The most terrible and secret secrets of the Soviet Union.

Historical site Bagheera - secrets of history, mysteries of the universe. Mysteries of great empires and ancient civilizations, the fate of disappeared treasures and biographies of people who changed the world, secrets of special services. The history of wars, mysteries of battles and battles, reconnaissance operations of the past and present. World traditions, modern life Russia, mysteries of the USSR, main directions of culture and others related topics- everything that official history is silent about.

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There is probably no person in Russia who has not heard of Uralmash, a plant in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg. IN Soviet years equipment for blast furnaces, mines, blooming machines, walking excavators and much more were produced there. About 40 thousand people worked here, living a stone's throw from the plant.

Many years ago, a monument was erected in the capital of Norway, Oslo. Soviet soldiers who fell during the liberation of the Viking country from fascist occupation. The inscription on the monument reads: “Norway thanks you”...

The division of Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany It never happened. And no amount of furious screaming through the gnashing of teeth of the self-proclaimed preachers of true humanism will cancel this fact. The process, which is commonly called the “partition of Poland,” in fact represented the return of territories temporarily occupied by the Poles after the Soviet-Polish War of 1920-1921.

When the construction of Stonehenge was completed, there were still about 500 years left before the construction of the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

Women have been serving in the army for a long time; they fought heroically on the fronts of two world wars of the 20th century and now command battalions and regiments, but in early XIX centuries, the prevailing opinion in society was that they had no place in the army.

The Industrial Party case is one of the most controversial trials of the 1930s. During times Soviet Union This page of history was carefully avoided, as were many other events related to repression. Today this process is commonly called fabricated, organized to justify the failures of the first five-year plan. But is this really so?

“Enlightened princes and wise generals who are able to get smart spies are sure to achieve great results” (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”).

In ancient times, the Galapagos (Turtle) Islands in Pacific Ocean served as a haven for pirates. Only in 1835, 300 years after the discovery of this amazing archipelago, the first scientist, Charles Darwin, visited it. Almost 90 more years passed, and then in the spring of 1923, the steam schooner “Noma” of the American scientific expedition. It was headed by zoologist William Beebe.

Historical site Bagheera - secrets of history, mysteries of the universe. Mysteries of great empires and ancient civilizations, the fate of disappeared treasures and biographies of people who changed the world, secrets of special services. The history of wars, mysteries of battles and battles, reconnaissance operations of the past and present. World traditions, modern life in Russia, the mysteries of the USSR, the main directions of culture and other related topics - everything that official history is silent about.

Study the secrets of history - it's interesting...

Currently reading

There is probably no person in Russia who has not heard of Uralmash, a plant in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg. In the Soviet years, equipment for blast furnaces, mines, blooming machines, walking excavators and much more were produced there. About 40 thousand people worked here, living a stone's throw from the plant.

Many years ago, in the capital of Norway, Oslo, a monument was erected to Soviet soldiers who fell during the liberation of the Viking country from fascist occupation. The inscription on the monument reads: “Norway thanks you”...

There was never a division of Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And no amount of furious screaming through the gnashing of teeth of the self-proclaimed preachers of true humanism will cancel this fact. The process, which is commonly called the “partition of Poland,” in fact represented the return of territories temporarily occupied by the Poles after the Soviet-Polish War of 1920-1921.

When the construction of Stonehenge was completed, there were still about 500 years left before the construction of the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

Women have been serving in the army for a long time, they fought heroically on the fronts of two world wars of the 20th century and now command battalions and regiments, but at the beginning of the 19th century the prevailing opinion in society was that they had no place in the army.

“Enlightened princes and wise generals who are able to get smart spies are sure to achieve great results” (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”).

In ancient times, the Galapagos (Turtle) Islands in the Pacific Ocean served as a haven for pirates. Only in 1835, 300 years after the discovery of this amazing archipelago, the first scientist, Charles Darwin, visited it. Almost another 90 years passed, and then in the spring of 1923, the steam schooner Noma of an American scientific expedition approached one of the islands - Indefatigable. It was headed by zoologist William Beebe.

