Posted inCulture, Modern Era

Intervision, the Soviet Bloc Festival that Replicated Eurovision with Voting by Turning the Lights On and Off

This is evident with NATO and the Warsaw Pact or the European Common Market and COMECON. But interestingly enough, the Eastern countries also had a response to something much less serious. In 1977, the ISC, the Intervision Song Contest, was born, which, as you can guess, was a copy of the Eurovision Song Contest in […]

Posted inModern Era, Science

Soviet Experiments to Create a Man-Ape Hybrid that Inspired an Unfinished Opera by Shostakovich

In 1932, Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the most significant composers of the 20th century, started writing a satirical opera that he ultimately left unfinished. Its title, Orango, refers to the name of the unlikely protagonist of an almost surreal plot about the life of a Parisian journalist, a hybrid between a man and an ape. […]

Posted inSecond World War

Aimo Koivunen, the Finnish Soldier who Was the First Documented Case of Pervitin Overdose in Combat

Pervitin is the name of a drug that soldiers consumed during World War II for its stimulating and euphoric effects, basically composed of methamphetamine. It was commonly used in the Wehrmacht but also in other armies (including the Allies), either under that name or other commercial names. Pervitin helped soldiers cope with the harshness of […]

Posted inSecond World War

Operation Osoaviakhim, the Forced Relocation of Thousands of German Scientists and Technicians to the USSR in 1946

Certainly, World War II history enthusiasts may know that the transfer to the United States of German scientists specialized in cutting-edge weapons at the end of the conflict was called Operation Paperclip. What is not as well-known is that the Soviets carried out a similar action, adding more than two and a half thousand specialists […]

Posted inModern Era, Science

Two Tortoises were the First Living Beings to complete a Full Orbit around the Moon

In September 1968, the former Soviet Union launched the Zond 5 mission, a milestone in space exploration that marked not only the first time a spacecraft orbited the Moon in a circumlunar trajectory and returned to Earth but also the first time living beings did so. Onboard the spacecraft were two tortoises, becoming the first […]

Posted inModern Era

Kitchen debate, the dialectic exchange between Nixon and Khrushchev during the American National Exhibition in Moscow

On July 24, 1959 Moscow was the site of an unusual event: the American National Exhibition, which followed the Soviet exhibition held a few months earlier in New York, both with the objective of reducing tensions between the two major blocks of the Cold War, taking advantage of the period of thaw that Nikita Krushchev […]