Soviet Union

MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units...

The Cold War is long over, but espionage is forever. Russian spies still operate in the U.S. and American ones in Russia. On Tuesday, Russia's security services said they had caught a U.S. diplomat who they claim is a CIA official trying to recruit a Russian agent. Here are some other cases of apparent spying between the old rivals: THE ANNA CHAPMAN RING These Russian spies lived in suburban U.S. homes and worked at jobs like real estate brokers or travel agents, quietly...

MOSCOW — Four weeks after the failed coup, the Soviet economy was in a tailspin and it was apparent that neither the republics nor the remnant central government had the means to address it. Inflation was running at about 300 percent, and the economy was shrinking at a rate of between 12 and 15 percent, the government calculated. Oil exports, which provided much-needed hard currency, were way down . The grain harvest was coming up short, and on Sept. 19, 1991, the Soviet Union doubled its food aid request to the Western nations, to a total...

There is much that we don't yet know about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev , the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings . But we do know that their family is ethnically Chechen, that they come from the Russian republic of Chechnya , where war broke out in 1994. Although that war began as a movement for Chechen sovereignty and independence, it escalated into two extraordinarily bloody, messy, vicious armed conflicts during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

For his first state visit, China's new president, Xi Jinping, traveled to Moscow this weekend to highlight the importance of his country's relationship with Russia . But according to officials and intellectuals in the Chinese Communist Party, Xi's fixation on that country's former regime — the Soviet Union — may prove even more crucial to China's future direction. The shadow of the U.S.S.R. still hangs over many parts of Chinese society. What is considered bygone Cold War history by much of the rest of...

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 89, the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose pitiless and searching chronicles of Soviet tyranny made him a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit, died yesterday in Moscow. A son told the Associated Press that he died of heart failure. Details were not immediately available. Driven, principled, frequently arrogant, a bearded figure with the fierce visage of a prophet, Solzhenitsyn was regarded as one of the greatest and most influential...

"Did you know Igor Birman?" my wife asked at the breakfast table after reading his April 21 obituary, " Russian emigre foretold outcome of Soviet implosion . " "Of course," I replied; everyone in Washington who worked on the Soviet Union knew the well-informed but abrasive Russian emigre economist.  We also knew that Mr. Birman was right and the CIA analysts were wrong in their predictions about the Soviet Union. Anyone who had served or studied in Moscow knew that the Soviet Union could not survive without...

MOSCOW — A year of difficult negotiations finally wrapped up on the night of June 17, 1991. For weeks, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had rarely been seen in public, because he was so occupied with hammering out an agreement on a new treaty that would fundamentally redefine the U.S.S.R. Significant amounts of power would devolve to the republics — Russia, Ukraine and the rest — and they in turn would freely join in creating a new union. That was the idea, anyway. Five years of reform had left the Soviet Union...

Paul B. Henze, a former CIA and National Security Council specialist in psychological operations who wrote a compelling and provocative book arguing that the Soviet Union had engineered an attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, died May 19 at a rehabilitation center in Culpeper, Va. He was 86 and died of complications after a series of strokes. Mr. Henze was a CIA station chief in Turkey and Ethi­o­pia during the 1960s and '70s and served in the Carter administration as a deputy...

Mark Palmer, a forceful and influential diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary during the collapse of communism, and who was a chief author of President Ronald Reagan's 1982 speech declaring that Marxism was headed toward "the ash heap of history," died Jan. 28 at his home in Washington. He was 71. He had melanoma, his wife, Sushma Palmer, said. From his first visit to the Soviet Union when he was 19, Mr. Palmer recognized that the Russian people were different from the Soviet government.

For his first state visit, China's new president, Xi Jinping, traveled to Moscow this weekend to highlight the importance of his country's relationship with Russia . But according to officials and intellectuals in the Chinese Communist Party, Xi's fixation on that country's former regime — the Soviet Union — may prove even more crucial to China's future direction. The shadow of the U.S.S.R. still hangs over many parts of Chinese society. What is considered bygone Cold War history by much of the rest of...

Kitty Weaver, who died Jan. 9 at 102, was a poultry farmer, student of primatology, Loudoun County socialite, fox hunter and scholar of Soviet-era education practices. A 1963 visit to the Soviet Union with her husband, a corporate lawyer, marked a turning point in her life. While playing tennis with her husband at a sporting facility in what was then Leningrad, she was shocked when asked by an instructor to leave the court and practice with other novices: Russian children. It would not be her last...

Mark Palmer, a forceful and influential diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary during the collapse of communism, and who was a chief author of President Ronald Reagan's 1982 speech declaring that Marxism was headed toward "the ash heap of history," died Jan. 28 at his home in Washington. He was 71. He had melanoma, his wife, Sushma Palmer, said. From his first visit to the Soviet Union when he was 19, Mr. Palmer recognized that the Russian people were different from the Soviet...

Max M. Kampelman, a longtime lawyer and political adviser who became a top Cold War diplomat, leading U.S. negotiations with the Soviet Union about the reduction of nuclear arms and the recognition of human rights, died Jan. 25 at his home in Washington. He was 92. A son, Jeffrey Kampelman, said he had congestive heart failure. Although not formally trained as a diplomat, Mr. Kampelman was skilled and patient in his dealings with Soviet officials in the 1980s, but he also managed to...

In November 1983, during an autumn of Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, a skilled Soviet military communications specialist struggled in secret for 10 days to send a radio signal from a waterlogged tunnel deep inside a mountain in the Urals. The code name of the redoubt was "Grot," or grotto. Around him, construction crews blasted away at the rock, building a hardened command post for the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces . The specialist's goal was to find out...

Galina Vishnevskaya, the soaringly talented Russian soprano who spent years in exile in Washington with her husband, the cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, after they stood up for art in defiance of the Soviets, died Dec. 11 in Moscow. She was 86. Her death was announced by the Opera Center in Moscow, which she had founded. No cause of death was released. Over a long career spent on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Ms. Vishnevskaya fulfilled a variety of...

There is much that we don't yet know about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev , the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings . But we do know that their family is ethnically Chechen, that they come from the Russian republic of Chechnya , where war broke out in 1994. Although that war began as a movement for Chechen sovereignty and independence, it escalated into two extraordinarily bloody, messy, vicious armed conflicts during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Adapted from "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy," published this week by Doubleday. In his second inaugural speech, delivered in January 1985, President Ronald Reagan offered a high-flying description of his Strategic Defense Initiative, calling it a global shield to "render nuclear weapons obsolete" by destroying the warheads before they could reach their targets. Later, the assertion was often made that Reagan's vision had bankrupted the Soviet Union -- "the...

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a confidant and top adviser to former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger who was credited with helping formulate the Nixon administration's policy of detente with the Soviet Union, died Nov. 18 at Brighton Gardens of Friendship Heights senior living facility. He was 86. He had Alzheimer's disease, said his wife, Marjorie Sonnenfeldt. Mr. Sonnenfeldt was known among insiders as "Kissinger's Kissinger," a moniker that reflected the deep philosophical affinity he shared with his boss despite...

Two of the 20th century's iconic moments took place within a few hundred yards of each other in the German capital, Berlin: the storming of the Reichstag by Soviet troops in April 1945 and the scaling of the Berlin Wall by East Germans 44 years later. We sense that the two are related — Soviet troops brought the communism that East Germans toppled in 1989 — but the years between those events are a vacuum in the minds of most Americans. Even a quarter-century after the opening of...