25 very interesting facts that you probably did not know about the Soviet Union

Many of us learned about the Soviet Union through heavily propagandized Hollywood films (ala Rambo III and Rocky IV), where the Soviets were portrayed as evil, robotic machines without human feelings.

However, the truth about America's biggest rival was much different.

As one of the world's two superpowers for much of the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union progressed alongside the United States in a range of fields from technology to science, military power to sports, and politics to culture.

Let's follow below 25 interesting facts that you probably did not know about the communist state.

25. During Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to England (December 1984), his wife, Raisa, told the British Minister of Agriculture, Michael Jopling, that in the Soviet Union there were more than 300 ways of cooking potatoes. When the British official expressed his doubts, she promised to send him a cookbook, which she did a few months later, noting: "I'm sorry I was somewhat inaccurate: in fact, there are 500 and not 300 recipe for cooking potatoes".

24. Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991. He ascended as a Soviet citizen, and returned to Earth as a Russian citizen.

23. One of the most famous weapons in the world, the Kalashnikov, was first created in the Soviet Union in 1947, and has been in continuous use ever since. In fact, there are more copies of this rifle in existence in the world than all other assault rifles combined!

22. Ostankino Tower, is the tallest television tower in Europe to this day, while it was the tallest self-supporting structure in the world from 1967 to 1976. It even surpassed the Empire State Building, while it was a masterpiece of Soviet engineering at the time it was built. It held this record until the completion of the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada in 1976.

21. The first spacecraft to land on another planet and transmit data to Earth was the Soviet Venus 7. Its journey began on August 17, 1970, while the spacecraft entered Venus' atmosphere on December 15 of the same year. After that, the device sent back only 23 minutes of weak data, apparently because it was sitting on its side.

20. Despite the Cold War between the two countries, the Soviet Union won the Oscar for best foreign film on 3 separate occasions: 'War and Peace' (1968), 'Dersu Uzala' (1975), 'Moscow Doesn't Trust tears' (1980). However, many Soviet directors were more concerned with artistic success than economic success. This influenced the realization of a large number of philosophical and poetic films, by some of the most well-known directors, such as Andrej Tarkovski, one of the greatest of the XNUMXth century.

19. Laika, perhaps the most famous dog of the XNUMXth century and the first animal launched into orbit, was found wandering the streets of Moscow. Soviet scientists thought that a dog like Laika would be ideal for their mission, as it was already used to the conditions of extreme cold and hunger in the unfriendly streets of the Soviet capital.

18. Operation Barbarossa, which was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, began on June 22, 1941. Nearly 95 percent of all German military losses in 1941-1944 occurred right during that operation.

17. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest murderous concentration camp, in January 1945. In fact, the USSR liberated more concentration camps than the rest of the Allies combined.

16. Logos on Soviet passports corroded quickly, while the United States used stainless steel. According to KGB files, hundreds of American agents were caught using fake "Soviet" passports, which were misprinted and of poor quality.

15. It is estimated that nearly 80 percent of Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive World War II. This caused major economic problems after the war, but the Soviet Union recouped that loss relatively quickly.

14. Soviet theaters staged the play "Fruits of Revolt" to show how poor people were in the capitalist West, but later it was banned, because citizens found it amazing that even the poor in the US could could afford to buy a car.

13. In a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 20, 1963, US President Kennedy proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces in their efforts to reach the moon. Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev was ready to accept Kennedy's proposal, but after the latter was killed, Khrushchev rejected the plan, as he did not trust Vice President Johnson.

12. The Soviet Union first participated in the Olympic Games in 1952. It dominated the medal table in 6 of its 9 appearances at the Summer Games, and 7 of its 9 participations at the Winter Games. Soviet athletes won an astonishing 1.204 medals (473 gold) in just 18 events, and remain to this day the most dominant nation in the modern history of the Olympic Games. The Soviet Union still dominates the medal table in sports such as gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, and men's and women's volleyball, 25 years after its breakup.

11. The book "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 due to suspicions of "occultism", but the book gained popularity on the black market along with other banned books at a time when the ban was lifted officially in 1940.

10. Have you ever heard the term Stiljagi? A typical Stiljagi, he was a member of a youth counterculture from the late 40s to the early 60s in the Soviet Union, who listened to Western music and dressed like an American or Western European youth. Western media often referred to them as Soviet beatniks or hipsters.

9. Although the Soviet Union was not famous for its entertainment industry, it did produce one of the most famous video games in history: Tetris. It was created by Russian programmer Aleksey Pazhitnov in 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnitsin Computing Center at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

He named the game from the Greek word for the number 4, tetra (all parts of the game contain 4 segments) and tennis, Pazhitnov's favorite sport. The game went on sale in the West two years later and sold an estimated 200 million copies, making it one of the best-selling video games of all time.

8. During a visit to the Boeing Company (in Seattle, Washington) in the early 80s, Soviet scientists had secretly put glue on the bottom of their shoes to collect hidden metal samples from the floor, and any other information they could . According to the KGB, their mission was a success.

7. Have you ever heard of "White Coke", the alternative version of American Coca-Cola produced in the 40s of the last century at the request of Georgi Zhukov, the marshal of the Soviet Union? The Soviets were introduced to the production of Coca-Cola during World War II by their counterpart in Western Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Duke D. Eisenhower, who was a fan of the drink. Zhukov ordered a colorless Coca-Cola that resembled vodka as he really liked that taste, but was embarrassed to be seen drinking the famous American drink in public.

6. Vladimir Demikhov was a Soviet scientist and pioneer in the field of organ transplantation. The controversial scientist created at least 22 two-headed animals during his quest to perfect the art of transplantation. Although he resembled the scientist of modern times, Doctor Moro, Demikhov's work was an attempt to understand how to replace damaged organs, or how to create artificial substitutes. Although he is best remembered for first creating a "two-headed dog" in 1959, his studies would eventually set the stage for similar organ transplants some 40 years later.

5. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev signed an agreement with then US Vice President Nixon to build the first Russian vodka factory in the United States. Apparently there was a Soviet thing that Americans wanted so badly to consume even during the Cold War.

4. In Soviet Russia, some prisoners who feared for their lives got tattoos of Lenin or Stalin (or both) on their chests or other parts of them, because the guards were not allowed to shoot at images of their national leaders .

3. When you think of supersonic flight, you probably think of the Concorde. And yet the French aircraft was not the first supersonic carrier, and certainly not the first commercial aircraft to exceed the speed of sound. Credit goes to the Tupolev TU-144, the Soviet Union's only supersonic carrier that made its first flight on December 31, 1968, near Moscow, two months before Concorde's first flight.

2. The 'Tsar Bomb' is the nickname for the AN602 hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Its test on October 30, 1961, remains one of the most powerful man-made explosions in history, producing a mushroom cloud 7 times the height of Mount Everest. The shock wave traversed the entire circumference of the Earth 3 times, while causing partial breakage of window panes up to a distance of 900 km. You already know why we are lucky that the Cold War did not turn into a "hot war".

During the siege of Leningrad in World War II, a group of Soviet scientists packed up a bunch of cruciferous seeds and moved them to the basement of the Hermitage Museum in an effort to protect the world's largest seed bank. They refused to eat any of them, and by the end of the siege in the spring of 1944, 9 of them had starved to death. /bota.al/