On October 31, 2009, an elderly man, nearly a century old, passed away in Beijing. His name was Qian Xuesen, and in China, he is considered a national hero for being the father of the country’s astronautics program, to the point that China’s first manned space mission, successfully carried out in 2003, was based on […]
Communism
Posted inModern Era
Günter Schabowski, the GDR Spokesman Whose Mistake Triggered the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Major historical events are shaped by a series of contextual factors, whether they are economic, political, social, or all of these at once. But sometimes, there is also an apparently minor element that, even if only as the final trigger, plays a role as notable as it is curious. This is what Graham Greene referred […]
Posted inModern Era
When Lenin and Stalin Robbed the Bank of Tiflis in 1907
The first quarter of the 20th century was a golden age in the history of bank heists, perhaps not in quality but in quantity—if we consider the amount stolen in the first case and the frequency in the second. The transition from famous 19th-century outlaws like Ned Kelly, Butch Cassidy, Harry Longabaugh, the Dalton brothers, […]
