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Heroes of Socialist Labour

  • Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev stood before a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of February 1956, and in four hours dismantled the reputation of a man…
  • Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin signed his articles "K. Stalin", an alias drawn from the Russian word for steel, translated as "Man of Steel." The man who chose it was born…
  • Alexei KosyginAlexei Kosygin spent the last night of his life alone in a Moscow hospital, stripped of his government protection, his communications, and the luxury goods…
  • Mikhail SuslovMikhail Andreyevich Suslov held the Soviet Union's ideological line for nearly four decades, yet he remains one of the most obscure figures of the Cold War…
  • Leonid BrezhnevLeonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared…
  • Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D.
  • Valentin GlushkoValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother.
  • Yuri AndropovYuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union.
  • Konstantin ChernenkoKonstantin Ustinovich Chernenko became the de jure leader of the Soviet Union on the 13th of February 1984, and by the time he died just over thirteen months…
  • Lavrentiy BeriaLavrentiy Beria stood over Stalin's paralysed body on the 2nd of March 1953, dismissed the frantic aide who pleaded for a doctor, and walked out of the dacha…
  • Alexei LeonovAlexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born on the 30th of May 1934 in Listvyanka, a small settlement in West Siberian Krai, and he died in Moscow on the 11th of…
  • Kliment VoroshilovKliment Voroshilov put on his military uniform one winter morning in 1969, fully decorated with his medals, called a car, and drove himself to the hospital.
  • Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow.
  • Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov was the man who built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit the damage it could do.
  • Nikolai PodgornyNikolai Podgorny held the highest ceremonial office in the Soviet Union for more than a decade, yet his story ends with him being physically removed from a…
  • Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he…
  • Lev YashinLev Yashin won the Ballon d'Or in 1963 as a goalkeeper. That sentence alone deserves a pause. In the entire history of that award, given annually to the…
  • Alexander ProkhorovAlexander Prokhorov was born on the 11th of July 1916 in Atherton, Australia, the child of Russian parents who had fled Tsarist repression on the other side…
  • Trofim LysenkoTrofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist born on the 29th of September 1898 in the village of Karlovka, managed to hijack the entire field of Soviet biology for…
  • Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades.
  • Georgy SviridovGeorgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was born on the 16th of December 1915 in the town of Fatezh. His father, a Bolshevik sympathizer named Vasily, died when Georgy…