A Dog Called Laika

With the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite, the Soviets gained a foothold in their ongoing Space Race with the United States. As they did not have the capability to create a single rocket to launch the satellite into space, the Soviet scientist in charge of the project designed a cluster of rockets which, when …

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Literally the Only Time the US and the USSR Didn’t Hate Each Other

Seemingly from the inception of the Soviet Union all the way to present day, the Soviet Union and every version of it that followed has been at odds with the United States. Communism and capitalism are functionally antithetical, and since the USSR and the United States respectively embody each system, it makes sense that there would …

Unsurprisingly, Stalinism Wasn’t Everything It Was Cracked up to Be

In a turn of events everyone should have seen coming, the progress promised by the revolution did not stick around. In the earlier days of the new government, progress had been made towards loosening restrictions on abortion and redefining what it meant to be a woman. Under the new regime, women were given the ability …

Meme

Kornilov’s Attempted Coup Backfired Worse Than He Ever Could Have Imagined

The majority of Kornilov’s grievance with the provisional government rested around their inability or unwillingness to take decisive action against the Bolshevik, which makes it especially ironic that his attempted coup was one of thing things that led to them taking power. The attempted coup was instrumental in providing support and sympathy for the Bolsheviks, …

The Russian Cowboy and the Murmansk Railroad

In the 1915, when Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ took a photograph of himself and two railroad guards posing at a construction site, both the railroad and the war that had prompted the railroad had begun fairly recently. In 1916, Prokudin-Gorskiĭ was commissioned to photograph the new railroad project, in part due to Russia's war efforts. The Ministry of Transportation …