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🕯 A memorial in Leningrad region was opened in memory of civilians of the #USSR – victims of the Nazi invaders – on 27 January, the day of the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad.

🕊 The monument is one of the tallest in the country (47 m), a mournful figure of a woman hugging her children, a symbol of the enormous tragedy of ordinary people.

🙏 150 real human destinies from different regions of the country are resurrected at the site where more than 80,000 civilians, children and prisoners of war were tortured in concentration camps during the Great Patriotic War.

#WeRemeber #NeverForget #WWII
📆 79 years ago, on 4 April 1945, Bratislava was liberated from the Nazis by Soviet troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front and Romanian Army under command of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky during Bratislava-Brno Offensive.

The city was prepared for defense by the enemy, with eastern suburbs of Bratislava being the most fortified area. In order to prevent destructions in the city Marshal R.Malinovsky decided to go around it and attack from the northwest but fighting in the city couldn’t be entirely avoided. Street battles continued for two days before Bratislava was totally purged.

💫 Local population greeted the Red Army soldiers as their liberators. Dressed up citizens of Czechoslovak towns and villages left their houses to take part in spontaneous rallies and festivities honouring Soviet soldiers.

#WW2 #WWII #WeRemember #USSR #Soviet #Russia #Slovakia #historyofRussia #historyofUSSR #militaryhistory #Czechoslovakia #Bratislava #Brno #rodionmalinovsky
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📆 92 years ago, on 4 April 1932, Andrei Tarkovsky was born, a Russian filmmaker, writer and film theorist. Among his best-known works as film director are feature films “Ivan’s Childhood” (1962), “Andrei Rublev” (1966), “Solaris” (1972), “Mirror” (1975), “Stalker” (1979), “Nostalghia” (1983) and “The Sacrifice” (1986). Throughout his lifetime Tarkovsky was awarded prizes of Venice, Cannes, Moscow film festivals, BAFTA.

Several of his works are enlisted as the best films of all time.

🎬Tarkovsky’s influence is seen in modern movies. “The Revenant” (2015) containing citations and borrowings from Tarkovsky’s works is the most up-to-date example.

#RussianCulture #RussianCinema #USSR #SovietCinema #OutstandingRussians #andreitarkovsky #ivanschildhood #russiancinema
📅 85 years ago, on 11 May 1939, the Khalkhin Gol conflict started involving the Soviet Union, Japan, Mongolia and the puppet state Manchukuo.

The reason for the conflict was a dispute over the border between Mongolia and Manchukuo supported by Japan.

Having occupied Manchuria in 1931, Japan turned its military interests to Soviet territories that bordered those areas. The ultimate Japan’s purpose in the conflict was capture of territories and creation of a bridgehead for attack on the USSR allied to Mongolia.

⚔️The conflict ended in defeat of the Japanese Kwantung Army and signing of a ceasefire agreement.

This victory also deterred Japan from launching an offensive against the USSR during WW2.

#WW2 #WWII #USSR #Soviet #Russia #Japan #historyofRussia #historyofUSSR #militaryhistory #KhalkhinGol
One of the most iconic Soviet monuments, the “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” was unveiled #OTD in 1937 at the World Fair in Paris.

The 58-meter-high monument (consisting of the 25-meter sculpture and the 33-meter pedestal) crowned the Soviet pavilion at the fair. It was authored by Vera Mukhina, the master of socialist realistic sculpture. The monument was a great success-all media outlets published its pictures with its copies reproduced in the World Fair's souvenirs.

💫In 1939, during the opening of VDNKh (Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) in the Russian capital, the statue was placed in front of a main entrance; though on a relatively small pedestal which was three times lower than the one in Paris.

📽️ After WW2 the sculpture became an official emblem of the Mosfilm cinema studio. Since then every Soviet film made by this studio is introduced by a logo of a man and woman holding a hammer and sickle.

Photos from The Moscow Times

#Russia #Soviet #USSR #SovietSculpture #SocialistRealism #Mosfilm #hammerandsickle #VeraMukhina #SovietCulture #RussianCulture #SocialistArt
📆#OTD in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova of USSR became the world’s first and youngest woman to travel into outer space with a solo mission.

🧑‍🚀The decision to select women for female cosmonauts group was taken in 1961. Having passed a number of rigid tests, V.Tereshkova was enrolled in the group. She embarked on her space flight onboard the Vostok-6 spacecraft. Her call sign in this flight was “Tchaika” (Russian for “seagull”).

