This year—25 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse—I went back again, to meet these young people like Sasha. Who are they? What do they want from their lives? What do they want for Russia?

The objective of the trick, so explained Carter officials Zbigniew Bryzinsky and Robert Gates, was to give the Soviet Union ‘a Vietnam’ of their own. Once in Afghanistan in 1979, the US funded ...

On September 13, 1959, the Soviet Union achieved a significant milestone with the Luna 2 mission, successfully crashing a spacecraft onto the Moon and placing metallic pennants with the U.S.S.R.'s ...