X-Nico

51 unusual facts about Soviet Union


A National Strategic Narrative

The 15 page article was titled A National Strategic Narrative by Mr. Y (a pseudonym for Captain Porter and Colonel Mykleby, reminiscent of the X Article which helped galvanize U.S. consensus on Containment of the Soviet Union from the 1940s up until the collapse of the Soviet Union decades later).

Anna Larina

In 1988, she gave a speech at a conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Bukharin’s birth given by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party Central Committee.

Arms race

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, tensions decreased and the nuclear arsenal of both countries were reduced.

Bublyk Kuzma Pavlovych

In 1917–1923 years he was witness and partly participant of events of Russian Revolution and Civil War in the central Eurasia, on the territories of former Russian Empire, in new-born Ukrainian and Russian Republics, which in 1922 became part of Soviet Union.

By Royal Command

As he was more sympathetic towards Hitler, and the fact that Dandy and Roan would have claimed to be working for the Communists, the United Kingdom would have formed an alliance with Germany, isolating the French and giving Germany an ally in the ensuing war against Communist Russia.

Canadian federal election, 1963

In addition to concern within the party about Diefenbaker's mercurial style of leadership, there had been a serious split in party ranks over the issue of stationing American nuclear missiles (see Bomarc missile) on Canadian soil for protection from possible Soviet attack.

Canadian Tour 1983

After the album was released the Soviet concert administration put in effect interdiction to Sofia Rotaru to leave the Soviet Union for 5 consecutive years due to her increasing popularity in the West.

Center for Policy Studies

CPS has published several volumes of policy research, runs its own policy paper series and offers an on-line library of policy documents from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the Policy Documentation Center.

Chess handicap

Second, the Soviet Union supported chess masters and sponsored chess education, but expected chess masters "to be cultural icons, not hustlers".

Eisenstein on Disney

It was published much later than most of Leyda's other seminal works on Eisenstein and it presents a unique side of this highly theoretical Soviet film director who is an outsider to American pop culture.

Elizaveta Voronyanskaya

This work, a history of the Gulag prison camps, was ready for publication in New York and Paris by 1973 but Solzhenitsyn had wished for first publication in the Soviet Union.

Evald Okas

With the advent of World War II and the Soviet invasion and occupation of Estonia, he was subsequently mobilized into Soviet army, but, like many other Estonians, moved to work battalions in Kotlas, Russia.

Grigori Voitinsky

In 1920, the Soviet Union established the Far Eastern Bureau in Siberia, a branch of the Third Communist International, or the Comintern.

Harry A. Franck

He even traveled through the Soviet Union in 1935, not without difficulty, and recorded his impressions in A Vagabond in Sovietland (1935).

Head of Kalmykia

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, three people have served as Heads of the Republic.

Hero City

On June 22, 1961 (20th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War) the term "Hero City" was applied to Kiev in the ukases that awarded Kiev the Order of Lenin and introduced the Medal "For the Defence of Kiev".

•

However, in military terms, the battle was a great victory for the German Army and a disaster for the Soviets.

Hungarian neopaganism

These movements have roots in the ethnological studies of the early 20th century, later the elaboration of a national Hungarian religion was endorsed in the interwar Turanist circles (1930s-40s), and finally blossomed alongside other Pagan religions in Hungary since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Hymie Barsel

Hymie became progressively more involved in the Youth Liberation Movement and began working as an organizer and then Secretary of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU).

•

During the war, South Africa and the Soviet Union were allies, and Hymie sought diplomatic ties between South Africa and Russia.

ICCF U.S.A.

This was the Final Olympiad III team tourney in which the USSR was invited also to enter a team for the first time.

Ilya Gabay

In March 1968, Gabay was dismissed as an editor at the Institute of the Peoples of Asia of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and in May 1969, arrested and imprisoned.

Ivan Alexandrov

Ivan Gavrilovich Alexandrov (1875–1936) was a Russian engineer who played a significant role in the modernisation of the Soviet Union.

Jan Palach Square

The previous name of the square, used through the communist era, was the Square of Red Army Soldiers (Náměstí Krasnoarmějců from the year 1948, before this was the name Rejdiště,according riding hall, standing in those places) commemorating Soviet soldiers killed during their liberation of Prague in May 1945.

Joe and Monkey

Kvetchbot: a Soviet-created, sociopathic robot who awakens from deactivation to find that his Russian Communist masters are no longer in power.

Joseph F. Holt

During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1955 Rep. Holt was held at gun point by a Soviet Army officer that demanded that he cease taking photographs of a church near Moscow.

