Top 10 USSR facts

Commander of the Air Force. As an officer of the Red Air Force during WW2, Vasily received rapid promotion. On 5 March 1942 he shot down an FW-190 and claimed another German aircraft soon after. He became Commander of the Air Force in the Moscow Military District in 1948. After the death of his father, he was considered a dangerous person and was judged in a behind-closed-doors trial. After 8 years of imprisonment, he was released in 1960, but died soon due to chronic alcoholism.

Mikhail Gorbachev is a Russian politician, author of perestroika (recreating), glasnost (publicity), uskorenie (acceleration) which purpose was to abolish communism in the USSR and to finish a Cold War. He left his post 25 Dec 1991 what symbolised the end of the almost 70 years of this country's tradition. In Russia, Gorbachev is remembered to have been responsible for destroying an empire. He got the Nobel Prize in 1990. Nowadays he is still active in public life but not taking part in Russian politics.

KGB is a civilian intelligence and counterintelligence agency. In 1995, it changed its name to FSB. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was an officer of KGB in 1975-1990. In 1985-1990 he had served in the territory of Eastern Germany (GDR), where he'd take care of recruiting spies.

Radar. Duga was a Soviet over-the-horizon radar system used as part of the Soviet anti-ballistic missile early-warning network. The system operated from July 1976 to December 1989. Two operational Duga radars were deployed, one near Chernobyl in the Ukraine and the other in eastern Siberia.

Volgograd. The name Stalingrad was given to the city of Volgograd in 1925 in honour of Joseph Stalin. In 1961 the city was renamed back to Volgograd.

Joseph Stalin. 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.

Black Baron. 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 .

The government agency in charge of the Soviet forced-labor camp-system. 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.

In Moscow. The Moscow Metro was one of the USSR’s most extravagant architectural projects. Stalin ordered the metro’s artists and architects to design a structure that embodied a radiant future.

T-34. Between 1941 and 1945, the Soviets produced 35119 T-34 tanks.