13 stories set here.
In February 1959 nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slope of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Urals. Their tent was found cut open from the inside; the bodies lay up to 1.5 km away, some barefoot in the snow, some with severe internal injuries. Sixty years of theories followed. The modern scientific verdict is a slab avalanche.
Read the story →On 24 June 1812 the Grande Armée — over 600,000 men from a dozen nations — crossed the Niemen into Russia. Borodino was carnage, Moscow burned around them, and the winter retreat destroyed the army: barely a tenth recrossed the frontier. It broke Napoleon's empire and produced, in Minard's chart of the shrinking army, perhaps the most famous data graphic ever drawn.
Read the story →Vladimir Komarov launched in Soyuz 1 on 23 April 1967 knowing the spacecraft had 203 documented engineering faults. He flew it anyway because the backup pilot was Yuri Gagarin and Komarov refused to let Gagarin take the risk. After 18 orbits the descent module's main parachute failed to deploy. Komarov hit the Orenburg Steppe at approximately 140 km/h and was killed instantly. He was 40.
Read the story →Dmitri Mendeleev published the first version of the periodic table in March 1869. He later told biographers he had seen the arrangement in a dream after three days of fruitless waking work. The dream story is probably substantially embellished, but the table works.
Read the story →Bolshevik forces seized the Petrograd Winter Palace on the night of 7-8 November 1917 (25-26 October Old Style). The Provisional Government's cabinet was arrested in the Malachite Room. Lenin became chairman of the new Council of People's Commissars the next morning. The Russian Revolution had moved from its February-March 1917 democratic phase to its Bolshevik authoritarian phase in 8 months.
Read the story →Grigori Rasputin was murdered in the cellar of the Yusupov Palace in Saint Petersburg in the early hours of 30 December 1916. The standard account given by his killer Prince Felix Yusupov has him poisoned with cyanide, shot once, attacked with a club, shot three more times, and drowned in the Neva. The autopsy supports the gunshots; it does not support either the cyanide or the drowning.
Read the story →Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, the family doctor, and three servants were shot and bayoneted in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg at approximately 1:30 a.m. on 17 July 1918. The execution was ordered by the local Ural Soviet against the approaching Czechoslovak Legion. The bodies were not recovered for 73 years. The five identified Romanov bodies were reburied at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, in July 1998.
Read the story →The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on 26 December 1991 by a declaration of the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet recognising the independence of the constituent republics. President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned the previous evening and the Soviet flag had been lowered from the Kremlin at 19:32 on 25 December 1991. Fifteen successor states emerged from the dissolution.
Read the story →The Battle of Stalingrad ran from 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943. Soviet forces encircled and destroyed the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus. Approximately 700,000 Axis and 478,000 Soviet military casualties were inflicted. About 40,000 Soviet civilians died. The battle was the strategic turning point of the Second World War in Europe.
Read the story →Lake Cheko is a 500-metre-wide elliptical lake about 8 km northwest of the Tunguska blast epicentre. In 2007 an Italian research team proposed that the lake is the impact crater of a small unfragmented portion of the 1908 Tunguska body. The interpretation is substantially contested.
Read the story →Leonid Kulik led the first scientific expedition to the Tunguska blast site in 1927, returned four more times in the following thirteen years, and was preparing a sixth expedition when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He volunteered for the People's Militia in 1941, was captured at Vyazma in October, and died of typhus in a Spas-Demensk POW camp in April 1942.
Read the story →On 15 February 2013 a 20-metre stony asteroid exploded over the southern Russian Urals at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The blast injured 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. It was the largest atmospheric impact event since Tunguska in 1908 — and the first to be captured on car-dashboard video.
Read the story →On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
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