Showing posts with the label Russia

Barge Haulers on The Volga

Aug 1, 2019

Before the era of steam engines, the process of moving a boat or a barge up a river was extremely difficult. The usual method was to tow the...

Beautiful Siberian Lake is Actually a Toxic Waste Dump

Jul 15, 2019

The electric blue waters of this pond in the Russian city of Novosibirsk has become the backdrop of many Instagram fans lately. Photograph...

Kyshtym: The Nuclear Disaster That Was Kept Secret For 30 Years

Jun 4, 2019

Thirty years before the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, in what became one of the most devastating nuclear accidents in history, ther...

Soviet Televisions

May 20, 2019

This is the KVN-49, a black-and-white television set produced in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the first set to be mass-produced in th...

The Goliath Transmitter

May 14, 2019

Communication with submarines is difficult because radio waves do not easily travel through salt water. The obvious solution is to surface ...

Berezniki: The Russian City Swallowed By Sinkholes

May 3, 2019

The city of Berezniki, in Russia’s Ural mountains, is slowly sinking into the earth. The city of more than 150,000 individuals was built dir...

Luna 15: The Soviet Probe That Tried to Gatecrash America’s First Moon Landing

Apr 19, 2019

Two hours before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were scheduled to leave the surface of the moon after their historic moonwalk, an unmanned ...

Bone Records: Soviet-Era Bootlegged Music on X-Rays

Feb 28, 2019

During the Cold War, Soviet Russia was a very restrictive place. The media was heavily censored, foreign radio and television station waves...

Sergei Krikalev: The Man Who Went Up a Soviet And Came Down a Russian

Feb 25, 2019

Late in the spring of 1991, Soviet cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Anatoli Artsebarski, along with Britain's first astronaut, Helen Shar...

What a 7-Year-Old Russian Boy Doodled in The 13th Century

Feb 22, 2019

Fifty years ago, a trove of manuscripts written on birch bark was discovered in the Russian city of Novgorod, situated some 200 kilometers...