Curated playlist
Heroes of the Soviet Union
- 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 who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute.…
- 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 Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, into poverty in the small Georgian city of Gori.…
- Leonid BrezhnevLeonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared national mourning. He was buried in his Marshal's uniform, medals pinned to his chest,…
- 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 October 2019. In the eight decades between those two dates, he accomplished something…
- Svetlana SavitskayaSvetlana Savitskaya was sixteen years old when she began jumping out of aircraft without telling her parents. She had hidden a parachute knife in her school bag, and her father only discovered the secret when he found it. That father was…
- 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. He had refused, the night before, to let his family call an ambulance. That quiet…
- Valentina TereshkovaIt is I, Seagull. Everything is fine. I see the horizon. It's a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is. Those words came from Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile worker, radioing down from orbit…
- Yuri GagarinYuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on the 12th of April 1961, and did it in 108 minutes. The spacecraft was called Vostok 1. The call sign Gagarin chose for himself was Kedr, the Russian word for Siberian pine. At the moment of…
- Valeri PolyakovValeri Polyakov stepped out of a Soyuz capsule on the 22nd of March 1995 and, refusing the offered chair just a few feet away, walked there himself. He had just spent 437 days in space. The message was deliberate: if a human being could…
- Richard SorgeRichard Sorge arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933, carrying press credentials from the most prestigious newspaper in Germany and a Nazi Party membership card fresh from Berlin. Joseph Goebbels had attended his farewell dinner.…