László Piros

He fought in the Second World War, but he was captured by the Soviets at Voronezh (January 1943).

Louise Reiss

The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.

Mahabad

The republic received strong support from the Soviet Union, which occupied Iran during the same era and included the Kurdish towns of Bukan, Piranshahr, Sardasht and Oshnavieh.

Neighborhoods of Beersheba

It was built in the 1990s to house new immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Night of the Ducks

For example, Soviet media claimed that the mobilization was possibly "to divert the workers' attention and to allow the government to insert into the defense clause of the budget 420 million Lirot, more than the previous year".

Nikolai Shpanov

The First Blow (Pervii Udar, 1939. Published before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it is a fictional account of the upcoming war between Third Reich and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Air Force stages a highly successful raid on industrial targets in Nuremberg. It was withdrawn from publication after Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler made their deal.)

Nito Alves

Alves favored stronger relations with the Soviet Union, which he wanted to grant military bases in Angola.

Order of Honour

Order of Honour,a Soviet decoration awarded between 1988 and 1994, which replaced the older Order of the Badge of Honour, awarded between 1935 and 1988;

Oti Kandi

Aşıq Hoseyn Javan, born in Oti Kandi, is the legendary Ashik who was exiled to Soviet Union due to his revolutionary songs during the brief reign of Azerbaijan People's Government following the World War II.

Palace of Culture

Palaces of Culture served another important purpose: they housed local congresses and conferences of the regional divisions of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, etc.

Pioneer 2M

Pioneer 2M was a Soviet Union land speed record car built in 1961 under the guidance of I. Tichomirov.

Ranipur, Uttarakhand

In an important move in 1962, Indian signed an agreement with the Soviet Union for the supply of Rs. 23 crores worth of equipment by Heavy Electrical Equipment Plants.

René Mailhot

He reported on many major events, including the breakdown of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil war in Mozambique, apartheid in South Africa, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Roger Matton

In 1966 the Montreal Symphony Orchestra included his Mouvement symphonique II in their concert repertoire for their 1966 tour of the Soviet Union, making it one of the first symphonic works by a Canadian composer to be performed in that nation.

Russian tube designations

Vacuum tubes produced in the former Soviet Union - and in present-day Russia - carry their own unique designations.

Soviet Census

A Soviet Census is a census carried out in the Soviet Union.

Soviet cuisine

Soviet cuisine, the common cuisine of the Soviet Union, was formed by the integration of the various national cuisines of the Soviet Union, in the course of the formation of the Soviet people.

Soviet pro-Arab propaganda

During the Cold War era the Soviet Union used propaganda as one of their many overt tools to gain support on a global scale in the war waged against the United States.

Spiro Koleka

Koleka's background and experience as a technocrat allowed him to lead numerous economic and political delegations of the time towards many East European countries, including the Soviet Union.

The Flying Saucers Are Real

He believed the Air Force or the US Government would eventually reveal these technologies to the public when the Soviet Union was no longer a threat.

Vagankovo Cemetery

It is the burial site for a number of people from the artistic and sports community of Russia and the old Soviet Union.

Valentin Turchin

Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1977.

Valerian Gaprindashvili

From the 1920s, like many of his fellow Symbolists, he faced an ideological pressure from the newly established Soviet regime which forced him to make a conciliatory move towards the standards of Soviet literature.

Valeriy Marchenko

His grandfather, Mykhaylo Marchenko, was the first Soviet dean of the University of Lviv.

Zelman Passov

Zelman Isaevich Passov Зельман Исаевич Пассов (1905, Staraya Russa, Russia - 15 February 1940) headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service, then part of the NKVD from June to November 1938, when he was arrested.


1965 in India

18 September - Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin invites the leaders of India and Pakistan to meet in the Soviet Union to negotiate.

7th Guards Cavalry Corps

The Corps was assigned to the Southwestern Front’s in the area of the 5th Tank Army (2nd formation) (Serafimovich) north of Stalingrad where it cooperated with the 1st Tank Corps (General V. V. Butkov) during Operation Uranus.

Aerolift

Aerolift was a South African airline based in Bryanston, Gauteng, Johannesburg, operating chartered passenger and cargo flights within Africa using Soviet-built aircraft.

Albatros L 77v

Three of the aircraft saw service performing armament trials in Lipetsk in the Soviet Union; these included one aircraft testing a free-mounted 20 mm cannon.

Aleksandr Nemits

Aleksandr Vasilivich Nemits, (Нёмитц, Александр Васильевич) was a Naval Officer of Russian Empire, Ukrainian State and Soviet Union.

