Articles

The Soviet space program gave the world the first artificial Earth satellite, the first planet rover and the first space station. On April 12, 1961, the era of space exploration for all mankind has begun! It started at the end of the 19th century with a Kaluga school teacher — the founder of theoretical cosmonautics Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

On December 5, 1957, the icebreaker Lenin, the world's first nuclear-powered surface vessel and the world's first civilian nuclear-powered vessel left the Leningrad shipyard. During her thirty years of service, she made it possible to significantly expand navigation in the northern latitudes and led 3741 transport through the icefields. Being a symbol of the technological and scientific victory of the Soviet Union in peaceful nuclear development, it was visited by Yuri Gagarin, future US President Richard Nixon, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Fidel Castro, Alexandra Pakhmutova played the piano in the wardroom trimmed with Karelian birch. Once having pulled ahead, Russia continues to hold the palm in the nuclear icebreaker fleet, the largest and the most powerful in the world icebreaker «Arktika» was just launched.

   During the Russian Empire military campaign in Central Asia on the 4th of December 1864, a hundred Cossacks left the city of Turkestan to secure the convoy passage. Small reconnaissance raid turned into a three-day battle with the ten-thousandth army of the Kokand Khanate, as a result, more than half a hundred were killed, but the rest breakthrough and reunited with the main body of the army. The Khan had to change his plans. The glory of this hundred is shining through the centuries.

   On July 17 1941 the German blitzkrieg, which already brought most of Europe to its knees, clanking its tracks, entered Soviet soil. Sergeant Nikolay Sirotinin volunteered to delay the advancing German troops along the Warsaw-Moscow highway. 57 enemy soldiers and officers were fallen in waves of rye over the Belarusian river Dobrost. Heroic deed of a lone artillery crewman with a light 45mm cannon.

For the first time in human history, an airplane was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile in 1959 over Beijing. The C-75 air defense system opened a new era of anti-air warfare. The key role of the Soviet Union in the Vietnam war. 

In 1654, the city of Smolensk was finally returned by the tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich, marking a breakthrough in the 150-year rivalry between the Commonwealth and the Muscovite kingdom, which could have ended with the creation of a powerful united East Slavic state, but led to the fall and subsequent partitions of Poland.

In 2016 the mercenaries of the most famous Russian private military "orchestra" named after Wagner entered the arches of the ancient city of Palmyra, after almost two thousand years after the Roman Emperor Aurelian. The history of the biggest Russian/Soviet military success in 21 century. 

Three thousand years ago, both sides of the Cimmerian Bosporus, currently known as the Kerch Strait, was owned by the Cimmerians, then they were replaced by the Scythians, Greeks, Goths, ninth-century Russian Tmutarakan state, then the Mongols, the Genoese, Tatars, and on March 18, 2014, both banks returned to Russian Federation. 

   I-16 is the first serial monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear, the last with an open cockpit and the perfect match for the silk scarves and brave Soviet pilots. The heroic story of the first years of the Civil war in Spain.

   Where ancient Kimmerians come from?

     «Если в детстве у тебя над кроватью висел постер Арнольда в меховых трусах, то тебе точно будет интересно услышать историю, в которой нашлось место двум самоубийствам, великому переселению народов, Шварценеггеру, Толкиену и Рене Зеллвегер».

     Константин Подстрешный — редактор «Навигатора игрового мира», ездил в Кросс-Плейнс, Техас, США, на фестиваль для почитателей творчества Роберта Говарда. В сентябре 2011 эта статья была издана в журнале FHM, теперь, с разрешения автора и небольшими дополнениями, я с радостью публикую ее здесь и отмечаю точку на карте для будущего паломничества.

 О казачьих песнях, красных звездах, бомбах ФАБ-1500 и поиске целевой аудитории.