Science & machines:
The periodic table, Mendeleev. Conditioned reflex, Pavlov. Radio, as Popov built it, in a race with Marconi. Space: Sputnik, Gagarin, the first spacewalk, the first woman in orbit. The AK-47. Tetris.
Mathematics. Lobachevsky and non-Euclidean geometry. Kolmogorov. Pontryagin. A school, not a single invention.
Letters and music. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich. The Bolshoi and the ballet tradition that traveled with Diaghilev. Stanislavski’s system, which is still how actors are taught.
Icons and the church. Andrei Rublev, the Old Testament Trinity, a whole school of painting that was liturgy before it was a picture. That line runs for centuries and does not pass through Paris.
The nineteenth century. Repin and the Wanderers, painting the country as it was: barge haulers, the tsar’s reply, provincial rooms. Levitan for the landscape. Serov for the portrait. Aivazovsky, if you count the sea.
The break. Malevich and the Black Square, Suprematism. Kandinsky, before he left. Tatlin’s tower, which was never built and still taught everybody. Goncharova, Larionov, Exter. Constructivism after that: Rodchenko’s photographs and posters, the idea that art was a machine for the new state. Then the state shut it. What followed was official Soviet painting, and a second culture underneath it: nonconformists, Bulatov, Kabakov, the Moscow conceptualists.
Applied:
The transformer in the form Yablochkov and others pushed. Sikorsky’s large aircraft and, after he left, the helicopter line he built in America. Soil science, Dokuchaev. Blood banks owe a debt to Soviet wartime medicine. The laser was shared; Basov and Prokhorov took the Nobel with Townes.
Literature- the best in the World:
Poetry. Pushkin is the start of the modern language, and Eugene Onegin is the book the rest keep answering. Lermontov. Tyutchev, who could put a metaphysical argument in eight lines. Fet. Nekrasov. In the twentieth century Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Blok, Brodsky. A lyric tradition that survived the state that killed several of them.
Prose. Gogol. Turgenev. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, the late religious writing. Chekhov, who changed the short story and the play at the same time. Then Bunin, Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov ,-- Russian first, even after he switched. The Master and Margarita and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are the two poles of the Soviet century, the fantastic and the camp.
Ballet and performance:
The Imperial school, then the Soviet one. Petipa set the classical repertory in St. Petersburg. Diaghilev took it west; Nijinsky, Pavlova, and the Ballets Russes made the export. Soviet ballet kept the machine: Ulanova, Plisetskaya, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky. Stanislavski is the acting method. Eisenstein is the film grammar everyone stole. Shostakovich and Prokofiev wrote for both the pit and the screen.
Sports:
Chess as a state religion: Alekhine, Botvinnik, Spassky, Karpov, Kasparov. Gymnastics, the Soviet system that still underwrites the sport: Latynina, Tourischeva, Andrianov. Figure skating, pairs especially. Weightlifting and wrestling, Olympic factories. Ice hockey from the 1950s on, the Red Machine. Track, distance running, the high jump. Football gave Yashin and little else the world kept.
Soviet hockey is the one sport where they were the standard for a generation. The national side that became known as the Red Machine was built after the war by Anatoly Tarasov and then Viktor Tikhonov.
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