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In 1978, a physicist took a particle accelerator beam through his brain and...
On June 3, 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron — the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union — when the safety mechanisms...
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A stunt pilot doing loops around the Soviet propaganda megaplane crashed into...
On May 18, 1935, the Maxim Gorky — the largest aircraft in the world, a Soviet eight-engine behemoth with a 63-meter wingspan roughly equal to a modern Boeing 747 — took off over Moscow alongside three...
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Russia has 44 secret cities with 1.5 million people that don't appear on...
Russia currently has 44 publicly acknowledged closed cities with a combined population of approximately 1.5 million people. The government calls them "closed administrative-territorial formations," or...
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Two Italian brothers claimed to have recorded dying Soviet cosmonauts that...
The Lost Cosmonauts theory alleges that the Soviet Union launched humans into space before Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight — and that the cosmonauts onboard died. The strongest piece of supposed evidence...
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"If you were to recite a single page, dogs would drop dead"— a review of the...
In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism,...
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Nine experienced hikers chose death in -40°F weather over whatever terrified...
Nine experienced hikers fled their tent in the dead of night, choosing certain death in -40°F weather over whatever horrified them inside. Their half-cut tent was found a month later, still containing...
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RIP Boris Spassky: "one of the greatest chess players of the Soviet era and...
Boris Spassky, the World Chess Champion who faced Bobby Fischer in the legendary "Match of the Century," died Thursday at age 88. Spassky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he became a...
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World's deadliest spot: the horror of Lake Karachay
Standing for just one hour at the shore of Russia's Lake Karachay ("black water") in 1990 would have killed you. Before it was buried beneath concrete and stone, the lake held an apocalyptic secret:...
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20th Century Men brilliantly flips the Cold War on its head, with superheroes
20th Century Men is a sprawling new alternate history comic book series from Deniz Camp and S. Morian. The official synopsis gives you a vague idea of what you're in for: At the end of the 20th...
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The Soviet Union's TOPGUN counterpart
Paper Skies delves into the elite 1521st Aviation Base Maryy "aggressor" squadrons located in Turkmenistan, known as the Soviet Union's TOPGUN counterpart; both schools were established around the...
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CIA releases new documents about Russian telepathy experiments in the 60s
Via Vice: The documents detail conversations an agent had with Soviet scientists and a student about the USSR's interest in developing ESP. Guided by these second hand accounts, it sounds like the...
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These weird old Soviet anti-alcohol posters are wild
In Soviet Russia, vodka drinks you. I thought I'd do a thread of soviet anti-alcohol posters because they are often brilliant, ingenious, and… sobering.First, from 1988, this one says "Passage to...
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Check out this 1931 Soviet guide to turning potatoes into toys
Potato Toys is a super charming, illustrated Soviet guide about how to make toys out of potatoes. I love all of the potato-creatures in the guide. Mr. Potato head has nothing on these little guys. The...
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Watch the Super Mario Bros teach Mikhail Gorbachev how to make pizza
I fell down a bit of a Wikipedia Wormhole after watching the recent fan-edit of the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie (which is even more inexplicable than I remembered). And that's how I learned that...
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Soviet Lord of the Rings
Embedded below are parts 1 and 2 of a recently-found TV production of The Lord of the Rings that's doing the rounds. The special attraction: it was made in Russia near the end of the Soviet era and is...
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A too-typical tragedy of science in the Soviet Union
Botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov had a lifelong mission to prevent starvation by improving food production. His native Russia suffered numerous famines under both the tsar and the Soviets. The...
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The great African American escape to Soviet Russia
While the Soviet Union under Stalin did plenty of internal ethnic cleansing, it also attempted to present a carefully curated vision of equality to the West, in contrast to America. It was a land where...
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Waiting for the American Khrushchev: Who will deliver the "Cult of...
In this powerful personal essay, Institute for the Future executive director Marina Gorbis writes about growing up in a Soviet Union brainwashed by Stalin's Big Lie, and what it took to break the lie....
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You can now play the unauthorized Indiana Jones video game created by...
Ars Technica has a fascinating new long-form article about The Adventures of Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989, an unauthorized text adventure created and passed between...
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The time Mikhail Gorbachev starred in a Pizza Hut commercial
In 1997, Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, needed some cash. So he made a Pizza Hut commercial. Of course there was more to the story than that, but not really so much. He...
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