95 Fun Facts About Soviet Union

What does the Russian word 'sovet', the root of 'soviet', mean?

Council: workers' councils called soviets first sprang up in the 1905 Revolution, and in 1917 they shared power with the Provisional Government.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922, soon after the Bolsheviks won which war?

The Russian Civil War: victory over the Whites let the Bolsheviks merge the Soviet republics they controlled into a single union state.

Which founding member of NATO shared a land border with the Soviet Union?

Norway: in October 1944 the Red Army fought its way into its occupied border town of Kirkenes, by then a burning ruin.

Soviet schemes to irrigate cotton in Central Asia shrank which lake to a fraction of its size?

The Aral Sea: once one of the world's largest lakes, it withered after the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that fed it were diverted to water the new farms.

Which three countries call their 1940 incorporation into the USSR an illegal occupation?

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia: in 1989 about two million people joined hands in a chain across all three, the Baltic Way, to demand independence.

On the Soviet flag, what did the hammer represent?

Urban industrial workers: some early Soviet designs paired the hammer and sickle with a sword, until Lenin had the sword removed.

The red of the Soviet flag honoured the banner of which 1871 uprising?

The Paris Commune: the rebels who ran the French capital in 1871 flew the socialist red flag rather than France's national flag.

Which Soviet ballet star defected to the West at a French airport in 1961?

Rudolf Nureyev: told to fly home to Moscow while his company went on to London, he slipped away from his KGB minders and asked for asylum.

Which song served as the Soviet national anthem before 1944?

The Internationale: a new anthem was ordered after Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943 as a gesture to his wartime Allies.

The US-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics protested the Soviet invasion of which country?

Afghanistan: Soviet troops had gone in at the end of December 1979, and nearly a decade of war passed before the last of them left.

Which founder of the Red Army choir composed the music of the Soviet national anthem?

Alexander Alexandrov: his tune began around 1938 as the Hymn of the Bolshevik Party, and Stalin personally chose it for the anthem adopted in 1944.

What was the birth surname of Vladimir Lenin?

Ulyanov: in 1924 his birthplace, Simbirsk, was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour.

What 1887 family event pushed the young Lenin towards revolutionary politics?

His brother's execution: Aleksandr was hanged for plotting to kill Tsar Alexander III, and that December Lenin was expelled from Kazan University after a student protest.

To which Siberian village was Lenin exiled in 1897, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya?

Shushenskoye: he was exiled there after a year in prison, arrested in December 1895 as his group prepared an illegal workers' newspaper.

In which town in Georgia was Joseph Stalin born?

Gori: in 2010 the authorities took down the Stalin monument in its central square, planning to move it to the town's Stalin museum.

What career was the teenage Stalin training for at his school in Tiflis?

Orthodox priest: he left the seminary in 1899 after turning to Marxism, and took the alias Koba from the bandit hero of Alexander Kazbegi's novel The Patricide.

How did the young Stalin raise funds for Lenin's Bolshevik faction?

Robberies, kidnappings and protection rackets: the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, staged to fund the Bolsheviks, killed around 40 people.

Which Soviet secret police chief was executed within a year of Stalin's death?

Lavrentiy Beria: his fellow leaders moved against him in June 1953, and by the official account he was executed that December.

What Russian word named the collective farms that peasants were forced to join under Stalin?

Kolkhoz: after Stalin's 1930 article 'Dizzy with Success' blamed overzealous officials, many peasants walked out of the farms before the drive resumed.

What term did the Bolsheviks use for better-off peasants who owned several animals and hired labourers?

Kulaks: Stalin announced their 'liquidation as a class' in December 1929, and well over a million people were deported to remote regions such as Siberia and the Urals.

What does the Ukrainian word 'Holodomor' mean?

Death by hunger: the Kremlin officially denied the 1932–33 famine for more than half a century, and public discussion of it was banned until the 1980s.

Whose 1934 assassination gave Stalin the pretext for the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge?

Sergei Kirov: the Leningrad party boss was shot by Leonid Nikolaev, and historians still dispute whether Stalin arranged the killing.

The Great Purge is nicknamed the 'Yezhovshchina' after which man?

The NKVD chief who ran it at its peak: Nikolai Yezhov was himself executed in 1940 and retouched out of an official photo beside Stalin.

Which exiled revolutionary, condemned in absentia at the Moscow show trials, was killed with an ice axe in Mexico?

Leon Trotsky: his killer, NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, served nearly 20 years in a Mexican prison and was then made a Hero of the Soviet Union.

What does the acronym GULAG stand for?

Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps: one of its first great projects was the White Sea–Baltic Canal, dug by prisoners of its Belbaltlag camp from 1931.

Which Nobel laureate wrote The Gulag Archipelago, first published in 1973?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: within weeks of the book's first appearance, he was arrested, stripped of Soviet citizenship and deported.

