Questions tagged [soviet-union]
for questions regarding the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union
43
questions
4
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Did Stalin say in 1940 that "the action of the Red Army is also a matter of world revolution"?
The quote appears in a 2001 paper in English... and only there in that exact formulation.
[Stalin's] policies during and after World War II amounted to “National Bolshevism”—the use of the Soviet ...
- 59.6k
0
votes
0
answers
87
views
Did USSR train East Pakistani separatists?
Here is a video from the defected KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov:
Behind Dhaka's fall - Yuri Bezmenov (Ex-KGB Agent)
The following is the part of the interview I am intersted in:
... Most of the Awami ...
- 1,292
7
votes
1
answer
934
views
Was a speech by Stalin released on vinyl where the entire B-side consisted of applause?
Stalin once gave a lengthy speech that was later released on vinyl. The entire B-side consisted of recorded applause.
I've seen this claimed in one syndicated article, but I can't seem to find other ...
- 59.6k
11
votes
1
answer
508
views
During the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was there a surge of child allergies in Tajikistan because people hoarded soap?
The Hesitant U.S. Rescue of the Soviet Economy Wilson Quarterly (Fall 2016):
By November 1990, Professor Graham Allison of Harvard University had become alarmed at the deterioration of the Soviet ...
- 59.6k
6
votes
1
answer
782
views
Did the US break several treaties with the USSR/Russia after 1918?
Source (last paragraph)
*Here’s another fact few Americans know: ever since 1918, the Russians have never once broken any treaty they’ve signed with the U.S., though the U.S. has broken a number of ...
- 1,011
-1
votes
1
answer
495
views
Did "the" London Agreement of 1945 bind the Soviets in writing to provide air access to [West] Berlin?
One Australian Airforce page offers this nutshell version of why the Soviets agreed to air corridors but shut down land access to West Berlin in the late 1940s.
Berlin was in the centre of the Soviet ...
- 59.6k
5
votes
0
answers
214
views
Did more than 2,000 television sets a year explode in Moscow alone, causing injuries and fires?
Paul Milgrom and John Roberts (1992) state without providing any sources:
The goods that were available were relatively expensive, shoddy, and often unsafe. For example, more than 2,000 television ...
user55018
9
votes
2
answers
933
views
Did Dr. Nikolay Chudinov revive Permian bacteria found in a potassium salt crystal in Perm, 1972?
I have heard of 3.5 million year old bacteria being revived, but 250 mya is much longer, and I can find no modern mention of this astonishing claim anywhere.
However, it was mentioned in multiple ...
- 479
12
votes
0
answers
614
views
Was the crew dropping the "Tsar Bomba" nuclear bomb given only a 50% chance to survive?
Background
The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created. On 30 October 1961 the Soviet Union experimentally detonated the bomb after dropping it from a plane above Nova Zembla. A ...
36
votes
1
answer
11k
views
Did the Soviet Union murder over 20M people under its control after the war?
Richard Rumelt (business professor at UCLA, 2011):
During the whole post-WWII period, the Soviet Union murdered upward of 20 million people, its own citizens and others under its control
True?
user17967
6
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Does this photo depict a human flesh market during the Russian famine?
This distressing photo has circulated around the internet including Daily Mail or The Sun as the depiction of people selling human flesh during The Russian famine of 1921–22. However, the source cited ...
- 887
8
votes
1
answer
4k
views
Did 40% of the NKVD (Soviet police) leadership have Jewish nationality?
Timothy D. Snyder wrote a history book, Bloodlands about the mass killings of Central/Eastern Europeans between 1933-1945.
Jewish Currents, a magazine of the Jewish Left, cite him in making claims ...
user52544
16
votes
4
answers
3k
views
Did Lenin say "destroy the family, you destroy the country", and if so in what context?
Various publications e.g. "The Parent Care Conversation" (which seems to be a religiously inspired book in some parts at least) attribute the saying "destroy the family, you destroy the country" to ...
