Showing posts with the label Russia

The Moscow Cathedral That Was Once a Swimming Pool

Sep 10, 2019

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour near Moskva river, Moscow. Photo credit: Valeri Potapova/Shutterstock.com On the northern bank of the ...

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...

Kola Superdeep Borehole

Dec 24, 2018

It’s hard to imagine that under this small metal cap lies the world’s deepest borehole. Now surrounded by ruins, the Kola Superdeep Borehol...

Wrangel Island: The Island of Polar Bears And Wooly Mammoth

Nov 22, 2018

Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, is one of the most remote islands in Russia. Straddling the International Date Line—the boundary where ...

How The Soviets Put Out Oil Well Fires by Using Nuclear Bombs

Sep 14, 2018

In the early 1960s, the two nuclear superpowers of the world—the United States of America and the Soviet Union—began looking for ways to uti...

The Scientists Who Starved to Death Surrounded By Food

Aug 15, 2018

The 900-day Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was perhaps one of the most gruesome sieges in modern history. Hitler’s diabolic ...

What Mathematics Has to Do With The Seven Bridges of Königsberg

Aug 7, 2018

Wedged between Poland and Lithuania, along the Baltic Coast, is a piece of Russia located 200 miles away from the Russian border. The Kalini...

Siberia’s Cold Storage Ice Tunnels

Jul 31, 2018

The Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia stays covered in permafrost all throughout the year, and while the winters are chilly, summers are ...

Yakutsk: The Coldest City in the World

May 19, 2018

Photo credit: Slava Stepanov There are plenty of regions in Russia that can claim to be very remote and very cold, but none as extreme as...

World War II’s Other Iconic Photo: Raising A Flag Over The Reichstag

May 8, 2018

When photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the picture of five US marines and a Navy sailor raising the American flag over the battle-scarred J...

Akademgorodok: Siberia’s Silicon Valley

Jan 3, 2018

Tucked away in a remote forest of birch and pine in the heart of Siberia, 3,000 km away from Moscow, at a place where winters are six months...