What was the codename of Germany's June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union?

Operation Barbarossa: despite repeated warnings of the attack, Stalin had not mobilised the Red Army, and the invasion caught it unprepared.

What did the USSR sign with Nazi Germany in August 1939, days before World War II began?

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: its secret protocol split Eastern Europe into spheres, and the Soviets invaded Poland 16 days after Germany did.

The Warsaw Pact was set up in 1955 partly in response to which country joining NATO?

West Germany: when Germany reunified in 1990 the whole country kept its NATO seats, while the East's Warsaw Pact membership was given up.

Which Warsaw Pact member formally withdrew in September 1968, a month after Czechoslovakia was invaded?

Albania: after siding with China in the Sino-Soviet split, it had stopped supporting the pact in 1961, while Romania refused to join the invasion yet stayed in.

At which 1956 event did Khrushchev deliver the 'Secret Speech' denouncing Stalin?

The 20th Party Congress: given to a closed session, the speech still spread abroad and helped stir the 1956 uprisings in Poland and Hungary.

Which crop was Khrushchev championing when a 1955 Soviet delegation visited Roswell Garst's farm?

Corn (maize): Khrushchev toured Garst's Iowa farm himself in September 1959, during his trip to the United States.

Where did Nixon and Khrushchev debate in 1959?

A model kitchen at a US exhibition in Moscow: the exchange was recorded on colour videotape and later broadcast in both countries.

Which US agency was created in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik 1?

NASA: the same shock also produced the National Defense Education Act, which poured money into science and maths teaching.

Which former textile mill worker became the first woman in space, in 1963?

Valentina Tereshkova: she orbited Earth 48 times on Vostok 6 in 1963, yet no other woman reached space until Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

Where had Laika, the dog aboard Sputnik 2, been found?

On the streets of Moscow: officials long claimed she survived for days in orbit, but in 2002 it emerged she had overheated within hours of launch.

What aircraft was Gagarin flying when he died in 1968?

MiG-15: he and fellow pilot Vladimir Seryogin died when their two-seat training jet crashed near Kirzhach, and both were buried in the Kremlin Wall.

In which present-day country is the Baikonur Cosmodrome, launch site of both Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1?

Kazakhstan: after independence it let Russia keep running the cosmodrome and its town, under a lease that extends to 2050.

Which Soviet space station, launched in 1986, later hosted visiting American astronauts?

Mir: in 1997 a Progress supply ship crashed into its Spektr module and punctured the hull, and the crew sealed the module off to save the station.

What does the Russian word 'perestroika' literally mean?

Restructuring: Gorbachev first used the word in a December 1984 speech, and the reforms it named helped bring down the Soviet Union itself.

What was Gorbachev's job as a young man before he joined the Communist Party?

Combine-harvester operator: a bumper harvest with his father won him the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, which likely got him into Moscow State University without an exam.

What was Chernobyl's reactor 4 undergoing when it exploded in April 1986?

A safety test: it was meant to show whether the turbines, spinning down after a power cut, could keep the cooling pumps running.

Which purpose-built city replaced the abandoned Pripyat for Chernobyl's workers?

Slavutych: builders from eight Soviet republics each put up their own district, originally named after capitals such as Tbilisi, Baku and Yerevan.

What did Soviet workers build over Chernobyl's wrecked reactor within months of the disaster?

A concrete sarcophagus: it was finished by the end of 1986, and in 2016 the giant steel arch of the New Safe Confinement was slid over it.

In which Crimean resort was Gorbachev on holiday when hardliners launched their coup in August 1991?

Foros: the plotters struck on 19 August, the day before he was due to sign the New Union Treaty they wanted to stop.

What was the popular nickname of the State Committee on the State of Emergency that staged the 1991 coup?

The Gang of Eight: Vice President Gennady Yanayev fronted the committee, yet the coup it launched on 19 August collapsed within days.

Which three republics' leaders signed the Belovezha Accords declaring the USSR effectively dissolved?

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: meeting at Viskuli on 8 December 1991, their leaders declared the USSR at an end and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Which agency became the main domestic successor of the Soviet KGB?

The FSB: when the KGB was broken up, foreign spying went to a separate agency, the SVR, while the FSB kept the old Lubyanka headquarters.

Which future president served as a KGB officer in Dresden in the late 1980s?

Vladimir Putin: Boris Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999, making him acting president, and he won the election that March.

What was one hundredth of a Soviet ruble called?

Kopeck: the name comes from kopyo, 'lance', after the rider holding a lance on early coins.

Which mountain, then named for Communism, was the highest point in the USSR?

Ismoil Somoni Peak in Tajikistan: it had been Stalin Peak until 1962, when it was renamed Communism Peak.

Soviet athletes made their Olympic debut at the 1952 Summer Games in which Nordic capital?