- 59.6k
2
votes
1
answer
618
views
Were the Schutzmannschaft members mostly allowed to return to their former lives?
The Schutzmannschaft (Auxiliary Police) were batallions of local and German units in German-occupied Eastern Europe, that participated in the Holocaust in World War II.
According to the Wikipedia ...
user50066
20
votes
1
answer
5k
views
Did 57% of people in France believe that the USSR contributed the most to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945?
The following image is frequently circulating when WWII is discussed:
Poll in France: "In your opinion, which country contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945?" (Source: polls IFOP 1945, ...
- 10.9k
15
votes
2
answers
16k
views
Was this Communist Party Directive from 1943 genuine?
When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them after
suitable buildups as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic and used the
prestige of anti-fascist and tolerance organisations to ...
- 259
-2
votes
2
answers
854
views
Is the March of the Immortal Regiment a cult of the German Third Reich?
The March of the Immortal Regiment is a recent tradition which is part of the annual Moscow Victory Day Parade
Russian journalist and politician, Alexander Nevzorov has criticised it:
(Inaccurate ...
- 115
7
votes
2
answers
883
views
Was there ever a speech by USSR officials before 1950 where it was asked of Soviet women to uphold traditional female roles?
In 1949 Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes:
There is no way to directly oblige a woman to give birth: all that can
be done is to enclose her in situations where motherhood is her only
option:...
- 379
16
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Was very little or no new medication developed in the USSR?
Prof. Robert (Haim) Belmaker, head of the Israeli Psychiatric Association, spoke today (2018-01-05) on the סדר יום / Daily Agenda radio program (Note this is a program in Hebrew).
At some point in the ...
- 2,463
24
votes
0
answers
1k
views
Was there a Soviet anti-motorcycle-helmet campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s?
Lessig (1995, pp. 964–965) writes:
Before the 1960s, motorcyclists in Soviet Russia did not wear helmets. In part this was because of a lack of any perceived need to wear helmets; in part it was ...
user17967
14
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Did secret police in the Eastern Bloc use X-ray machines to give people cancer?
This Reddit thread claims that the Soviet secret police used hidden x-ray machines to give people cancer in order to remove them quitely from power.
I've heard that claim colloquially before but have ...
- 7,126
1
vote
2
answers
555
views
Did the US / UK supply the Russians with machinery before or during the Cold War?
I was reading this question on Quora, when I reached the last answer:
I visited the Tbilisi Aircraft factory at the end of the Cold War and was astonished to see that MIG fighter fuselages were ...
- 331
21
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Was the KGB using leftists to "destabilize" nations?
In 1984, a former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, claimed in a lengthy interview that:
@32:11: [...] progressive intellectuals; writers, journalists, publishers, professors of colleges [...] For us ...
6
votes
2
answers
512
views
Did the amount of bureaucrats increase in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union?
David Graber says in this interview on The Real News,
My favorite example is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 10 years between, I think it was 1991 or two, and 2002, the total ...
- 29.5k
10
votes
0
answers
466
views
Were many of the people McCarthy accused paid Soviet spies? [closed]
According to an answer on this question on the WorldBuilding StackExchange
There were plenty of communists in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. It's popular today to laugh at the paranoia of ...
1
vote
2
answers
933
views
Does Liberation Theology have its roots from the KGB and the Soviet Union?
Trinity Church was affiliated and steeped in Liberation Theology. Recent reports (below) indicate that this philosophy was founded in the USSR as a Cold War plot to help undermine America, based on ...
user36356
8
votes
0
answers
411
views
Did Stalin personally tell Churchill that "the great bulk" of "10 millions" people were "wiped out" during collectivization?
The War Memoirs of Winston Churchill: Face to Face with Stalin Life Magazine 30 October 1950 at pages 104 and 106:
[about 1am August 18, 1942]
"I thought you would have found it bad," said ...
- 105k
20
votes
1
answer
4k
views
Did Stalin kill more than 10 million People?
There are many sources claiming that Stalin killed between 20 and 60 million people. A few articles with this claim:
In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper ...
