35 Historic Soviet Union Stories That Deserve to Be Remembered

None Of Above Elections

26. In the Soviet Union during 1991, voting “none of above” resulted in new elections with new candidates in 200 races. Boris Yeltsin later said the “none of the above” option “helped convince the people they had real power even in a rigged election, and [it] played a role in building true democracy.”

27. During World War 2, the Soviet Union trained dogs to destroy German tanks by blowing them up. Their use was later stopped because the dogs often ran back toward the familiar smell of Soviet soldiers and tanks, killing them instead.

28. The Soviet Union attempted to suppress Genghis Khan’s memory in Mongolia by deleting his story from school textbooks and banning people from making pilgrimages to his birthplace.

29. USSR’s first nuclear submarine was grimly nicknamed ‘Hiroshima’ because it was accident-prone and because 10 people died during its construction.

30. As the Soviet Union advanced toward Berlin, an SS soldier was compelled to play the piano for his captors. Through sign language, they made it clear that he would be executed the instant he stopped. He played for 22 hours, after which he collapsed in tears. They congratulated him, then shot him.

31. In 1940, the Soviet Union shot down a civilian Finnish flight traveling from Helsinki to Tallinn. To help preserve peace the Finnish government concealed the fact for over a year.

32. The USSR built a Skynet-like device (Dead Hand) in the 1980s that would launch a massive nuclear attack without any human intervention if it detected Moscow had been destroyed.

33. Soviet government officials struck a deal with Pepsi to permit Pepsi into the Soviet Union, making it the first foreign product sanctioned for sale in the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Coca-Cola was favored because Pepsi was associated with the Soviet Union.

34. In the USSR, vodka produced by the state-owned brands used to come in half-liter bottles which once opened couldn’t be recapped.

35. The Soviet Union named a crater (McAuliffe) on Venus after Christa McAuliffe, the teacher astronaut who died during the Challenger space shuttle disaster.