Helsinki: as a compromise, the Soviet team and other Eastern Bloc athletes were housed in a separate second Olympic village.

The first Soviet atomic bomb, tested in 1949, was a near copy of which American bomb?

Fat Man: spy Klaus Fuchs had passed its detailed design to the Soviets.

Which Soviet state committee set national production targets for each five-year period?

Gosplan: the economy was actually steered by its detailed one-year plans, while the publicised five-year plans set only broad goals.

Which organisation, founded in 1949, was Moscow's answer to the Marshall Plan?

Comecon: fearing US economic domination of Eastern Europe, Stalin had kept his satellite states out of Marshall Plan aid.

Which US president's family was given a puppy of Soviet space dog Strelka by Nikita Khrushchev?

John F. Kennedy's family received the puppy, Pushinka, after Jacqueline Kennedy asked Khrushchev about Strelka at a state dinner in Vienna. Pushinka grew up at the White House.

Which hit video game did Alexey Pajitnov create at a Soviet computing centre in the mid-1980s?

Tetris was written in Pajitnov's spare time on an Elektronika 60, and the rights stayed with his state employer for a decade before reverting to him at the end of 1995.

What kind of animal was Misha, the smiling mascot of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow?

A bear cub drawn by children's illustrator Victor Chizhikov, Misha was released on a cluster of balloons at the closing ceremony and floated away from the stadium.

On which island did the USSR secretly place nuclear missiles in 1962, nearly starting a war?

Cuba lost its Soviet missiles after a 13-day standoff, and in return the United States secretly agreed to dismantle the weapons it had deployed to Turkey.

Which Soviet tank commander designed the AK-47 after hearing wounded soldiers complain about their rifles?

Mikhail Kalashnikov overheard the complaints while in hospital himself, recovering from wounds suffered at Bryansk in 1941. The rifle's letters stand for Avtomat Kalashnikova.

Which American ended 24 years of Soviet control of the world chess title by beating Boris Spassky in 1972?

Bobby Fischer won in Reykjavik even though he forfeited the second game by failing to appear, in a contest dubbed the Match of the Century.

What nickname was given to the Soviet thermonuclear weapon tested in 1961, the most powerful ever detonated?

Tsar Bomba was designed to yield about 100 megatons, but its uranium tamper was swapped for lead before the test, roughly halving the blast to cut radioactive fallout.

Which phrase did Winston Churchill popularise in a 1946 Missouri speech about Soviet control of Eastern Europe?

Iron Curtain reached the public from a small college in Fulton, Missouri, but Churchill had already used the image a year earlier in a telegram to President Truman.

Which product did Mikhail Gorbachev's 1985 campaign restrict, sending Soviet sugar sales soaring?

Alcohol was the target, and sugar sales rose by 18% within two years as households turned to distilling their own spirits, known as samogon.

In which sport did the USSR win a 1972 Olympic final over the US after the last three seconds were replayed?

Basketball's 1972 final ended a 63–0 American record at the Olympics, and the US players voted unanimously to refuse their silver medals and skipped the ceremony.

Which US president called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire' in a 1983 speech to evangelical Christians?

Ronald Reagan got the phrase from his chief speechwriter, Anthony Dolan, whose similar wording had been struck from a London speech the year before.

Which newspaper, whose name means 'Truth', was the official daily of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee?

Pravda had a circulation of 11 million at its height, and after the Soviet collapse it was sold to a Greek business family in 1992.

Which Russian word for 'openness' became Mikhail Gorbachev's slogan for a more transparent Soviet government?

Glasnost was no new coinage: Russians had used it since the 19th century for openness in politics and the courts, long before it became a slogan of the 1980s.

Where in Moscow was Vladimir Lenin's preserved body put on public display after his death in 1924?

Red Square first held a wooden tomb, ready six days after Lenin died. Its stone replacement, designed by Alexey Shchusev, borrows from ancient tombs such as the Step Pyramid.

Which present-day Russian city was named Stalingrad when the Red Army won World War II's bloodiest battle there?

Volgograd has carried its present name only since 1961. Until 1925 it was Tsaritsyn, a river port that began as a fortress in 1589.

Which country's 1956 uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks after Imre Nagy declared it would leave the Warsaw Pact?

Hungary's revolt was crushed within weeks, and about 200,000 people fled abroad, most of them across the border into Austria.

Which city did the Soviet Union cut off by road, rail and canal in 1948, prompting a Western airlift?

Berlin's western sectors were kept alive by 278,228 flights that delivered more than two million tons of supplies, nearly two-thirds of it coal.

Which Soviet cosmonaut made the first spacewalk in 1965 and barely managed to squeeze back into his capsule?

Alexei Leonov's suit ballooned in the vacuum until he could not fit through the airlock, so he opened a valve to bleed off pressure before he could get in.

Which American spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz capsule in July 1975 for a symbolic handshake in orbit?

