Russian history is full of devotees ready to lay down their lives for their idea. Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) was the first Russian socialist to preach the ideas of equality and brotherhood. And although he did not take direct part in revolutionary activity, he was among those who prepared the ground for its development. One of the leaders of the Westernizers, later he became disillusioned with the ideals of the European way of development of Russia, moved to the opposite camp and became the founder of another movement, populism, significant for our history. The biography of Herzen is closely connected with such figures of the Russian and world revolution as Ogaryov, Belinsky, Proudhon, Garibaldi. Throughout his life he constantly tried to find the best way for equitable organization of society. To tell the truth, Alexander Ivanovich is respected for the passionate love for the people and the selfless service to the chosen ideals.
Alexander was an illegitimate son of the rich landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev and 16-year-old German girl Henrietta. Due to the fact that officially the marriage was not registered, the father couldn’t give the boy his surname. So he named his son Herzen, which means “child of the heart” in German. The future publicist and writer was brought up in his uncle’s house on Tverskoi Boulevard (now the Gorky Literary Institute). The ideas of the Great French Revolution were constantly hovering in the air of Alexander’s study room. Already at that time, Herzen befriended Ogaryov.
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The nineteenth century is called the Golden Age for Russian literature and the period of the formation of art criticism, the founder and most vivid representative of which is Vissarion Belinsky. The world significance of this person is measured by the quality of his ideas. According to contemporaries, Belinsky, a critic and a Western philosopher, has outgrown the level of bourgeois thought of the time. He established a symbiotic relationship between the writer and the critic whose creative interaction he considered a tool of societal self-exploration.
The influence of this publicist and writer on Russian literature is felt until now. Vissarion first established the correct concepts of prose and poetry in general. It was he who pointed out the direction in which literature was to go to become a social force and a teacher for the younger generation.
Theoretical positions that he developed, have become common property. New literary generations are still based on his relentless search for truth, as well as on the views on the importance of literature in life.
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Mikhail Gorbachev is a statesman and public figure of Russia of the 20th century who entered the political world during the Soviet era. You know, Gorbachev became the first and only president of the USSR, the results of his activities entered into Russian history, and also became important factors in the politics of the rest of the world. Perestroika led to a change in life in Russia and the political situation in the world. The role of Gorbachev in the country’s life is ambiguous – some believe that the politician brought more benefit to the people than harm, while others believe that the politician became the cause of all the troubles of modern Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
Mikhail Sergeyevich was born on March 2, 1931 in the Stavropol village Privolnoye. The parents of the future president, Sergei Andreevich and Maria Panteleyevna, were peasants, so his childhood was without wealth and luxury. In the early years, the boy had to go through the German occupation of Stavropol, which left an imprint on the character and political position of the young man in the future.
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Boris Yeltsin was a statesman who went down in history as the first president of Russia, and also as a radical reformer of the country.
The boy was born on February 1, 1931 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) into a simple working-class family. His father Nikolai Ignatievich was engaged in construction, and mother Claudia Vasilyevna was a dressmaker. Soon after the birth of Boris his father was repressed, the boy along with his mother and brother Mikhail lived in Berezniki, Perm Region.
At school the future president studied well and was a class activist. After school Boris became a student at the Ural Polytechnic Institute.
Because of the trauma Boris didn’t have two fingers, so he was not called to serve in the army. But this did not prevent him to play volleyball, became Master of Sports and play for the national team of Yekaterinburg. After the university, Yeltsin worked as a joiner, painter, concrete worker, carpenter, mason, glazier, plasterer and crane operator. By the mid-sixties he had already headed the Sverdlovsk house-building plant. In those same years Boris Nikolayevich became a delegate to the city conference of the Communist Party, then first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the CPSU. And by the beginning of the 1980s Boris became a member of the Central Committee of the Party.
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Felix Yusupov, the richest man of his time, golden boy of the Russian aristocracy, did much to become famous. But in the history he is known as Grigory Rasputin’s murderer.
Felix was born on March 24, 1887 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. Zinaida Nikolaevna, Felix’s mother, wanted to have a daughter. She even had sewed a pink dress for the unborn child. So as a child the boy was dressed in girlish dresses. Even in adulthood Felix liked to dress up in women’s suits. He was one of the first freaks of his time. You know, he liked to come to the restaurant with a makeup, in a dress and performed romances. Even after the wedding with Irina Romanova, the niece of the Tsar Nicholas II, he didn’t quit his old habits. Their daughter Irina was born in 1915.
To tell the truth, he was a frivolous aristocrat. For example, when he didn’t enter the military school, Felix made friends with gypsies and participated in performances singing soprano.
In 1909-1912 he studied at Oxford University (University College), where he founded the Russian Society of Oxford University. When Felix entered Oxford, he preferred comfortable armchairs of London theaters to hard benches of university audiences. For a while, he even acted in theater – an unheard infamy for the aristocracy. Moreover, he sang the female role instead of one of the blue-eyed actresses of Aquarium theater.
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Igor Sikorsky was a Russian and the American aircraft designer, scientist, inventor, philosopher, engineer, pilot, and entrepreneur. He was the creator of the world’s first: four-engine airplane Russian Vityaz (1913), a heavy four-engine bomber and the passenger plane Ilya Muromets (1914), a transatlantic seaplane, single-rotor helicopter (USA, 1942). His single-rotor design, a major breakthrough in helicopter technology, remains the dominant configuration in the early twenty-first century. The winged-S emblem still signifies the world’s most advanced rotorcraft.
Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was born on May 25, 1889 in Kiev, Russian Empire. He was the youngest of five children into a family of well-known psychiatrist, professor of Kiev University in the Department of Mental and Nervous Diseases Ivan Sikorsky (1842-1919). His mother also had a medical education, but she never practiced. One of his earliest memories was the mother’s story about Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to design an aircraft. From that moment, the dream of flight captured his imagination, despite the fact that he was repeatedly told about the proven impossibility of this.
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Lavrentiy Beria is one of the most infamous politicians of the 20th century, whose activities are still widely discussed in modern society. He was an extremely controversial personality in the history of the USSR and went through a long political path full of repressions and endless crimes. The head of the NKVD was a cunning and insidious politician. The destinies of entire peoples depended on his decisions.
He worked under the auspices of the then acting head of the USSR, Josef Stalin. You know, after Stalin’s death he was going to rule the country, but in the struggle for power he lost to Nikita Khrushchev and, by decision of the court, was executed as a traitor to the Motherland.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich was born on March 29, 1899 in a village in Abkhazia into the family of poor peasants. He was the third and only healthy child in the family – the elder brother of the future politician died of illness at the age of two, and the sister suffered a serious illness and became deaf and dumb. From the very childhood the boy showed a great interest in education, which was not typical for peasant children. At the same time, parents decided to give the son a chance to become educated. They had to sell half of their house to pay for the boy’s education in the Sukhumi Higher Primary School.
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