Stories: Russia

Stories connected to Russia.

Alone on an Arctic island. Then rescue.Ada Blackjack joined an expedition to Wrangel Island. After the other members left or died, she remained on t…
The warning said attack. He judged it a false alarm.In 1983, Soviet early-warning equipment reported American missile launches. Officer Stanislav Petrov judged t…
A hare that prefers the forest to open ground.The Manchurian hare lives in forests of northeastern China and eastern Russia and avoids open areas. Its wood…
She studied paramedicine. She also carried type for a secret press.While studying in Saratov in the Russian Empire, Anna Weisman smuggled literature and printing type in 1902 t…
How do you record a whole way of life? This questionnaire asked 2,087 questions.The first volume of Der Mentsch, prepared after a Jewish ethnographic expedition, was printed in St. Petersbu…
You do not need to know the language. The clues are enough.Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak devised self-contained linguistic puzzles in 1963. They ask solvers to infe…
To return to Chile in secret, he changed his appearance.Chilean politician Luis Corvalán was detained after the 1973 coup and freed in a 1976 prisoner exchange. In t…
After a space-center tour, he made an unscheduled supermarket stop.During a September 1989 US visit, Soviet politician Boris Yeltsin stopped at an ordinary Houston grocery stor…
A two-hundred-tonne bell that never rangThe Tsar Bell at Moscow’s Kremlin stands about six metres tall and weighs roughly two hundred tonnes. Cast in…
Fuel for a 1907 motoring race travelled by camelThe 1907 Peking-to-Paris race relied on fuel stations arranged along its route. Camels carried supplies ahead…
The skeleton flower’s white petals turn transparent when wetDiphylleia grayi, found in Japan and other mountain habitats, has white flowers whose petals become transpare…
Those cannonballs are decorationsMoscow’s bronze Tsar Cannon was cast in 1586. The large iron balls displayed in front of it were made in 1834…
An explosion flattened a vast Siberian forestOn 30 June 1908, the Tunguska explosion struck Siberia, flattening roughly 2,150 square kilometres of forest.…
A fleet bound for the Far East fired on British fishermenDuring the Russo-Japanese War in October 1904, a Russian fleet heading east mistook British fishing trawlers…
A researcher compared a supposed new water with his sweatPolywater attracted attention in the 1960s as a proposed new form of water with unusual properties, including…