The region that formed the TDFR had been part of the Russian Empire. As the empire dissolved during the 1917 February Revolution and a provisional government took over, a similar body, called the Special Transcaucasian Committee (Ozakom), did the same in the Caucasus. After the October Revolution and rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Transcaucasian Commissariat replaced the Ozakom. In March 1918, as the First World War continued, the Commissariat initiated peace talks with the Ottoman Empire, which had invaded the region, but the talks broke down quickly as the Ottomans refused to accept the authority of the Commissariat. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russia's involvement in the war, conceded parts of the Transcaucasus to the Ottoman Empire, which pursued its invasion to take control of the territory. Faced with this imminent threat, on 22 April 1918 the Commissariat dissolved itself and established the TDFR as an independent state. A legislature, the Seim, was formed to direct negotiations with the Ottoman Empire, which had immediately recognized the state. (Full article...)
After the mutineers sought asylum in Constanța, Romania, and after the Russians recovered the ship, her name was changed to Panteleimon. She accidentally sank a Russian submarine in 1909 and was badly damaged when she ran aground in 1911. During World War I, Panteleimon participated in the Battle of Cape Sarych in late 1914. She covered several bombardments of the Bosphorus fortifications in early 1915, including one where the ship was attacked by the OttomanbattlecruiserYavuz Sultan Selim – Panteleimon and the other Russian pre-dreadnoughts present drove her off before she could inflict any serious damage. The ship was relegated to secondary roles after Russia's first dreadnought battleship entered service in late 1915. She was by then obsolete and was reduced to reserve in 1918 in Sevastopol. (Full article...)
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King Władysław II Jagiełło, detail of the Triptych of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Wawel Cathedral, Kraków
Jogaila was the last pagan ruler of medieval Lithuania. After he became King of Poland, as a result of the Union of Krewo, the newly formed Polish-Lithuanian union confronted the growing power of the Teutonic Order. The allied victory at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, followed by the Peace of Thorn, secured the Polish and Lithuanian borders and marked the emergence of the Polish–Lithuanian alliance as a significant force in Europe. The reign of Władysław II Jagiełło extended Polish frontiers and is often considered the beginning of Poland's Golden Age. (Full article...)
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With the pale yellow rump visible. Buryatia, Russia.
Pallas's leaf warbler is one of the smallest Palearcticwarblers, with a relatively large head and short tail. It has greenish upperparts and white underparts, a lemon-yellow rump, and yellow double wingbars, supercilia and central crown stripe. It is similar in appearance to several other Asian warblers, including some that were formerly considered to be subspecies of it, although its distinctive vocalisations aid identification. (Full article...)
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Maria Vasilievna Trubnikova (Russian: Мари́я Васи́льевна Тру́бникова, néeIvasheva [Ивашева]; 6 January 1835 – 28 April 1897) was a Russian feminist and activist. Of mixed Russian and French heritage, Trubnikova was orphaned at an early age and subsequently raised by a wealthy relative. She married at 19; she and her husband, Konstantin, had seven children. In adulthood, Trubnikova hosted a women-only salon which became a center of feminist activism. She also maintained international connections to fellow feminists in England, France, and other countries. Alongside Anna Filosofova and Nadezhda Stasova, whom she mentored, Trubnikova was one of the earliest leaders of the Russian women's movement.
Together, the three friends and allies were referred to as the "triumvirate". They founded and led several organizations designed to promote women's cultural and economic independence, including a publishing cooperative. Subsequently, they successfully pushed government officials to allow higher education for women, although continuing opposition meant that their successes were sometimes limited or reversed. In later life, Trubnikova experienced severe illness and personal difficulties; she died in 1897. (Full article...)
Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Diamond as a form of carbon is a tasteless, odourless, strong, brittle solid, colourless in pure form, a poor conductor of electricity, and insoluble in water. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, but diamond is metastable and converts to it at a negligible rate under those conditions. Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material, properties that are used in major industrial applications such as cutting and polishing tools. They are also the reason that diamond anvil cells can subject materials to pressures found deep in the Earth.
Because the arrangement of atoms in diamond is extremely rigid, few types of impurity can contaminate it (two exceptions are boron and nitrogen). Small numbers of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) can color a diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange, or red. Diamond also has a very high refractive index and a relatively high optical dispersion. (Full article...)
Due to the length of the front lines created by the German 1942 summer offensive, which had aimed at taking the Caucasus oil fields and the city of Stalingrad, German and other Axis forces were over-extended. The German decision to transfer several mechanized divisions from the Soviet Union to Western Europe exacerbated their situation. Furthermore, Axis units in the area were depleted by months of fighting, especially those which had taken part in the struggle for Stalingrad. The Germans could only count on the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps, which had the strength of a single panzer division, and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division as reserves to bolster their Romanian allies guarding the German Sixth Army's flanks. These Romanian armies lacked the heavy equipment to deal with Soviet armor. In contrast, the Red Army deployed over one million personnel for the offensive. Soviet troop movements were not without problems: concealing their build-up proved difficult, and Soviet units commonly arrived late due to logistical issues. Operation Uranus was first postponed by the Soviet high command (Stavka) from 8 to 17 November, then to 19 November. (Full article...)
