When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build a case against them.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Wrestling in Paris
A pilgrimage to the 2017 World Championships makes Andrew Kay wonder: is wrestling a metaphor for current global politics, or have global politics become increasingly wrestling-like?
Posted inArts & Culture, Current Events, Nonfiction, Quotes
How Russia Has Been Spying in Plain Sight in San Francisco
What was going on at Russia’s consulate in San Francisco?
Posted inFiction, Story
The Wolves
A forester’s daughter spends a night in a cabin in Soviet Russia, but it takes decades to discover how much danger she put her family in.
Posted inStory
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch
In fraught games of power politics, sometimes the best revenge is not being exiled to die alone on an island in the South Atlantic.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Russia’s House of Shadows
Moscow’s House on the Embankment, built to house the Soviet élite, became purge central. They were the new nobility, until suddenly they weren’t.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Who Killed Tolstoy?
If literature is the news that stays news, then it’s always a good time to revist Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed, about the people obsessed with Russia’s great authors. In this selection, Batuman gets a travel grant as a college student to investigate whether Leo Tolstoy was murdered. She examines his life for clues. She […]
Posted inHistory, Nonfiction, Quotes
The House Where Revolution Went to Die
The House on the Embankment housed hundreds of Soviet leaders. Eventually, it was the former house of hundreds of purge victims.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Rainbow Railroad to Canada for Gay Chechen Men
Canada is taking in gay Chechen men subject to persecution, the risk to Canada-Russia relations be damned.
Posted inCulture
And What of My Wrath?
Cersei Lannister could have been a great antihero, but she was on the wrong show.