Probably, no other country in the world had as many secrets as the USSR kept. The Iron Curtain hid everything that was not compatible with the “beautiful Soviet life.”

The whole world learned about the terrible nuclear accident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1957 only thirty years later. The tragedy happened in the south of Russia near the city of Kyshtym. The accident occurred due to an explosion in a container in which radioactive waste was stored; this container had the shape of a stainless steel cylinder and was covered with concrete. Moreover, it was designed in such a way that in case of repair it was impossible to get close to it, probably because the developers had no doubts about the strength of the structure.

At the end of September, the cooling systems failed, no one bothered to repair it, and it was simply turned off; a few days later there was an explosion in a storage facility with 80 m3 of nuclear waste. The force of the explosion lifted some of the radioactive debris one and a half kilometers, resulting in the formation of a cloud. Just twelve hours later, radioactive fallout fell within a radius of three hundred and fifty kilometers; it covered the territories of the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, and Tyumen regions; in total, more than twenty thousand square kilometers were affected. As a result of the disaster, the homes of more than ten thousand people were destroyed, and about three hundred thousand people suffered from radiation. For the first time, the US intelligence services became aware of the tragedy in the 60s, but fearing a negative attitude towards nuclear tests, the world kept silent about it, and in 1976 a Soviet emigrant announced it in the press. The USSR confirmed information about the disaster only several years after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

The Cold War between the USSR and the West dictated the condition of primacy in all sectors of life. The same position was in the field of astronautics, where the USSR and the USA competed to see who would be the first to launch a man into space. The Soviet Union strictly classified all data on ongoing research, and many of the names of the pilots - cosmonauts, who had been preparing for flights for thirty long years, were classified. This happened with Valentinov Bondarenko, a fighter pilot who was a member of the first space squad of the USSR.

In 1960 he was selected to participate in preparations for space flights, and he became fourth on the list of 29 pilots preparing for the first space flight. Unfortunately, he never managed to fly.

The pilot underwent the training necessary for space flight; one of the training sessions was a ten-day stay in a hyperbaric chamber at NII-7. The test involved being alone and quiet. However, fate played a cruel joke on him. During one of his medical studies, he made a mistake. After removing the sensors from the body, he wiped the places on the body where they were attached with alcohol and threw away the cotton swab. The tampon hit the hot coil of the electric stove and burst into flames. Since inside the pressure chamber almost all the air consisted of pure oxygen, then the fire instantly spread to the entire chamber and the pilot’s woolen suit instantly caught fire...

Unfortunately, the rescuers were unable to open the pressure chamber quickly, since there was a large pressure difference between it and the surrounding space. When Bondarenko was taken out of the pressure chamber, he was still alive, although he received burns over 98% of his body, his eyes, hair and skin were completely burned, blood vessels could only be found on the soles of his feet. Being in pain shock, the pilot whispered that he was in great pain. He was urgently transported to the Botkin hospital, where, despite the efforts of the doctors, he died sixteen hours later from burn shock. Nineteen days later Yuri Gagarin flew into space...

A year later, in 1961, Valentin Bondarenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star (posthumously); he was survived by his wife and young son. The state did not help the family, they only received a pension until the child came of age, and they tried to forget about the family. Valentin was buried in Kharkov, the inscription “from friends - pilots” was carved on the obelisk, and only in the 80s it was attributed to “cosmonauts of the USSR”.

All information about the incident with Valentin Bondarenko was classified until 1986, when the story of his death was described in the Izvestia newspaper.

For a very long time, all data about the famine of 1932-1933 in some regions of the USSR was kept silent, they tried to forget about it and erase it from history, as something that actually did not happen.

The policy of collectivization, surplus appropriation and grain procurements carried out by the Soviet regime led to the fact that terrible famine broke out in a number of territories of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Recently, theories have arisen that the famine in Ukraine was caused deliberately, to eradicate the rebellious people, but this cannot be confirmed one hundred percent. On purpose or not, such a policy took the lives of millions of people.

