Curated category
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
- 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…
- Fidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz delivered the longest speech ever heard before the United Nations General Assembly, speaking for four and a half hours in 1960.
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail 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…
- 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.
- Kim Il SungKim 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…
- 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…
- Lev KuleshovLev 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.
- 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…
- Boris YeltsinBoris 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…
- Josip Broz TitoJosip 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Wojciech JaruzelskiWojciech Jaruzelski was born on the 6th of July 1923 in Kurów, into a family of Polish gentry, the seventh of eight children.
- 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…
- Andrey VyshinskyAndrey 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…
- 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…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim 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…
- Sergei EisensteinSergei 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- Erich HoneckerErich Honecker stood at a podium in Saarland in September 1987 and spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders.
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades.
- 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…
- 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…