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In 2007 Mikhail Gorbachev sat for a Louis Vuitton campaign beside the Berlin Wall. The last Soviet leader with a soft leather bag: what becomes possible once a power stops believing its own story.
On 28 July 1942, with the Wehrmacht driving on Stalingrad, Stalin issued Order No. 227: retreat without written orders, and face a penal battalion, the Gulag, or a bullet from your own side. It may have helped save the front. That is not the same as justifying it.
Popular history says the AK-47 went into production on 6 July 1947. Soviet trial records say the rifle didn't exist yet that week, and had just failed its tests. What emerged from the redesign armed a hundred million people anyway.
On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.
In 1954, the Soviet Presidium voted to transfer Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. The session lasted minutes. The consequences are still running.
Before it was about roses and chocolate, February 14th marked a stranger event: the day Bolshevik Russia skipped thirteen days to join the modern calendar.
On 12 January 1903, Igor Kurchatov was born in the Urals. Forty-six years later, under his direction, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and ended America's nuclear monopoly four years after Hiroshima.