She orbited the Earth 48 times and spent 2 days, 22 hours, and 50 mins in space. Her mission was used to continue the medical studies on humans in spaceflight and offered comparative data of the effects of space travel on women.

The next woman’s spaceflight took place only 19 years later with the second female cosmonaut also being Soviet citizen Svetlana Savitskaya.

#spaceexploration #USSR #Soviet #Russia #firstinspace #Tereshkova #firstwomaninspace
📚Anti-apartheid literature in the Soviet Union

Anti-apartheid writer Peter Abrahams (1919–2017) was well-known in the Soviet Union. His novel “The Path of Thunder” first was translated into Russian in 1949 and was reprinted many times until the late 1980s with hundreds of thousands of copies.

In the Soviet Union this South African work was used by the Soviet Ministry of Education to learn English. Even a textbook for English learners was based on this novel.

📒 Abrahams was inspired by Afro-American realist fiction. Es’kia Mphahlele noted that for black writers in South Africa “realism burst into full blossom” in the 1940s. Abrahams’ novels continued Mphahlele “were to provide an inspiration for later fiction – that of the next decade.” In South Africa Abrahams became a role model for black journalists and fiction writers of the 1950s.

Richard Rive, a prominent South African author and academic, believed that Abrahams’s realism also comes from the social realist traditions of the prose produced in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. Rive pointed out that “Abrahams was intent on showing social conflict in the broad, political sense of the word.”

In the Soviet Union, where South African fiction often had bigger print runs that in South Africa, “The Path of Thunder” became the first widely known African novel. Through Abrahams’s work readers in the Soviet Union were first introduced to anti-apartheid fiction, long before they read novels by Alex La Guma, Andre Brink or Nadine Gordimer.

Moreover, “The Path of Thunder: was adapted for ballet by Azerbaijani composer Gara Garayev in 1957. The ballet was performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. In 1956, in Armenia, Stepan Kevorkov and Erasm Karamyan directed a drama based on Abrahams’s novel, which was seen by millions of people across the Soviet Union.

The materials provided by the Center for Southern Africa Studies of the Institute (https://www.inafran.ru/en/).

#pagesofcommonhistory #russia #sovietunion #russiasouthafrica #ussr #humanrightsday #africa #literature
🚘 Soviet and Russian motor vehicles in South Africa

The Lada Niva, a Soviet-made four-wheel-drive vehicle, first became available in South Africa in 1988. As the anti-apartheid sanctions were in force, the Soviet Union did authorise exports to South Africa. Hundreds of Nivas were imported from Western Europe, without after-market support. Only after South Africa’s transition to democracy authorised imports, supported by nationwide marketing campaigns, began.

In the late 1990s, the cars were shipped directly from Russia, with a full range of spares and technical support. The inexpensive and practical all-terrainer was welcomed by car enthusiasts in South Africa.

🚙 The ability to perform over rugged terrain and its affordability made the Lada Niva an excellent choice for South Africans. The economical car had permanent four-wheel-drive, five-speed gearbox with high and low range and a diff lock. For a small recreational vehicl, it had a huge fuel tank. Its 1.7-litre four-cylinder engine delivered 127Nm of torque.

The slightly modified Niva, now known as Lada Legend, is still produced in Russia and exported to several countries in Asia and Africa. The car, originally developed for Russia’s rural areas and launched in 1976, was the first mass-produced off-road vehicle with a monocoque structure and a permanent all-wheel-drive system.

The Lada took part in the Paris–Dakar Rally and reached the North Pole, the Antarctic and Everest. Nowadays, the Lada Niva/Legend is the world’s longest-running 4x4 still in production in its original form.

🛞 It has also enjoyed enthusiast societies on several continents. The Lada Owners Club of Southern Africa was formed in 2000. It has continued to operate after 2003 when the Lada Niva imports were discontinued. The club’s official Facebook group has nearly four thousand members: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LOCSA/

The materials provided by the Center for Southern Africa Studies of the Institute (https://www.inafran.ru/en/).

#pagesofcommonhistory #russia #sovietunion #russiasouthafrica #ussr #humanrightsday #africa
🪖Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the iconic AK-47 automatic rifle, and South Africa

We continue the series of joint publications with the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences "Russia - South Africa in the XX century: pages of common history", timed to the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the 65th anniversary of the Institute, as well as the 30th anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa.

🇿🇦 The Soviet engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 (the Avtomat Kalashnikova), a weapon that gained an iconic status during wars of liberation worldwide including South Africa.

