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Curated playlist

Recipients of the Order of Lenin

  • Nikita Khrushchev15 minNikita 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 Stalin10 minJoseph 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.…
  • Fidel Castro15 minFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz delivered the longest speech ever heard before the United Nations General Assembly, speaking for four and a half hours in 1960. The audience included Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Egyptian president Gamal…
  • Mikhail Gorbachev13 minMikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as teenagers and lived in an adobe-walled hut belonging to his grandfather. He died…
  • Alexei Kosygin13 minAlexei Kosygin spent the last night of his life alone in a Moscow hospital, stripped of his government protection, his communications, and the luxury goods he had accumulated across five decades of Soviet power. When he died on the 18th of…
  • Mikhail Suslov12 minMikhail 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 era. Born in 1902 in the village of Shakhovskoye in Saratov Governorate, he rose…
  • Leonid Brezhnev19 minLeonid 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,…
  • Vyacheslav Molotov16 minVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
  • Valentin Glushko5 minValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother. At age fourteen, he read novels by Jules Verne that sparked his interest in aeronautics. He wrote a letter to…
  • Yuri Andropov15 minYuri 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. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left…
  • Kim Il Sung15 minKim Il Sung arrived at the Korean port of Wonsan on the 19th of September 1945, stepping off a ship as a 33-year-old captain in the Soviet Red Army after 26 years away from the peninsula. According to one Soviet official, he had been…
  • Konstantin Chernenko10 minKonstantin 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 later, Soviet newspapers ran his obituary on page two while page one celebrated…
  • Lavrentiy Beria14 minLavrentiy 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 at Kuntsevo ordering everyone not to panic. Twelve hours would pass before anyone…
  • Lev Kuleshov7 minLev Kuleshov placed the same footage of an actor named Ivan Mozzhukhin next to a bowl of soup, then a coffin, then a woman reclining on a couch. The actor's face never changed. Yet audiences watching each version were convinced they saw…
  • Alexei Leonov11 minAlexei 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…
  • Boris Yeltsin15 minBoris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament on a sweltering August day in 1991 and delivered a speech that would echo across the twentieth century. Below him, a crowd had gathered to defy a coup against Soviet leader…
  • Josip Broz Tito16 minJosip Broz, known to the world as Tito, once wrote a letter that read: "Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle." He added that if it did not stop, he would send one…
  • Svetlana Savitskaya10 minSvetlana 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 Voroshilov10 minKliment 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…
  • Wojciech Jaruzelski12 minWojciech Jaruzelski was born on the 6th of July 1923 in Kurów, into a family of Polish gentry, the seventh of eight children. Before he turned twenty, his father would be dead in a Soviet camp, his eyes would be permanently damaged from…
  • Dmitri Shostakovich14 minDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
  • Andrei Sakharov12 minAndrei 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. Born in Moscow on the 21st of May 1921, he grew up in a household shaped by…
  • Nikolai Podgorny10 minNikolai 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 painting. On the 24th of May 1977, a unanimous vote by the Central Committee…
  • Andrey Vyshinsky16 minAndrey Vyshinsky is remembered for a chilling line attributed to him from the Stalin era: "Give me a man and I will find the crime." Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat, best known as the state prosecutor at Joseph…
  • Lev Landau9 minLev 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 had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
  • Maxim Gorky16 minMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
  • Sergei Eisenstein10 minSergei Eisenstein arrived in Hollywood in May 1930 with a contract worth $100,000 and an invitation from Paramount Pictures to make a film in the United States. He had already directed two of the most celebrated silent films in history. He…
  • Alexander Prokhorov9 minAlexander 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 of the world. That unusual origin - an Australian childhood, a Russian soul, a…
  • Trofim Lysenko13 minTrofim 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 more than three decades. He was not a polished academic. He had only learned to…
  • Valentina Tereshkova11 minIt 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 Gagarin13 minYuri 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 Polyakov7 minValeri 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…
  • Erich Honecker12 minErich Honecker stood at a podium in Saarland in September 1987 and spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders. The crowd listening to him knew that this man, born in their region three-quarters of a century…
  • Sergey Mikhalkov5 minSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…
  • Richard Sorge16 minRichard 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.…
  • Georgy Sviridov6 minGeorgy Sviridov wrote the piece of music that millions of Soviet citizens heard every evening. Yet most of them never connected it to his name. His score for the 1965 film Time, Forward! supplied the opening theme for Vremya, the nightly…

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