What is also terrible is that the terrible famine was hidden from foreign countries; they knew nothing about it, or they knew, but did not want to strain relations with Stalin. In order to hide all the horrors happening in the USSR, the top leadership staged real “performances” in front of foreign tourists and correspondents: store shelves were filled with all kinds of products, but it was impossible for ordinary citizens to go there - any attempts ended in arrest. Sometimes such ideas reached the point of absurdity - the streets were washed away, and responsible party workers dressed up as peasants. It was not for nothing that such performances were staged; the French Prime Minister, who visited Ukraine, said that he found himself in a real “blooming garden.”

There is still no exact number of people who died from hunger, but some researchers put the figure at up to seven million people; it’s not for nothing that the census that the USSR conducted in 1937 was classified. Unfortunately, only in last years a truthful assessment of the events and nightmares of 1932-33 in the Union was given.

For a long time, the tragedy that occurred in the Katyn Forest was kept secret, and the world community pretended that it knew nothing about these events. The USSR hid the horrors of mass executions with the help of Great Britain and the USA.

Relations between Poland and the USSR have always been very difficult. In 1939, the fourth partition of Poland took place; more than half a million Poles were captured in Soviet captivity, the majority Soviet authorities handed over German troops, and about forty thousand ended up in Soviet camps.

In 1940, Beria told Stalin that many former Polish officers, members of reconnaissance units and nationalists were being held in camps on the territory of Poland and the Union. Thus, more than 25,000 Polish citizens were branded, whose past did not please the USSR authorities. It was customary to examine their personal affairs with special care and shoot them. In April, those sentenced in groups of 350-400 people were taken to the Katyn Forest to be shot, an especially dangerous overcoat was thrown over their heads and they were shot in the back of the head near the ditch, while German-made pistols were used; later the USSR used this fact at the Nuremberg tribunal, trying to prove that the murders were committed Germans during the occupation of the USSR. The USSR adhered to this opinion until 1990, categorically denying its guilt.

However, Britain and the USA knew about wine Soviet Union. So Churchill, in informal conversations, confirmed that this was the work of the Bolsheviks, but at the same time censored the English press in this matter. Roosevelt also did not want to openly blame Stalin; evidence that the government knew about the Union’s guilt surfaced in the United States only in 1952.

The arms race that began immediately after the end of the war gave a sharp impetus to the engineering developments of the Soviet Union. One of these new products was the Ekranoplan.

In the mid-60s, an American spy satellite managed to take pictures of an unfinished Soviet seaplane. The Americans were amazed by the enormous size of the flying vessel - there was nothing like it in the USA. Moreover, American experts said that such a huge wing span would not even allow the plane to take off. Size wasn't the only oddity aircraft. Its engines were located too close to the nose of the vehicle than to its wings. However, the Americans failed to unravel the secrets of the flying object, until the collapse of the USSR.

The classified object turned out to be the Caspian Sea Monster - an ekranoplane, a kind of device that combined an airplane and a ship that could fly just a few meters from the surface of the water.

The developments were top secret; even the name of the device could not be mentioned. Huge amounts of money were allocated for the project, as the developers hoped that such ecoplanes would be very useful in the future. It was assumed that such “Monsters” would be able to transport hundreds of soldiers and tanks at a speed of about five hundred kilometers per hour, while they would be completely invisible to radar. The total weight of the ekranoplan with cargo could reach five hundred tons. The device was supposed to be equipped with fuel-efficient engines that would consume less fuel than many cargo planes. During development, the designers managed to build only one such ecronoplane, the length of which was two and a half times greater than the Boeing, it was equipped with eight jet engines and six warheads with a nuclear charge.

During the first flight of the ekranoplan, which was built at the Nizhny Novgorod plant and the Aircraft Building named after S. Ordzhonikidze, the giant's designer Rostislav Alekseev himself was at the helm. The tests lasted fifteen years, and in 1980, during an accident, the ekranoplan was destroyed.

