Launched in 1972, the failed Venus probe has been stuck in Earth orbit ever since. Now it's hurtling back down to Earth.

The Soviet Union is unsurpassed in the art of defense budgetry. The point of the game is not so much to lay out actual fiscal allocations as to demonstrate to outsiders the latest Kremlin ...

Gorbachev died after a long illness, Russian state news agencies ... was lowered. The Soviet Union – was over and Yeltsin was in control. “We are living in a new world,” Gorbachev said.

Venera 1 was launched in 1961, only four years after Sputnik 1, the first satellite. Venera 7, in 1970, was the first ...

Finally, much more awkwardly, he oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, as it split into 15 nations. “We are now living in a ... and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ...

Gorbachev will be buried at Moscow's Novo-Dyevitchiye cemetery, next to his wife, Raisa, Russia's state-run news agency ... was the last leader of the Soviet Union before it dissolved.