Curated category
Recipients of the Stalin Prize
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- Andrey VyshinskyAndrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky was born in Odessa into a Polish Catholic family. His father, Yanuary Vyshinsky, worked as an experienced inspector for the…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…