It’s always the most embarrassing part of a fallen regime. All those statues, no longer relevant. Usually they come down, hence the severed head of Vladimir Lenin recently unearthed in Berlin. But what to do with all those Lenins still standing? Turn them into the likeness of a more benevolent leader, of course.
The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were controversial. While its war in Afghanistan had sparked a global boycott of the games, the USSR also wanted to showcase its capacity for opulence. To this day, the architecture of the Olympic Village lives on like an undying tribute to the Soviets' misplaced and ultimately…
The Soviet Union had some problems, but one thing they got right was space art. That's why there's nothing better than this gallery of adorable and awe-inspiring postcards from the USSR, looking at our future life in outer space.
After the Soviet Union formed, the new country's first animated film was a 1924 piece of propaganda films. From then until well into the 1970s, animated propaganda thrived in the USSR, offering a rare insight into the republic.
By the latter half of the Space Race between the United States and the USSR, focus had shifted from simply putting people into orbit to seeing how long they could stay up there. And while the U.S. won the sprint to the moon, it was actually the Russians who won the endurance test with the Salyut 7 space station.
The canine members of Soviet Union's space program were stars, symbols of the nation's technological future. And so, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, these pups appeared on matchbook covers, commemorative boxes, ceramics, and more.
These photographs by Rebecca Bathory make it seem as if the apocalypse has come and gone and the world is in complete ruins. Not quite. They’re actually photographs of countries and places that were a part of the former Soviet Union. The forgotten decay is haunting.
Though it played out on the international stage, the arms race between the United States and the USSR took place mainly in rural, isolated parts of the world. The Americans tested their nuclear bombs on a desolate patch of Nevada. The Russians chose a barren polygon-shaped patch of what is now Kazakhstan.
In 1971, a woman in Kazakhstan near the Aral sea died of smallpox. How did she get it? It was harvested, weaponized, let out in a controlled test, and got out of control. Here's how the USSR saved the world from the smallpox outbreak it caused.
Artists from the Soviet Union didn't just imagine a worker's Utopia on Earth. They also thought that the great communist experiment would eventually reach other worlds, too. Here are some incredible works of art and conceptual design that put the Soviet Union in space.
It's almost tragic that Peter Jackson didn't go with this design for Gollum. However, it's completely understandable why the adorable Smaug didn't take off.
In its heyday, plastic was viewed as a revolutionary advancement—safer and lighter than glass, cheap to manufacture, and useful in countless commercial applications. In fact, in the early 1960's architects in the USSR even tried building entire houses out of the stuff.
It's not surprising that the first animation to come out the newly formed Soviet Union was anti-capitalist propaganda, but 1924's Soviet Toys has particularly unnerving imagery, which includes a disappearing woman, a man with cameras for eyes, and a capitalist whose stomach is treated as piñata by the proletariat.
Say what you will about urban exploration as a hobby, these guys sure do find some cool shit sometimes. Thank God they take cameras with them.
The '80s weren't a great time for those living in the U.S.S.R., although those living in Moscow had it better than most. As the rest of the country dealt with bread and meat rations, those living in the capital had access to fruit (sometimes), soda (a treat) and could even see a movie (if you had the money). Here's a…
The Cold War contained a lot of ignominious events for all how participated in it. One of them lingers in conspiracy theories to this day. There was a conspiracy involved — just not the ones the theorist generally believe in.
The twentieth century Soviet space program will always be remembered as one of the greatest in the world. And these posters reveal that it also came with one of the world's most beautifully-designed propaganda campaigns, too.
We recently learned that the NSA is definitely watching us, and as it turns out, our Soviet Big Brother is spying on us too. Intelligence historian Matthew Aid discovered through declassified CIA documents that Russia still has a massive network of former KGB listening stations that are actively eavesdropping. And…
The Internet is a huge place. Some parts of it are awesome, but others are...less so. And falling squarely in that latter category is the ancient .su domain, once the cyberhome of the Soviet Union. It's not exactly well maintained, or well policed, which is why more and more online criminals are using it as a hideout.
Most helicopters are designed to either carry a lot of cargo at the expense of maneuverability—like the Chinook—or be quick and nimble while sacrificing armament and transport capabilities, like the Huey. Russia's Mi-24 HIND multi-mission gunship isn't "most helicopters."