Soviet history

History

14 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring

Common starting questions

• Why do Soviet apartment blocks all look identical?

Rabbit holes

1. the Tetris rights saga

   Written on a Soviet computer with no graphics in 1984, then a mess of Western companies selling rights they didn't have. The Game Boy deal happened in Moscow with everyone in different hotels.

   Ben Adler · 6 sources

2. the Moscow Metro was built to look like palaces

   'Palaces for the people'. Chandeliers, mosaics, marble. Also built deep enough to double as bomb shelters.

   Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources

3. Venera: the Soviet probes that landed on Venus and sent back photos

   Venera 13 lasted 127 minutes on the surface of Venus, at roughly 470°C and 90 atmospheres. Its photos (and Venera 14's) are still the only color images from the surface. Nobody talks about this enough.

   Nikolai Volkov · 5 sources

4. the deepest hole humans ever dug is 23 cm wide

   12,262 m deep. They stopped because rock at 180°C was behaving more like plastic. The 'screams from hell' story was a 1989 hoax that spread through Christian broadcasting.

   Anya Petrova · 4 sources

5. the theremin guy also built one of the best spy bugs ever

   Started with Clara Rockmore videos, ended up in Cold War espionage. Theremin went back to the USSR, got sent to a prison lab, and designed a passive listening device that hung in the US ambassador's study in Moscow for seven years before anyone found it.

   Marcus Thompson · 7 sources

6. Stalin's Seven Sisters

   Marcus Thompson · 4 sources

7. the Soviets built a ternary computer

   Setun used balanced ternary (−1, 0, +1) instead of binary. About 50 were built in the 1950s-60s. Balanced ternary makes negative numbers and rounding really elegant.

   Callie Sutherland · 5 sources

8. the Russian Woodpecker

   Shortwave listeners heard a mysterious tapping all over the world in the 70s and 80s. It was a giant over-the-horizon radar near Chernobyl. The antenna is still standing there.

   Nikolai Volkov · 4 sources

9. the Soviet internet that never happened

   Glushkov proposed a nationwide computer network to run the planned economy in the 60s. It died in ministry turf wars. Benjamin Peters' book title says it: 'How Not to Network a Nation'.

   Dmitri Kuznetsov · 5 sources

10. why every ex-Soviet city has the same apartment blocks

    Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources

11. in 1969 British scientists took a laser to Moscow to check a Soviet fusion claim

    The Soviets reported tokamak temperatures that Western physicists didn't believe. So a team from Culham brought their own laser diagnostic to the Kurchatov Institute, in the middle of the Cold War, and confirmed it. After that basically everyone started building tokamaks.

    Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources

12. the An-225, the biggest plane ever, was built to carry a space shuttle

    Only one was ever completed. Built to piggyback the Buran shuttle, then spent decades hauling oversized cargo. Destroyed at Hostomel in 2022.

    Zoë Tran · 4 sources

13. bone music: Soviet bootlegs pressed on X-rays

    Banned jazz and rock'n'roll cut into old hospital X-ray film. You can see someone's ribcage while you listen to Elvis. Barely playable and incredible.

    Rosa Delacroix · 4 sources

14. cosmonauts carried a triple-barreled gun because of wolves

    Voskhod 2 landed off-course in the Siberian forest in 1965 and the crew spent a cold night there. Afterward cosmonaut survival kits included the TP-82 until 2007.

    Dev Malhotra · 4 sources