Chechen militants led by Shamil Basayev on June 14, 1995, took about 1,500 hostages in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk and seized a hospital. More than 100 died in the course of the five-day drama, many after failed attempts by Russian forces to free the hostages. It came just months after Russian forces launched the First Chechen War in December 1994.
A woman held hostage by Chechen separatists has spoken about it on camera for the first time, 25 years after a five-day siege that left some 150 people dead in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk.
A decade has passed since ethnic violence tore through towns and cities in southern Kyrgyzstan, killing 470 people according to an international report. RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service and Current Time talked with ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz people in Osh, the city where the violence started, to get a sense of how people feel about life today and about the events of June 2010.
Largely unseen footage of the funeral and official mourning following the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin is featured in a new documentary, State Funeral, by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. It's being shown on Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. The mourning events were held at factories, on collective farms, town squares, and in meeting halls across the Soviet Union.
A 97-year-old Russian World War II veteran has been inspired by the fund-raising efforts of the UK's Captain Tom Moore during the coronavirus pandemic She is posting war stories online every day to raise money for the families of Russian medics who have died fighting COVID-19.
Fifteen years ago, protesters in Kyrgyzstan launched a chain of events that many observers thought would bring lasting democratic change to this strategic Central Asian country. But what long-term impact has the 2005 Tulip Revolution actually had?
Thirty years ago, on January 27, 1990, the first McDonald's opened in Moscow. It had taken 14 years of negotiations, vodka shots, and handouts of Ronald McDonald wristwatches to get this icon of Western capitalism into the Soviet Union.
Even in his 90s, Ukrainian Yakov Lomaka remembers the German for his ID number from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration-extermination camp. He has reason to. Those camp inmates who could not remember their ID numbers in German were denied food and hit, he says. Current Time spoke with Lomaka about his memories of Auschwitz ahead of the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation on January 27, 1945.
Seventy-five years ago today, the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration-extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.1 million people had died there by the war’s end. For Soviet tank crewman David Dushman, the condition of the camp’s “unfortunate” inmates was a shock. Many of those prisoners, like Vera Kriegal Grossman, see their survival as a victory in itself.
The use of Soviet troops against civilians in Baku on January 19-20, 1990 cemented Azerbaijan’s resolve to leave the USSR and reclaim its independence. The crackdown occurred amidst signs that Moscow was losing control of the situation on the ground in Azerbaijan. Tensions were spiraling with neighboring Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region and Azerbaijani protesters wanted officials to resign. Current Time spoke with an eyewitness of these events.
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