The 78-year-old major-general said that he produced the AK-47 after the Second World War to help protect the borders of his country. Decades later the light automatic gun with a short barrel meant to be fired from the hip or shoulder became the preferred weapon of South Africa’s freedom fighters. The Soviet Union provided AK-47s to the ANC military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. By the time of Kalashnikov’s trip to South Africa in 1997 approximately 70 million AK-47s had been produced. The rifle’s popularity with anti-apartheid fighters stemmed from its robust durability.

The inventor of the legendary rifle travelled to South Africa to mark the 50th anniversary of his best-known design, the world’s most popular automatic rifle AK-47. “The main purpose of my work,” - as he recounted to a South African journalist - “was to design a sub-machine gun for soldiers who did not graduate from military academies. I wanted them to have simple and reliable weapons in their hands.”

During his stay Kalashnikov visited the factory in Pretoria where the Vektor R4, the standard service rifle of the South African Defence Force, was produced. He also spent several days in Western Cape attending a function in his honour at the Castle in Cape Town and hunting springbok at a game farm near Ceres. He was impressed by the friendly disposition of South Africans towards Russia, their optimism, similar problems of building a democratic society.

📝The materials provided by the Center for Southern Africa Studies of the Institute (https://www.inafran.ru/en/).

#pagesofcommonhistory #russia #sovietunion #russiasouthafrica #ussr #humanrightsday #africa
Forwarded from Russian MFA 🇷🇺
⚡️ Russian MFA in cooperation with the Rosatom State Corporation has issued handbook "Back Home to Russia. 40th Anniversary of the launch of the Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant (ZNPP) Unit 1"

The copies of the handbook were circulated during the 68th session of the IAEA General Conference, opened on September 16 in Vienna.

📖 Read the handbook in full

ℹ️ The history of the Zaporozhskaya NPP (ZNPP) dates back to 1977 when the Council of Ministers of the #USSR adopted a decision on its construction. Site works began in 1979. In 1984, Unit 1 of the plant was put into operation. In 1985-1987, another three units were put into operation, and in 1988 an expansion project was approved for the construction of two more reactors.

🇷🇺 At the ZNPP site, six Soviet-design power units with VVER reactors were constructed and put into operation. Atomenergoproekt (Moscow) acted as chief designer of the project, Kurchatov Institute (Moscow) – was its scientific coordinator, Gidropress (Podolsk, Moscow region) supplied the reactor installations.

The equipment for the power plant was manufactured by enterprises in Leningrad (reactor vessels were manufactured by the Izhora Plants) and Volgodonsk (earthquake-resistant refuelling machines).

☝️ Thus, the Russian Federation is the owner of the project and technologies, and has the whole set of documentation, regarding Zaporozhskaya Nuclear power plant.


As a result of the referendum held in late September 2022, the Zaporozhskaya region,where the ZNPP is located, has joined the Russian Federation. The plant has come under Russian jurisdiction.

Before the ZNPP came under Russian jurisdiction, Ukrainian authorities had carried out a number of questionable experiments involving the use in the plant's reactors of nuclear fuel that was neither in compliance with its engineering design nor initially agreed upon with the Russian organization that had designed the ZNPP.

⚛️ Maintenance and repair at the plant are being carried out in 2024 as scheduled (as previously in 2023). The plant equipment damaged as a result of shellings by the AFU was repaired. <...> Measures were also undertaken to ensure uninterrupted water supply to essential consumers of the systems of the ZNPP power units, as the dam of the Kakhovskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant had been destroyed as a result of Ukrainian shellings. Now the water level in the said pond is stable.

Currently, the Zaporozhskaya NPP operates all standard radiation monitoring systems, except for three of them, which were destroyed by the armed forces of Ukraine, and two, which are situated on the right bank of the river Dnepr,
controlled by Ukraine.

The Russian Side has undertaken compensating measures. Radiation and technological monitoring of basic equipment and technological systems of power units, radiation-dosimetry monitoring of staff exposure, environment radiation monitoring, etc. are ensured. Radiation monitoring data are automatically transmitted to the IAEA Secretariat.

☝️ Russia takes all possible measures to ensure reliability and protection of the ZNPP, its robust operation, to curb threats to its security posed by Ukraine, strengthen its nuclear safety in accordance with national legislation and obligations undertaken, including Convention on Nuclear Safety and the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities.

The very fact of return of the plant to the Russian nuclear community represents a significant contribution to the nuclear safety and nuclear security of this NPP which is the largest in Europe.

The primary threat to the ZNPP’s security comes from Ukraine that regularly attacks the plant and its infrastructure, and resorts to all kinds of provocations, including against staff of the ZNPP and family members, living in the city of Energodar.
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