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Soviet Union

Millennium

By Evgeniya Dame, Illustrations by James Yang

Spring 2022

The half-lit classroom smelled like crackers and spilled soda. My class counselor, the dean of educational affairs, and Ella Markovna, my soft-spoken literature teacher, sat along one wall, under the faded reproduction of Pushkin’s portrait. They told me to grab a chair, and I did, putting it as far away as possible. My mother, who taught at the same school, kept inching hers this way and that, unsure whether she belonged with Pushkin and her colleagues or me, the emerging delinquent.

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Photography by Mathias Depardon

Boomtown on the Caspian

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Photography by Mathias Depardon

Fall 2016

The nation of Azerbaijan, wedged into the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Iran, is small, geopolitically vulnerable, and relatively new to the contrivance of nationhood. Most of its history has been spent on the fringes of someone else’s empire; millennia of successive imperial occupations ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and, over the twenty-five years since, Azerbaijanis have been experimenting with novel forms of national pride. 

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Victoria Semykina

My Midwestern Soviet Childhood

By Liesl Schillinger, Illustrations by Victoria Semykina

Winter 2015

It may sound incomprehensible—senseless, Constance Garnett would have put it, as she did in her translation of The Brothers Karamazov—but while the rest of the world may dread the return of the prolonged hostile stare-down known in the last half of the last century as the Cold War, in some ways, I welcome the refreeze.

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Tanya, in her summer dress, plays with one of her favorite stray dogs, June 2012.

The Colors of Tiksi

By Paul Reyes, Photography by Evgenia Arbugaeva

Winter 2014

When it thrived—​if such can be said about a village in the Arctic Circle—​Tiksi was home to 12,000 people, many of whom worked at the seaport, the handful of scientific-​research stations, and military bases nearby.

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The End of Enver Pasha

By Louis Fischer

Spring 1930

The relations between revolutionary Russia and revolutionary Turkey were conditioned by a personal rivalry between two of the Turkish leaders. The Bolsheviks adopted an extremely helpful and cordial attitude toward Kemal Pasha, and Kemal Pasha displa [...]

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9 Sencu Iela

By Pauls Toutonghi

Winter 2009

On the night of August 3, 1944—in the hot crickety darkness of Riga, Latvia—my grandparents did two remarkable things. After midnight, while his children were sleeping, my grandfather—Harijs Mindenbergs—sat down at the kitchen table and wrote three letters: One to Benita, his wife. One to Juris, his son. And one to Ruta, his daughter and my mother. Soviet troops were advancing toward the city. In five hours, most of the family would flee to Germany.

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