After decades of environmental disaster, fish and wildlife may rebound to Central Asia's Aral Sea, but the lake will never be restored to its former glory.

Before the infamous Wannsee conference, Nazis had another meeting during which they planned the mass starvation of millions of Eastern Europeans.

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously pounded his shoe at a United Nations meeting in 1960. Anecdotes of erratic behavior like this are unsettling.

On the little-known hippie youth culture of the USSR.

The first Earthling was Laika, a Russian mongrel found on the streets of Moscow.