On this day, 186 years ago, Russian poet Pushkin died after after being wounded in a pistol duel. 😢

This is how it happened...

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10 Russian PRISON TATTOO designs & their meanings

Some tattoos are meaningless, some have sentimental value for their owners.

When it comes to the Russian criminal underworld, however, prison tattoos make up a unique system of communication that may indicate the person’s place in the criminal hierarchy or tell other prisoners just how dangerous he really is.

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How the USSR created GIANT artificial lightning bolts ⚡

In the 1970s this futuristic-looking apparatus created a 150-meter-long artificial lightning bolt. The charge was so powerful that it could compare to a real natural lightning bolt. The structure was called “Tesla coils”. It worked for several decades in a forest in the Moscow region.

The device is still there; it turned into an unofficial tourist object for those who love abandoned Soviet heritage. Let’s look at what it is and what it was capable of.

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⛓️ Check out Tim Kirby's adventures in Russia!
https://www.youtube.com/@TimKirbysTravel

5 WORST diplomatic scandals in the USSR

The struggle against the Soviet Union during the Cold War was conducted not only on the official diplomatic front, but also on the clandestine, undercover one. The Soviet Union likewise engaged in subversive work against Western intelligence services and diplomats. But failures and incidents occurred in all intel services, with the Soviet ones being no exception.

High-profile undercover cases were sometimes made public, like, for instance, the seizure of the Russian consulate in China, or the explosion in Tel-Aviv, for which Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion personally apologized to the USSR.

However, the Soviet intelligence service covered up its biggest failures most thoroughly. For example, the incident when a KGB lieutenant colonel was recruited in France, following which he gave up the names and data on hundreds of undercover Soviet agents to the French intelligence service.

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This 325-meter tall cliff called "Aq Qaya" or "White Rock" in the Belogorsky District is a popular filming location, which is not surprising given that this place could be somewhere in Puerto Rico.

📸 Aydar Daminov

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Happy belated birthday to Boris Pasternak!

133 years ago on February 10 was the birthday of the great Russian poet and Nobel laureate in literature, Boris Pasternak.

You can read our summary of his major work Doctor Zhivago.

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Aurora borealis in Teriberka, Murmansk region.

📷 by @mr_alex_turner

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Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo: The Russian revolutionary’s affair with the icon of global feminism

Leon Trotsky led the October Revolution and created the Red Army. Despite all his merits, he was expelled from the USSR and received political asylum in Mexico, where he and his wife lived in the house of the legendary Frida Kahlo - one of the most prominent Latin American artists and feminists.

The acquaintance eventually grew into a passionate love affair.

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Konstantin Bogaevsky’s 10 most important works

Konstantin Bogaevsky took his first steps in painting in his native Feodosia. There he studied under great marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky.

Later, the well-known poet Maximilian Voloshin called him “the painter of the land” with good reason. Setting up a studio in Feodosia, Bogaevsky created paintings in which he conveyed his peculiar, melancholic vision of the ancient hills and mountains of Crimea.

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Suzdal’s outdoor museum: Exploring traditions of wooden architecture

Among the town’s many architectural landmarks, perhaps the most distinctive is the wooden Church of the Tikhvin Icon of the Virgin, located a short distance downriver on the same bank as the Monastery of Saints Boris and Gleb.

Although the construction date is subject to question; one version states that a wooden church was built on the site in the 1650s and then rebuilt in its present form in 1717.

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