Remember one of the most remarkable masterpieces of Soviet engineering? Despite only having made one flight, it is still continue to fascinate people across the globe — and She still intends to continue doing so…
The beauty of the beast
Leonid Brezhnev meets Leader of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Muammar al-Gaddafi in Vnukovo airport, late 1970s.
Photo TASS / Vasily Yegorov; Valentin Kuzmin
And one more..
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ©, leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya,with Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (3rd-L) smile while members of delegations of both countries sign agreements. Brezhnev and Gaddafi are surrounded by (from left) Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign minister, Nikolay Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and Aleksey Kosygin. (AFP/Getty Images).
1976
Really, no comments.
The console
A reader of our blog has sent us some photos of the chess computer he dug out at his home: made in late 1980s, this was the game to play.
A merchant’s house. Early twenties.
A heritage building now
The city of Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria, is a town with the population of just over a million, at about 1500 km distance from Moscow. It is beautifully set at the confluence of the Belaya and Ufa rivers, on low hills to the west of Southern Urals. The city was founded in 1574 at the orders of Ivan the Terrible, and the name meaning “small” in Turkic. It is a well kept city with lots of greenery, wide alleys, parks and plentiful historic buildings.
Today’s post is a little different from our usual format, as the modern pictures of the city are, well, modern and not of the Soviet epoch. It is still nice to see, however, how the city has been changing over the past hundred years — and the old photographs are still full of life and very easy on the eye.
The superplane carrying a Buran.
In 1984 the big country needed a big plane. Antonov Design Bureau was entrusted with developing of a plane for large-sized cargo transportation. A six-motor super heavy turbojet plane An-225 «Mriya» («dream» in Ukranian) became the product of the designers’ four-year work. The aircraft, which will celebrate it’s twenty years anniversary of its first test flight, still remains the absolute champion in terms of load-carrying capacity.
A fun post for you today — a series of illustrations for a Russian edition of The Hobbit, 1989. The artist Belomlinsky portrayed the characters in a funky manner. The book was published at 300,000 copies and it was a success — I had itas a kid and it had me scared. I could never get over the fact that someone needs to leave their wonderful cave full of jars with pickles!
See how you like Bilbo, Gandalf, Gollum, the Trolls, the Big People and the Dragon — let us know if it makes you smile.
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. The cover.