Curated category
Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- Sergei ProkofievSergei Prokofiev died on the 5th of March 1953 , the same day as Joseph Stalin. His coffin had to be carried by hand through the back streets of Moscow, away…
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several…
- Garry KasparovOn the 9th of November 1985, in Moscow, Garry Kasparov needed only to hold his own against Anatoly Karpov to take the world chess crown.
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz entered the world on the 21st of February 1915. He was born into a Jewish family in Kharkov, then part of the Russian Empire.
- 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.
- 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…
- Arvydas SabonisArvydas Sabonis was selected by the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round of the 1986 NBA draft, but he would not step onto an NBA court until 1995 …
- Vladimir VernadskyVladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky died on the 6th of January 1945, just as the Soviet atomic bomb project he had helped inspire was beginning to take shape.
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades.