📚 The month-long Russian literature festival in Trivandrum has ended. It was organized by the Russian House in Trivandrum together with the Russkiy Mir Foundation.
👥 The closing ceremony was attended by the writer K.V.Mohankumar, literary critic K.S.Ravikumar, poet Rose Mary, and director of the Russian House in India Oleg Osipov.
👨In his speech K.V. Mohankumar noted that literature played a significant role in the development of friendly relations between Russia and India. O. Osipov presented awards to Rose Mary and Dr. K. Govindan Nair for their contribution to the popularization of Russian literature.
🥇 The winners of the “Eloquence” competition on the topic “Russian writers in world literature” were awarded medals.
✅ The honorary consul of Russia, director of the Russian House in Trivandrum, Ratish Nair, presided.

#RussianHouse #festival #Russianlanguage #Trivandrum

✈️ On June 18, 1937, the now legendary and back then deemed impossible non-stop flight was undertaken by Soviet aviators through the "air road not taken before" — Moscow - North Pole - Vancouver. The crew consisting of commander Valery Chkalov, co-pilot Georgy Baidukov and navigator Aleksander Belyakov pursued an ambitious goal: for the first time in history to "connect" the continents by the shortest route - across the Arctic Ocean.

Especially for this and other long-distance flights, the Soviet aircraft engineer Andrey Tupolev in just one year created a single-engine ANT-25 with an extended wing. This design allowed to take more fuel and also increased the machine's planning ability.

🧊The flight, which lasted a total of 63 hours and 16 minutes, was conducted under extreme conditions. Due to Arctic frosts, ice had to be cut off from the cockpit windows manually, and the engine had to be cooled with tea and coffee water (the water reserves intended for this purpose were frozen). Due to cloud fronts pilots had to either pilot the aircraft blindly or change course, which resulted in overconsumption of about 300 litres of fuel.

The flight of Valery Chkalov's team became one of the biggest events in the history of world aviation. It demonstrated the advanced character of Soviet achievements in aircraft construction, proved to the whole world the highest professionalism and courage of Soviet aviators.

🤝 The three pilots feat was widely covered in the press - both Soviet and American. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally received the crew in the Oval Office of the White House. Instead of the planned 15-minute conversation, he chatted with the Soviet crew for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

#FunFact (not so fun at the time): while preparing the flight, a network of radio stations was put in place along the entire Northern Sea Route. In addition, the flight was planned specifically when the drifting polar station "North Pole-1" under the leadership of Ivan Papanin worked in June 1937. The pilots even managed to get a weather report from the station, but just during the passage of this area on ANT-25 the antenna of the onboard radio station failed. So the crew travelled over the Arctic Ocean without any communication.