Ambassador Jack Matlock had a front row seat for the final days of the US-Soviet Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. While working on his article, 1983: The Scariest Year (Mar/Apr 2013), Russian Life Publisher Paul Richardson conducted an email interview with Matlock, which is produced here in its entirety.

History offered Zoe Paleologue little hope. Her homeland overrun, her royal pedigree in tatters... And then the Tsar of all the Russias needed a new wife...

Sixty years ago Stalin died and the Soviet Union was in collective shock. So much has been written about this event that we decided to take a different tack, offering a selection of first person accounts from that time.

Whenever I read about Constance Garnett, doyenne of Russian-to-English literary translation, sitting in the garden and banging out her work with scarcely a break for reflection (“She would finish a page,” D.H. Lawrence tells us, “and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up...”), I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

In 1703 Peter the Great founded the first Russian newspaper. This is what it looked like and what it covered.

By any measure, the son of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev lived a life that was very full. Born 100 years ago this fall, this is his amazing story.

How should we understand current political dissent in Russia? Russian Life publisher Paul Richardson met with long-time Soviet/Russian political dissident Alexander Skobov to get his views on what is going on in Russia and where things are headed.

Moscow's last Great Fire was 200 years ago, on September 14, 1812, in the wake of the Russian army's abandonment of Moscow. Debate continues to rage if the fire was accidental or set intentionally by retreating troops. And a misunderstanding of the scope of the fire's destruction hampers preservation efforts to this day.

Reviews of five interesting new books for Russophiles: Former People, Nevsky, St. Petersburg Noir, Wooden Churches and Russian Film Posters.

Fifty years ago this October, the world walked to the brink of nuclear holocaust, looked over the edge, and stepped back. This is the account of one actor in that frightful drama, someone who dared to take a stand and may just have ended up saving the planet.

The assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, was used as the pretext for the launching of the Red Terror, a wave of repression and killing aimed at wiping out the Bolsheviks' opponents, real and imagined.

On the world's worst nuclear disaster prior to Chernobyl, when, in 1957, nuclear waste exploded at the Mayak plant in Ozyorsk. The damage has yet to be fully recognized or accepted.