Alexandra Uteev Johnson

As a Foreign Service Officer she worked as an analyst in the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research specializing in Soviet relations with Arab countries.

Alexandru Mironov

Born in the Bessarabian locality of Vertujeni, now part of Moldova, Mironov was from a family which took refuge in southern Romania following the region's second occupation by the Soviet Union before the end of World War II.

Anne Sunnucks

Although this result qualified her to play in the next event in the Women's World Championship sequence, she was a major in the Women's Royal Army Corps and the authorities would not allow her to travel to the USSR where the 1955 Women's Candidates tournament was being held.

Belostock Offensive

The 2nd Belorussian Front had successfully forced the entire length of the Neman and Svisloch by July 24; the 50th Army, with support from the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps, took or retook the eastern part of the Augustow Forest and part of the outlying fortifications of Grodno which the Germans had retained after their counter-offensive.

Christa Tordy

She was assassinated along with her husband by the Soviet Red Army during its invasion of Germany during World War II.

Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia

The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (in Russian: Комитет Освобождения Народов России, abbreviated as КОНР, KONR) was a committee composed of military and civilian anticommunists from territories of the Soviet Union (most being Russians).

Dwijen Mukhopadhyay

As a member of ‘Indian Cultural Delegation’, he toured Soviet Union and East European countries like Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

Environmental security

After World War II, definitions typically focused on the subject of realpolitik that developed during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Eric Grinstead

In the late 1960s Lokesh Chandra invited Grinstead to catalogue a large collection of about 15,000 photographs and photocopies of Tangut Buddhist texts that had been acquired by his father, the famous Sanskrit scholar Raghu Vira (died 1963), during visits to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China during the 1950s.

Erich Wiesner

Wiesner became a member of the Central committee of the Young Communist League of Germany in 1920 and moved to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he worked at the Comintern.

Fedoseevtsy

There were small groups of the Fedoseevtsy in the Soviet Union, who had been moving away from religious intolerance and asceticism.

Giovanni Messe

The CSIR was a mobile infantry and cavalry unit of the Italian army that took part in Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.

Gōgen Yamaguchi

During his military tour in Manchuria in World War II, Gōgen was captured by the Soviet military in 1942 and incarcerated as a prisoner of war in a Russian concentration camp; it was here that he battled and defeated a live tiger according to his autobiography (cited above).

He'll Have to Go

Elton John performed "He'll Have to Go" live on a number of occasions, perhaps most notably in 1979 on his acoustic tour with percussionist Ray Cooper, which included eight historic performances in the Soviet Union; a first for a Western rock artist.

Hofn Air Station

The Greenland, Iceland and United Kingdom air defense sector, better known as the GIUK gap, was routinely utilized by the Soviet Union's long range heavy bombers and maritime reconnaissance platforms as a transit point towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Hotelicopter

It showed a craft based on the Soviet giant Mil V-12 military helicopter, leading millions to believe the world's first luxury hotel/helicopter was a reality.

Igor Savitsky

Thereafter, Savitsky began collecting the works of Central Asian artists, including Alexander Volkov, Ural Tansykbayev and Victor Ufimtsev of the Uzbek school, and later those of the Russian avant-garde – including Kliment Red'ko, Lyubov Popova, Mukhina, Ivan Koudriachov and Robert Falk – whose paintings, although already recognized in Western Europe (especially in France), had been banned in the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s rule and through the 1960s.

Illarion Ivanov-Schitz

He was one of the few architects born in the 1860s who integrated into the Soviet establishment, earning the Order of Lenin for various resort projects and for redesigning the interiors of the Grand Kremlin Palace in the 1930s.

Ivan Ladyga

In April 1943, he was a senior aide to the chief of intelligence of the 18th Guards Rifle Corps of the 13th Army of the Central Front in the Battle of Kursk where he was involved in the defensive battles in the area west of Station Ponyri, the counterattack at Sevsk, Konotop, and Priluki.

Juhan Viiding

It is not known whether Viiding intended to develop a second poetic voice in addition to that of Jüri Üdi, or that he simply realized that the Soviet era of ideological symbols—as described in his "Jüri’s Yarn"—was coming to an end and the actor Jüri Üdi could drop the mask to reveal Juhan Viiding’s true literary face.

Junibacken

The station also presents framed copies of Lindgren memorabilia, including a glowing letter of praise for Lindgren from then president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev.

Leonid Ivashov

Between 1976 and 1984 he worked as a senior aid to the Soviet Minister of Defense Dmitriy Ustinov.

