Once-cursed Gulag river now Siberian lifeline
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MARKHAYANOVA, Russia  - The Kolyma used to be a river of death for prisoners in some of the harshest camps of Josef Stalin's Gulag empire. Now the camps are long gone, but so too is the activity of a once-bustling Soviet Arctic outpost.
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KULSHICHI, Belarus -- No one lives here anymore. Only radiation-danger signs stick up from the ground in this village contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl accident, and abandoned buildings gape silently, their windows broken.
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ELISTA, Russia -- Life is not all smooth sailing for Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the flamboyant leader of the remote Russian republic of Kalmykia.
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Amazingly, some people still believe the devastating Siberian event was caused by space aliens
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TASTUPEK, Kazakhstan -- In the cool of one recent evening, after tending to his herd of 19 camels, Puzblay Seytpembetov and four companions pushed his small single-engine boat out onto the placid waters of the Aral Sea to lay fishnets. In the morning, he predicted, he would haul in flapping carp and...
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ALI-YURT, Russia  - Petimat Tatriyeva was woken up one morning late last month by shouts and banging coming from the courtyard of her home.
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Societa' comune si trova a Tyumen, in Siberia
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Central Asia's poorest county is also one of the world's leading transit routes for heroin, opium and other drugs from Afghanistan. Sergei Makhkamov has been caught in the flood.
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Russian officials on Saturday restarted a nuclear reactor that sparked widespread panic in southern Russia when it automatically shut down earlier this week.
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A plea to prevent a Russian teacher from being sentenced to detention in Siberian prison camps is coming from an unlikely source: former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
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A decade ago, when Hadijat Gatayeva risked her life to pluck orphaned children out of the blackened ruins of her native Chechnya, she never imagined that the small, personal rescue operation would have no end.
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The signs say "KEEP OUT" and warn of radiation contamination, but the mushroom-pickers trudge right past them carrying their pails. Eighteen years after the reactor at Chernobyl in neighboring Ukraine exploded, spewing a cloud of radiation that blew north and contaminated 22 percent of this ex-Soviet republic, activists warn of a new threat facing Belarusians: the longing to return to normal life.
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BESLAN, Russia -- Relatives wandered among rows and rows of plastic body bags at a morgue yesterday, searching for loved ones who had died at the end of a three-day siege by Chechen rebels the day before.
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MOSCOW -- She survived three days as a hostage and the destruction of the school where she has passed nearly all of her 72-year life. Now Lydia Tsaliyeva is heading home, and her life may be in danger all over again. This time, however, the threat comes from her neighbors.
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A former Soviet official is charged with genocide for allegedly organising deportations to Siberia.
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MOSCOW -- The locked gates and barred windows that kept 45 women from escaping a fire early yesterday at a drug treatment center pointed to conditions now common in post-Soviet Russia's state-run institutions.
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Emperor Nicholas and his family were executed in 1918. But with newly discovered remains, they're making headlines again in Russia