Samantha Smith was a 13-year-old from Manchester, Maine, who wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982 asking him why his country wanted war — and he wrote back, inviting her to visit the USSR. Her two-week tour behind the Iron Curtain in 1983 made her the unlikely face of Cold War diplomacy. On August…
On August 18, 1991, Soviet hard-liners cut Mikhail Gorbachev’s phone lines at his vacation dacha in Crimea, placed him under house arrest, and declared themselves the new rulers of the USSR. Three days later the coup had collapsed, the Communist Party was banned, and the Soviet Union had roughly four months left to live. The…
On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Hess — Hitler’s former deputy and the last prisoner of Spandau — was found dead at age 93. He had been the sole inmate of a 600-cell prison for 21 years. His death sparked conspiracy theories that have never fully gone away.
For two decades, the name sent a chill through Western intelligence agencies. He was a phantom — a Venezuelan-born revolutionary who moved through Europe’s underworld like smoke, responsible for bombings, assassinations, and one of the most audacious hostage operations in modern history. His real name was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. But the world knew him as…
August 11, 1984. President Ronald Reagan is at Rancho del Cielo, his beloved ranch in the Santa Barbara hills. It’s a Saturday morning. In a few minutes he’ll deliver his weekly radio address to the nation — this week’s topic: the Equal Access Act, a bill he’d just signed into law. The tech crew from…
It was July 31, 1991, and the world was holding its breath. In the gilded halls of the Kremlin, two men sat down at a long table and did something nobody had thought possible a decade earlier: they agreed to actually get rid of the nukes. Not all of them. Not even most of them….
On July 28, 1984, the XXIII Summer Olympic Games opened at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with one of the most spectacular ceremonies in Olympic history — a $5 million, three-hour production featuring 84 grand pianos, a man flying a jetpack over 92,516 spectators, and Ronald Reagan officially declaring the Games open. Nineteen countries including…
On June 29, 1995, the Space Shuttle Atlantis completed the first Shuttle-Mir docking, latching onto Russia’s Mir space station 250 miles above Lake Baikal. It was the 100th U.S. crewed launch and the first joint U.S.-Russian flight since 1975. Commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson and Mir commander Vladimir Dezhurov shook hands through the hatch, and for…
On June 6, 1984, Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov finished Tetris on an Elektronika 60. The story of how it leaked out of Moscow and became gaming’s most-played game ever.
On June 5, 1989, an unknown man with shopping bags stopped a column of Type 59 tanks in Beijing. Inside the iconic Tank Man photograph, the four photographers who smuggled it out, and what happened to the man who refused to move.
At 6:43 p.m. on May 28, 1987, an 18-year-old West German kid named Mathias Rust set the wheels of a rented Cessna 172 down on a bridge fifty feet from St. Basil’s Cathedral. He had just flown 750 miles through the most heavily defended airspace on the planet. Soviet radar had tracked him. A MiG-23…
On May 15, 1988, Soviet tanks began rolling out of Afghanistan. After 9 years and 15,000 lives lost, Gorbachev called it a bleeding wound and pulled the plug. Here are 7 wild facts from the day Russia’s Vietnam finally ended.
