A matter that has become topical again in recent weeks... A short history of the so-called "hot line", a communications system that linked the leaders of the erstwhile USSR and the US, set up in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, to reduce the possibility of an "accidental" nuclear war between the two superpowers. The hot line came into being one year after the ... Read full entry

The early exploits of the Soviet space program were often shrouded in secrecy, and unlike US space missions which were virtually a media circus, only the merest of details of a space flight were ever revealed. After stumbling upon this snippet about Russian Aleksei Leonov, the first person to ever walk in space, I can see why the Soviets chose not to say too much about their space exploration program. After ... Read full entry

INTOURIST Soviet Union Russia Labels Soviet era artwork and posters will go well with your .su domain website. Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with ... Read full entry

USSR stirs sentiments Gone, but not forgotten, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, lives on in cyberspace, where registrations of the Soviet domain name .su continue to grow in popularity. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising - registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing ... Read full entry

Charlie Wilson's War Texas congressman Charlie Wilson manages to win the cold war, or at least play a hand in ending the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in the late 1980s. More a case of winning the battle but losing the war as history went on to show. A banner reading "Charlie Did It!" can be seen at both the beginning and end of the ... Read full entry