Soviet Union questions

Siqueiros was one of the most important muralists of his time. Although Siqueiros and Trótskiy were initially friends, soon they grew apart due to Siqueiros' loyalty to Stalin. The painter banded with an extremist communist group and tried to assassinate Trótskiy in his own house in Mexico City.

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (1913-1978), more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent who assassinated Leon Trotsky, the renowned Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, in Mexico City in August 1940. He served 20 years in a Mexican prison for the murder.

The first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, flew in 1963. Space flight programs were slow to employ women, and only began to include them from the 1980s. Most women in space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station.

Vladimir (1870-1924), better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1922 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party.

The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labor camp-system that was set up under Vladimir Lenin and reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. The Gulag is recognized by many as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

The Lavochkin La-5 was a Soviet fighter aircraft of World War II. It was one of the Soviet Air Force's most capable types of warplane, able to fight German designs on an equal footing. The La-5 had its defects. Perhaps the most serious was the thermal isolation of the engine, lack of ventilation in the cockpit, and a canopy that was impossible to open at speeds over 350 km/h. To make things worse, exhaust gas often entered the cockpit due to poor insulation of the engine compartment. Consequently, pilots ignored orders and frequently flew with their canopies open.

Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel (1878-1928) was a Russian officer in the Imperial Russian Army and later commanding general of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in Southern Russia in the later stages of the Russian Civil War. After his side lost the civil war in 1920, he left Russia and became one of the most prominent exiled White émigrés.Wrangel is immortalized by the nickname of "Black Baron" in the marching song The Red Army .

Nadezhda Alliluyeva was the second wife of Joseph Stalin. The couple married in 1919, when Stalin was already a 40-year-old widower and father of one son (Yakov). Nadezhda and Joseph had two children together: Vasily, born in 1921, who became a fighter pilot (C.O. of 32 GIAP) at Stalingrad, and Svetlana, their daughter, born 1926.

The Continuation War was a conflict fought by Finland and Nazi Germany, as co-belligerents, against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944, during World War II. Germany regarded its operations in the region as part of its overall war efforts on the Eastern Front and provided Finland with critical material support and military assistance.

Kalashnikov's Automatic Rifle; also known as the Kalashnikov and AK, is a gas-operated, 7.62×39mm assault rifle, developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It is the originating firearm of the "AK") family. Design work on the AK-47 began in 1945.