Apollo's link-up was the first crewed international space mission, and no American astronaut flew again for nearly six years, until the first Space Shuttle launch.

Which American spy plane was shot down deep inside the Soviet Union in May 1960, wrecking a Paris summit?

U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers parachuted into captivity and was freed in 1962 in a prisoner exchange for the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel.

Which country's Flight 007 airliner was shot down by a Soviet fighter in 1983 after drifting off course?

South Korea's Boeing 747 began to drift about ten minutes after leaving Anchorage, probably because of its autopilot setting, and held that heading for five and a half hours.

Which neighbour fought deadly border clashes with the Soviet Union over a Ussuri River island in 1969?

China's troops launched a surprise attack on Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island that March, and by October Moscow was contemplating a nuclear strike.

By what name do Russians know the Soviet Union's 1941–1945 fight against Nazi Germany?

The Great Patriotic War echoes the Patriotic War of 1812, the Russian name for the resistance to Napoleon's invasion, and the term was in print a day after Germany attacked.

Where is Nikita Khrushchev said to have pounded a desk with his shoe during an angry 1960 debate?

The United Nations General Assembly was hearing a Philippine delegate say Eastern Europe had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union. Eyewitness accounts conflict on whether the shoe ever struck the desk.

Which small committee at the top of the Communist Party was the real ruling body of the Soviet Union?

Politburo is short for Political Bureau, a body Lenin first set up with only seven members in 1917 to direct the October Revolution.

What name is given to Alexander Dubček's 1968 reforms in Czechoslovakia, which Warsaw Pact troops invaded to suppress?

Prague Spring gave way to a period called normalization, in which Dubček's replacement, Gustáv Husák, reversed almost all of the reforms.

Which physicist helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize as a dissident?

Andrei Sakharov was not allowed to leave the country to collect the prize, so his wife, Yelena Bonner, read his speech at the ceremony.

Which Soviet author was forced to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature after Doctor Zhivago appeared abroad?

Boris Pasternak's manuscript had been rejected by Soviet publishers, then smuggled to Italy, where the novel was first printed in 1957.

Which composer dedicated his Seventh Symphony to besieged Leningrad, where it was performed in August 1942?

Dmitri Shostakovich's symphony was broadcast by loudspeaker throughout the city and towards the German forces as a show of defiance. It takes about 80 minutes to perform.

Which Soviet marshal, second only to Stalin in the wartime command, accepted Germany's surrender in 1945?

Georgy Zhukov went on to inspect the 1945 Moscow Victory Parade on horseback, the pose in which a statue outside Moscow's State Historical Museum shows him.

Which Soviet gymnast, nicknamed the 'Sparrow from Minsk', won three gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics?

Olga Korbut had already made history on the uneven bars, where her backflip-to-catch was the first backward release move ever performed by a woman.

What Russian term describes banned texts that Soviet dissidents copied themselves and passed from reader to reader?

Samizdat means self-publishing, and it grew out of a 1940s pun by the poet Nikolay Glazkov, who typed copies of his own poems under a mock publisher's name.

Which rocket engineer behind Sputnik was identified in public only as the 'Chief Designer' during his lifetime?

Sergei Korolev was named publicly only after his death in 1966. Years earlier he had been arrested on false charges and spent months in a Kolyma gold mine.

Which Soviet duty officer judged a 1983 satellite warning of incoming American missiles to be a false alarm?

Stanislav Petrov chose to wait for a confirmation that never came instead of reporting an attack, and an investigation later confirmed that the warning system had malfunctioned.

Which secret police force, the first of the Soviet era, did Felix Dzerzhinsky lead from December 1917?

Cheka officers were known as Chekists, a label that outlived the agency: it was applied to the secret police for the rest of the Soviet period, whatever the official name.

Which Soviet agronomist rejected Mendelian genetics and used political power to have rival scientists jailed?

Trofim Lysenko ran the Institute of Genetics from 1940, and researchers who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed and left destitute. The botanist Nikolai Vavilov was imprisoned.

Which lake's winter ice carried the 'Road of Life', the only surface route into besieged Leningrad?

Ladoga's ice road brought food in and, in its first winter alone, carried more than half a million people out of the starving city.

Which Moscow building, put up for an insurance company in 1898, became the Soviet secret police headquarters?

Lubyanka stands on a spot where Catherine the Great had once based her own secret police, and the prison inside it began operating in 1920.

What was the name of the Soviet space shuttle that made its only orbital flight, without a crew, in 1988?

Buran never flew again after that single mission, and the orbiter was destroyed in 2002 when the roof of its storage hangar collapsed.

In which capital did Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill hold their first meeting as the 'Big Three', in 1943?

Tehran hosted the talks at the Soviet embassy, and their main outcome was a British and American commitment to open a second front against Germany.