Leonid Tsypkin

Leonid Borisovich Tsypkin (Леонид Борисович Цыпкин) (March 20, 1926 — March 20, 1982) was a Soviet writer and medical doctor, best known for his book Summer in Baden-Baden.

Mapparium

Built in 1935 and based upon Rand McNally political maps published the previous year, the Mapparium shows the political world as it was at that time, including such long-disused labels as Italian East Africa and Siam, as well as more-recently defunct political entities such as the Soviet Union.

Mark Kirnarsky

Mark Abramovich Kirnarsky (June 8, 1893, Pogar–1941, Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg) was a Soviet cover artist of Jewish descent.

Marvelkind

There were multiple studios setup throughout the house and guests of the marvelkind included The Faint, Soviet, Assassins, Local H, Nash Kato and a number of other local bands and artists.

Marxist aesthetics

For instance Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who greatly influenced the art of the early Soviet Union, was not following Marx's statements on the subject so much as the humanist Ludwig Feuerbach.

Mohammed Daoud Khan

His ten-year tenure was noted for his foreign policy turn to the Soviet Union, the completion of the Helmand Valley project, which radically improved living conditions in southwestern Afghanistan, and tentative steps towards the emancipation of women.

My Best Friend, General Vasili, Son of Joseph Stalin

Biopic film, based on a true story of friendship between Vasili Stalin, the son of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and the famous Russian sports star Vsevolod Bobrov.

Olaf Rose

His dissertation, which was financially supported by the Clausewitz Society, explored the influence of Carl von Clausewitz as a military theorist in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Poul Henningsen

After the war he dissociated himself from the communists who were criticizing him for flabbing humanitarianism in his attitude to the settlement with the Nazis and for his growing scepticism about the Soviet Union and in many ways he was isolated.

Project 119

This marked the first time since the 1936 Summer Olympics that neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union/Russia, had won the most gold medals at a Summer Olympics.

Project 571

In the early morning of September 13, Lin Biao, Ye Qun, Lin Liguo, and most of the other major plotters attempted to flee to the Soviet Union and boarded a prearranged Trident 1-E, (a CAAC B-256) piloted by Pan Jingyin, the deputy commander of the PLAAF 34th division.

RELCOM

It was launched in the Soviet Union on August 1, 1990 in the Kurchatov Institute in collaboration with DEMOS co-operative (although the engineering team at DEMOS at the time consisted mostly of Kurchatov Institute employees, some key members (Mikhail Davidov, Vadim Antonov, Dmitry Volodin) in the RELCOM team were never employed by Kurchatov Institute).

Tany Youne

Tany Youne (born Tatyana Stepanovna Maksimova-Koshkinsky; January 28, 1903; Cherby, Kazan province (now Yadrinsky District of Chuvash Republic) — October 6, 1977 Cheboksary, Chuvash ASSR) was a soviet actress and writer.

The Journalist

The second part ("Garden and Spring") tells about Aliabiev's life in Paris where he meets Annie Girardot, attends the rehearsal of Mireille Mathieu and conducts extensive discussions with his new friend, an American journalist, trying to persuade him in the advantages of Soviet way of life.

Tom Rüsz Jacobsen

He made his debut against Soviet Union on 24 September 1979, while he was still played for third-tier team Fram Larvik.

Type 64 pistol

Ever since the expulsion of the Kuomintang government, concluding the Chinese Civil War, the People's Liberation Army relied heavily upon support from the Soviet Union for supplies and weaponry.

USA/USSR Joint Statement on Uniform Acceptance of Rules of International Law Governing Innocent Passage

The Joint Statement by the USA and the USSR (the superpowers of the time) was made to counteract state activity to restrict the passage of ships carrying potentially hazardous materials through states' territorial sea, culminating mainly from the Basel Convention 1989.

Vasily Pronin

As a member of the Military Council of the Moscow Military District and Moscow Zone of Defense, Vasily Pronin together with the first secretary of the Moscow City Council and Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party Alexander Shcherbakov rendered great assistance to the State Defense Committee and Western Front command in organizing the defense of the capital in the fall and winter of 1941.

Vietnamese people in Bulgaria

According to an international agreement of 1980, Bulgaria, along with other Comecon members such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, accepted Vietnamese guest workers in the country as a relatively cheaper manual labour workforce.

Voronezh Front

During Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev, which began on August 3, 1943, the Front included 38th, 40th, 27th, 6th Guards, 5th Guards, and 1st and 5th Guards Tank Armies.