Jere Van Dyk is the author of "In Afghanistan" and a former reporter for The New York Times. In the early 1980s he covered the Afghan-Soviet war, living with the Afghan rebels. He received a Pulitzer ...

"You're next," said a Russian historian I interviewed in 1993 about the Soviet Union's collapse ... Gorbachev's unilateral ...

Against this backdrop, as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Shrayer-Petrov penned his panoramic novel of a Jewish doctor, his non-Jewish Russian wife and their teenage son whose once ...

Russia changes only when it loses wars.

After years of blood, sweat and tears, the Soviet Union abandoned its crusades in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. Gorbachev cited Soviet hero Vladimir Lenin’s “pragmatism” as justification ...

In 1978, a year before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Russian archaeologist Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi began digging at the Tillya Tepe site in northern Afghanistan, which archaeologists ...

One of the keys to the Taliban success was they offered an alternative. They said, “Look, the mujahedeen fought heroically to liberate your country but have now turned it into a war zone. We offer ...

The Soviet Mi-24 was a testament to the Soviet preference for brute force and power over finesse or whiz-bang technological wizardry. These flying beasts were killers. At the height of the Cold ...