Curated playlist
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 who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute.…
- 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 teenagers and lived in an adobe-walled hut belonging to his grandfather. He died…
- Valentin GlushkoValentin 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 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. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left…
- 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 later, Soviet newspapers ran his obituary on page two while page one celebrated…
- 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. The actor's face never changed. Yet audiences watching each version were convinced they saw…
- 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 twentieth century. Below him, a crowd had gathered to defy a coup against Soviet leader…
- 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 from the vast crowds mourning the dictator. About 30 people attended his funeral.…
- 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 decades reshaping itself by force. His father, Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov, was…
- 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. Karpov, playing White in the 24th game, had to win to keep the title. Kasparov answered with the…
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Lifshitz was the second of only 43 people ever to pass Lev Landau's Theoretical Minimum examination. Born on the 21st of February 1915 in Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, Lifshitz came from a Jewish family. The…
- 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. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
- 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 painting. On the 24th of May 1977, a unanimous vote by the Central Committee…
- 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 politician, jurist and diplomat, best known as the state prosecutor at Joseph…
- 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 had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- 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 - nine years later, at the age of 30. By then, he had already won a gold medal at the…
- 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. He never saw the nuclear age he had argued for. What he left behind was something…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey 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…