Curated category
Russian atheists
- 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…
- Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov was born on the feast day of St. Anthony the Great in Taganrog, a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov, and he died on the 15th of July 1904…
- 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…
- 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…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D.
- 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…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive.
- Vissarion BelinskyVissarion Belinsky died on the eve of his arrest. The Tsar's police were coming for him on account of his political views, but consumption took him first in…
- George GamowGeorgiy Antonovich Gamow was born in Odessa, Russian Empire, now Odesa, Ukraine. His father taught Russian language and literature while his mother taught…
- 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.
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district.
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match…
- Nikolai VavilovNikolai Vavilov carried a pet lizard in his pocket through the halls of the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy. That small, eccentric detail captures something…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox…
- 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…
- 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.
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff inserted tiny citrus thorns into the larvae of starfish and then waited. What he saw in 1882 would alter the course of medicine.
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own…
- Alexander ZinovievAlexander Zinoviev was born on the 29th of October 1922 in a peasant village called Pakhtino, in the Kostroma Governorate of Russia.
- Anton RubinsteinAnton Rubinstein once told a young Josef Hofmann, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do. If you can." That final dare captures the man entirely.
- Konstantin TsiolkovskyKonstantin Tsiolkovsky, a self-taught Russian school teacher who spent his days in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, wrote the mathematical foundation…