Little was known about the effects of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and animal flights were viewed by engineers as a necessary precursor to human missions. The experiment, which monitored Laika's vital signs, aimed to prove that a living organism could survive being launched into orbit and continue to function under conditions of weakened gravity and increased radiation, providing scientists with some of the first data on the biological effects of spaceflight. (Full article...)
The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, also known as the Erivansky Square expropriation, was an armed robbery on 26 June 1907[a] in the city of Tiflis (present-day Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) in the Tiflis Governorate in the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire. A Bolshevik group "expropriated" a bank cash shipment to fund their revolutionary activities. The robbers attacked a bank stagecoach, and the surrounding police and soldiers, using bombs and guns while the stagecoach was transporting money through Erivansky Square (present-day Freedom Square) between the post office and the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire. The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others, according to official archive documents. The robbers escaped with 241,000 rubles.
The robbery was organized by a number of top-level Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and Alexander Bogdanov; and executed by a party of revolutionaries led by Stalin's early associate Simon Ter-Petrosian, also known as "Kamo" and "The Caucasian Robin-Hood". Because such activities had been explicitly prohibited by the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) only weeks previously, the robbery and the killings caused outrage within the party against the Bolsheviks (a faction within the RSDLP). As a result, Lenin and Stalin tried to distance themselves from the robbery. (Full article...)
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Fram leaves Bergen on 2 July 1893, bound for the Arctic Ocean Nansen's Fram expedition of 1893–1896 was an attempt by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to reach the geographical North Pole by harnessing the natural east–west current of the Arctic Ocean. In the face of much discouragement from other polar explorers, Nansen took his ship Fram to the New Siberian Islands in the eastern Arctic Ocean, froze her into the pack ice, and waited for the drift to carry her towards the pole. Impatient with the slow speed and erratic character of the drift, after 18 months Nansen and a chosen companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship with a team of Samoyed dogs and sledges and made for the pole. They did not reach it, but they achieved a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13.6′N before a long retreat over ice and water to reach safety in Franz Josef Land. Meanwhile, Fram continued to drift westward, finally emerging in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The idea for the expedition had arisen after items from the American vessel Jeannette, which had sunk off the north coast of Siberia in 1881, were discovered three years later off the south-west coast of Greenland. The wreckage had obviously been carried across the polar ocean, perhaps across the pole itself. Based on this and other debris recovered from the Greenland coast, the meteorologist Henrik Mohn developed a theory of transpolar drift, which led Nansen to believe that a specially designed ship could be frozen in the pack ice and follow the same track as Jeannette wreckage, thus reaching the vicinity of the pole. (Full article...)
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Eduard Anatolyevich Streltsov (Russian: Эдуа́рд Анато́льевич Стрельцо́в, IPA:[ɨdʊˈartɐnɐˈtolʲjɪvʲitɕstrʲɪlʲˈtsof]ⓘ; 21 July 1937 – 22 July 1990) was a Soviet footballer who played as a forward for Torpedo Moscow and the Soviet national team during the 1950s and 1960s. A powerful and skilful attacking player, he scored the fourth-highest number of goals for the Soviet Union and has been called "the greatest outfield player Russia has ever produced". He is sometimes dubbed "the Russian Pelé".
Born and raised in east Moscow, Streltsov joined Torpedo at the age of 16 in 1953 and made his international debut two years later. He was part of the squad that won the gold medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and came seventh in the 1957 Ballon d'Or. The following year, his promising career was interrupted by allegations of sexual assault shortly before the 1958 World Cup. Soviet authorities pledged he could still play if he admitted his guilt, after which he confessed, but was instead prosecuted and sentenced to twelve years of forced labour under the Gulag system (abolished in 1960 and replaced by prisons). The conviction was highly controversial, with many pointing to conflicts between Streltsov and government officials. (Full article...)
Peresvet and Pobeda were salvaged after the Japanese captured Port Arthur and incorporated into the Imperial Japanese Navy. Peresvet was sold back to the Russians during World War I, as the two countries were by now allies, and sank after hitting German mines in the Mediterranean in early 1917 while Pobeda, renamed Suwo, remained instead in Japanese service and participated in the Battle of Tsingtao in late 1914. She became a gunnery training ship in 1917. The ship was disarmed in 1922 to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty and probably scrapped around that time. (Full article...)
This photo of the Nilov Monastery on Stolobny Island in Tver Oblast, Russia, was taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in 1910 before the advent of colour photography. His process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different coloured filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly coloured light, it was possible to reconstruct the original colour scene.
