (Dec. 22, 2016)

You’ve all seen Dr. Strangelove, which means I’m pretty sure you understand the general idea behind a doomsday device: if you destroy us, we destroy you, no matter what. The concept of an automatic system that guarantees nuclear retaliation if a country is subjected to a nuclear attack has been part of the collective nuclear nightmare for decades. It’s not just a concept, though. Such a doomsday device exists, and it goes by the chilling name Dead Hand. By Jason Torchinsky.

A look at the balanced ternary notation and it’s use in Setun, a Soviet computer. By Andrew Buntine.

By Vicki Boykis’ mom.

How the Soviets Revolutionized Wristwatches. By Hunter Oatman-Stanford.

An exhibition examining the landscape and abandoned spaces of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries opens in London.

Russian photographer Egor Rogalev explains his enduring fascination with post-Soviet edgelands.

Sometime in the late 1970s, Miriam Schapiro and Elaine Lustig Cohen gathered a group of feminist artists and writers around my dining room table with a proposal… By Joyce Kozloff. (Jan. 2)

Restricted by the aesthetic limits on architecture in the Soviet Union, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin imagined the most fantastic cities and wondrous structures on paper.