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
Hard work and no play
A good-sized Soviet factory usually consisted of up to a hundred industrial divisions, with 200 – 800 workers in each. They had to be accommodated, fed, and often educated, and typically to the Soviet way of doing things, that often wasn’t handled very well. So if you ever wondered what it would be like to be a young engineer at a large factory in the Soviet Russia — please read on.
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.
The V-Day. Copyright unknown
On May, 25th 1945 Joseph Stalin made a celebratory speech devoted to the end of the Russian Great Patriotic War. The Second World War was coming to an end, but the Soviet Union was done fighting. The Russian troops had exited Germany and ahead lied a long road of rebuilding and rehabilitation. So in Kremlin, at the V-day Meeting, Stalin had said the following:
Do not expect me to say anything extraordinary today. I have a very simple, very ordinary toast to make. I would like to raise a glass to health of those people who are low in rank and invisible in the hierarchy. Of those who we consider to be the “small screws” of our huge state mechanism — they might be small but without them us generals, marshals and other top army leaders wouldn’t have made it. They are plentiful, they are a legion, it is tens of millions of people who have not been heard of — yet they hold us together, as the base holds the top. To their health!
Today we have brought to your attention a fragment of the interview with Yelena Bonner, a human rights activist, a dissident, a writer, and a widow of the late Andrei Sakharov — during the war she was a teen and now, courtesy to the Internet-magazine Snob.ru, she tells us about her experience during the war.
So — We did not fight for Stalin or the Soviet Union. We fought because we had no other choice.
Military Parade in Moscow
In accordance with the official history the Second World War (in Russia called ‘the Great Patriotic War’) was commenced on the Soviet territory by Germany: the treacherous attack on 22 June, 1941when they invaded into the USSR. This official version of the Soviet Government is written in every history book. At the same time there is numerous evidence of Stalin’s desire to start the war first with the intention similar to Hitler’s . And that is why there is the theory that Stalin provoked German aggression against the USSR.
Buran VS Shuttle
According to the Soviet propaganda, everything which wasn’t invented by the ancient Chinese, was invented by the Soviet engineers in the USSR. Ah, they were said to invent the best weaponry, the best tanks and the best cars.
In reality, of course, the path of inventions had a very moderate development but in order to keep the morale up, Soviet government had the engineers copying things off their American, Canadian or Japanese counterparts. Certainly, nothing is wrong with it per se– such strategies usually allow to save time and money by buying and recreating a licensed version. However, the root of all evils is the mentioned Soviet brainwash on the topic of Soviet superiority in all fields of engineering research and development.
Let’s have a closer look at who really invented what.