Unfortunately, to the Soviet people very often there was negligence and a disregard for their work, which very often led to accidents and disasters. One of these large-scale disasters was the Nedelin disaster. It occurred during preparations for the first launch of the R-16 intercontinental missile.

Half an hour before the expected launch of the rocket, one of the engines started, as a result, the fuel tanks were destroyed, and the rocket fuel began to ignite. During the investigation, it was revealed that the day before there was a breakthrough in the membrane of one of the tanks, and the fuel was not drained in violation of instructions. To speed up preparations for the launch, an external ampoule battery was installed on board the rocket, an hour before the launch, which led to the appearance of voltage in the electrical circuits of the rocket, which led to the contacts closing and an explosion.

By all rights, the rocket should have been sent for rechecking, and this would have dragged on for several months. Commander-in-Chief commanded the missile launch missile forces Mitrofan Nedelin, who reacted rather superficially to the breakdown in the rocket that occurred the day before, especially since he had an order to launch the rocket on Great Day October revolution. The explosion that occurred was of horrifying proportions - all the people on the launch site died, the temperature was so enormous that the coating of the site was melted, which is why no one was able to escape - everyone burned alive. More than eighty people died in the disaster, and about fifty were injured.

All information about the disaster was carefully classified; no official statements were made. It was announced that the commander of the missile forces, M. Nedelin, died in a plane crash. All the relatives of the victims were told that their relatives had died as a result of an accident. However, the information and tragedies still found their way into the foreign media, and already at the end of 1960, the Italians reported a disaster in which one hundred people died, and five years later in England, one of the exposed Soviet intelligence officers confirmed the data on the disaster. The USSR first announced the disaster only in 1989 in the magazine Ogonyok, where an essay was published.

At the end of the forties, the Soviet Union created a top-secret laboratory on one of the islands of the Aral Sea, which was developing the latest biological weapons. The main developments were carried out with the bubonic plague viruses and anthrax. Later, smallpox joined these strains.

It is believed that in 1971 they managed to develop a vaccine-resistant smallpox virus, which in 1990 may have been sold to Iraq as a bacteriological weapon. It was in 1971 that the developed virus was tested outdoors, leading to a severe outbreak of smallpox. Ten people were infected. Quarantine was urgently introduced for several hundred people, and more than fifty thousand local residents The Aral Sea region has been vaccinated. All data about the smallpox outbreak was classified; they learned about it only at the beginning of the 21st century, since the Russian authorities also did not recognize what had happened.

In Soviet times, there were cities that were not marked on more than one map; only those who lived there knew about their existence. Such cities received their status due to the location of secret objects of national importance in them. Get there to an ordinary person was impossible due to the strict access system and the secrecy of the city's location. As a rule, they were given names regional center with the addition of a number, for example Penza - 19. Such secrecy often helped to hide the disasters that happened here, as in the case of the radioactive disaster in Chelyabinsk - 65. However, these cities also had advantages - they were well supplied, there was always a shortage of goods, and the level crime was almost zero. It was very difficult to get a job in such a city - they checked relatives almost up to the 5th generation.

Each of these cities had its own secret specifics. Thus, in Zagorsk-6 there was a Virological Institute, Arzamas-16 was engaged in nuclear weapons, in Sverdlovsk-45 they were engaged in uranium enrichment. Later, relatives of residents were allowed to come to some cities, but for this they underwent strict verification by special authorities. In total, according to available data, there were forty-two closed cities in the Union, but fifteen of them are closed now.

Historical site Bagheera - secrets of history, mysteries of the universe. Mysteries of great empires and ancient civilizations, the fate of disappeared treasures and biographies of people who changed the world, secrets of special services. The history of wars, mysteries of battles and battles, reconnaissance operations of the past and present. World traditions, modern life in Russia, the mysteries of the USSR, the main directions of culture and other related topics - everything that official history is silent about.

Study the secrets of history - it's interesting...