- 301
1
vote
1
answer
375
views
Was Ignaty Karpezo buried alive and then found alive?
Wikipedia claims the following. Ignaty Karpezo was a general during WWII. After a heavy bombing he was found without signs of life. A medic determined death. He was buried consequently.
But after a ...
- 868
4
votes
0
answers
385
views
Was it common in the USSR for an enterprise to buy steel knives so to melt down them for steel?
This article claims it was common in the USSR if an enterprise needed steel, to buy say knives or other steel goods and melt them for steel.
In general, control by the ruble was designed to ...
- 868
13
votes
2
answers
22k
views
Did 80% of Soviet males born in 1923 die in WWII?
I found this fact on OMG Facts:
80% of Soviet males born in 1923 died in WWII.
Not surprisingly, Russia was the country with the highest WW2 causalities, with over 21 million.
I can't find ...
- 132
7
votes
0
answers
473
views
Stalin's absent-minded signature resulted in Hotel Moskva having two designs?
Is this explanation true/false/unverifiable?
Four Seasons Hotel Moscow (Wikipedia):
The original hotel was notable for its use of two different designs for the wings off the central structure. ...
user17967
31
votes
3
answers
16k
views
Did a Soviet nail factory produce useless nails to improve metrics?
We've all heard the story, which sounds for all the world like a typical urban legend. It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made
nails. ...
- 1,465
25
votes
1
answer
21k
views
Is this video of the Soviet Dog Revival Experiment real?
In this video a dog's head is brought back to life by artificially injecting blood and air. The dog's head reacted to sound and touch and used its tongue to taste.
I am not skeptic about its ...
- 2,343
7
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Were the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany de facto allies in September 1939?
"A German and a Soviet officer shaking hands at the end of the Invasion of Poland." (source)
On the 17th of September 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, following a German invasion ...
- 26.6k
22
votes
1
answer
24k
views
Did the Soviet Union ban microwave ovens in 1976?
Some anti-microwave evangelists make the claim that the USSR banned microwave ovens in 1976 following a study which raised health concerns. Sometimes an additional claim is made that the ban lasted ...
- 322
13
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Was Greenpeace ever sponsored by the KGB?
As an urban legend, I've heard this claim many times. Allegedly, in the 1970s, the KGB sponsored various Western "anti-war" movements, especially the ones that could hinder Western nuclear ...
- 26.6k
7
votes
3
answers
7k
views
Did the USSR have better tanks than Germany in WW2?
Prompted by this question and a comment by matt_black. The T-34 is often cited as the best tank of WW2. However some articles paint a very different picture.
Quote:
According to the head of the ...
- 573
14
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Did the USSR have 21 thousand tanks at the beginning of WW2?
In the Icebreaker series by Viktor Suvorov, he says that at the beginning of World War 2, the Soviet Union had roughly 7 times as many tanks as Nazi Germany, which had 3000-4000 tanks.
I can't ...
- 578
21
votes
1
answer
4k
views
Was Oppenheimer a spy passing nuclear secrets to Soviet agents?
From Los Angeles Times:
A Soviet spy chief's memoirs published here today claim that the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the U.S. atomic bomb project during and after World War II, passed ...
- 3,963
13
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Is this graph of life expectancy pre and post Chernobyl accurate?
Is the following graph of male life expectancy of ex-Soviet states spanning Chernobyl accurate?
The source of the graph is a blog post (チェルノブイリ事故後の平均寿命), which according to google translate means "...
- 38.9k
173
votes
1
answer
24k
views
Did NASA invest a million dollars in the research of a space pen, when the USSR simply used a pencil?
I encountered this picture of the "Russian space pen" from the MIT Museum gift shop
When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized that the ball-point pen would not ...
- 31.6k
13
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Is there a Soviet doomsday device called "Perimeter" or "Dead Hand"?
I stumbled upon an article on wired.com which told details about an automatic nuclear retaliation system build by the soviets in the mid-eighties. This system is supposed to ensure destruction of the ...
- 233