Tag: Soviet Union
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Crimea: Past and present
Crimea, on the Black Sea, has been successively inhabited by Cimmerians, Scythians, and Greeks. Around the sixth century BCE, colonists from Greece established important settlements in Crimea, such as Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol) and Pantikapaion (modern Kerch). The Greek influence during the classical period is reflected in plays such as Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris, the…
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A Polish tragedy and a case without a diagnosis
On the morning of September 1, 1939, German troops attacked Poland without a declaration of war. Two weeks later, on September 17, while Poland was defending itself in the west, the Soviet Union attacked from the east. This two-pronged attack was too much for Poland to handle. On October 6, 1939, its last troops surrendered.…
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Along the Silk Road in Central Asia
The historical Silk Road was a vast network of land and sea routes that connected China with the West for over 2,000 years, facilitating the exchange of silk, spices, gold, and also ideas until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Its origins have been attributed to the Han Dynasty, and Samarkand and Bukhara have long…
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The cosmonaut’s body: Medical politics and Soviet space medicine
Martine MussiesUtrecht, The Netherlands When Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth on April 12, 1961, his body represented more than human achievement—it embodied a radical reimagining of medicine’s role in space travel.10 The Soviet space program transformed cosmonauts into living laboratories where medical science, political ideology, and technological innovation converged. This transformation reveals how the USSR weaponized…
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Saving the starving Soviets with Spam
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands.”1– Nikita Khrushchev In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. The “breadbasket” agricultural regions of Southern Russia and the Ukraine were quickly occupied, causing a food crisis for the USSR. Russian soldiers’ food rations consisted…
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Shostakovich and his mysterious neurologic disease
For most of his life Dmitri Shostakovich lived under the shadow of Joseph Stalin, the brutal dictator of the Soviet Union. In 1936, Stalin and some members of the Politburo attended a performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin did not like it. The next day, the opera was criticized, denounced, and ridiculed in…