Alexei Leonov (1934–2019) was a Soviet cosmonaut, Air Force major general, writer, and artist. On 18 March 1965, he became the first human to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. At the end of the spacewalk, his spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point that he had great difficulty re-entering the airlock, forcing him to open a valve to deflate his suit. His second trip into space took place ten years later, when he was commander of Soyuz 19, the Soviet half of the 1975 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. The crater Leonov on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
This picture shows Leonov photographed in 1974, wearing a lapel pin with a version of the emblem for the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, which was then in development.
The Sukhoi Superjet 100 is a modern fly-by-wiretwin-engineregional jet with 8 to 108 passenger seats. Development began in 2000; the aircraft had its maiden flight on 19 May 2008 and entered commercial service on 21 April 2011. This aircraft is seen flying off the coast of Italy near Sanremo.
This photograph of Skudina, taken in 2009, is part of a collection of 500 images of Russian sportspeople released to Wikimedia Commons by Bolshoi Sport.
Photograph credit: Arto Jousi; restored by Adam Cuerden
Yuri Gagarin (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet Air Forces pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space; his capsule, Vostok 1, completed a single orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. Gagarin became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, his nation's highest honour. In 1967, he served as a member of the backup crew for the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission, after which the Russian authorities, fearing for the safety of such an iconic figure, banned him from further spaceflights. However, he was killed the following year, when the MiG-15 training jet that he was piloting with his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near the town of Kirzhach.
This photograph of Gagarin, dated July 1961, was taken at a press conference during a visit to Finland approximately three months after his spaceflight.
A late nineteenth-century photochrom of a reindeer sled, Arkhangelsk, Russia. Reindeer have been herded for centuries by several Arctic and Subarctic people including the Sami and the Nenets. They are raised for their meat, hides, antlers and, to a lesser extent, for milk and transportation.
Alexis (1629–1676) was the tsar of Russia from 1645 until his death. Born in Moscow on 29 March 1629, the son of Tsar Michael and Eudoxia Streshneva, the sixteen-year-old Alexis acceded to the throne after his father's death. Boris Morozov, a shrewd boyar open to Western ideas, took charge of Russia in the early years of Alexis's reign, but was exiled from Moscow following a popular uprising. Alexis responded to the uprising with a new legal code. His reign saw wars with Poland and with Sweden, a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, and the major Cossack revolt of Stenka Razin. Alexis was married twice and had sixteen children, including tsars Fyodor III; Ivan V; Peter the Great; and Sofia, who ruled as regent for her brothers from 1682 to 1689.
This oil painting, made by an unknown artist in the 1670s, is now located in a museum in Ptuj, Slovenia.
The Tauride Palace is one of the largest and most historic palaces in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was designed by Ivan Starov for Prince Grigory Potemkin, and was constructed between 1783 and 1789. After the owner's death, it was purchased by Catherine the Great, who constructed a theatre in the east wing and a church in the west wing. Many improvements were also made to the grounds, including construction of the Admiralty Pavilion, the gardener house, the orangery, glass-houses, bridges, and ironwork fences. Although the exterior of the building was rather plain, the interior was very luxurious. More recently, the building housed the first Imperial State Duma (1906–1917) and the post-revolution provisional government.
Maslenitsa, a 1919 painting depicting the carnival of the same name, which takes place the last week before Great Lent. The painting encompasses a broad range of things associated with Russia, such as snowy winter weather, a troika, an Orthodox church with onion domes. Painted in the aftermath of the October Revolution, the canvas was intended as a farewell to the unspoilt "Holy Russia" of yore.
A Chechen man prays during the First Battle of Grozny, January 1995. The flame in the background is coming from a gas pipeline which was hit by shrapnel.
Gorky Park is a park in central Moscow, Russia, inaugurated in 1928 following the use of the site in 1923 for the First All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industries Exhibition. The park was named after the writer and political activist Maxim Gorky. It underwent a major reconstruction in 2011; nearly all the amusement rides and other attractions were removed, extensive lawns and flower beds were created, and new roadways were laid. A 15,000 m2 (160,000 sq ft) ice rink was installed at the same time. This picture shows the colonnaded main portal of Gorky Park.
Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a Russian political activist and writer who helped establish the Socialist Realism literary method. This portrait dates from a trip Gorky made to the United States in 1906, on which he raised funds for the Bolsheviks. During this trip he wrote his novel The Mother.
Although James Clerk Maxwell made the first color photograph in 1861, the results were far from realistic until Prokudin-Gorsky perfected the technique with a series of improvements around 1905. His process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different colored filter. Prokudin-Gorskii then went on to document much of the country of Russia, travelling by train in a specially equipped darkroomrailroad car.
October 26, 2002 - Moscow theater hostage crisis: The police pumped anesthetic into the building, then stormed it from every entrance. The subsequent gunfight left 42 terrorists and 120 hostages dead.
... that Michael S. Farbman's reporting of the Russian Civil War in winter 1917–18 was described by The Observer as "one of the outstanding successes of the time in special correspondence"?
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