On This Day: June 6, 1984 — Tetris Is Born in Moscow
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.
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On This Day: May 28, 1987 — Mathias Rust Lands in Red Square
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…
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Soviet Exit from Afghanistan: 7 Shocking Cold War Facts From May 15, 1988
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.
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1984 Olympics Boycott: 7 Cold War Shocks From May 8
The 1984 Olympics boycott began on May 8, 1984, when the Soviet Union announced it would skip the Los Angeles Summer Games — a Cold War retaliation that pulled fifteen Eastern Bloc nations and four allies out of competition just eleven weeks before the opening ceremony. The walkout was the largest Olympic boycott since 1980,…
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The Dead Hand System: The Soviet Doomsday Machine That Still Exists
Dead Hand system panic, Stanislav Petrov, WarGames, The Day After, and Red Dawn show how 80s nuclear fear seeped into everyday pop culture.
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Reagan’s Star Wars Speech: The Night SDI Changed the Cold War Forever
President Reagan addresses the nation from the Oval Office on March 23, 1983, unveiling his ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative. On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan sat behind his desk in the Oval Office and delivered a televised address that would reshape the Cold War, terrify the Soviet Union, and earn one of the most…
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Mir Space Station First Crew Launch | On This Day, March 13, 1986
On March 13, 1986, cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev launched aboard Soyuz T-15 to become the first crew of the Mir space station — beginning 15 years of continuous human habitation in orbit and changing space exploration forever.
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Lithuania Independence 1990: The Day That Broke the USSR
On March 11, 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence, starting the domino effect that would topple the entire communist empire within 18 months. This is the story of the small Baltic nation that dared to be first and changed the world.
