The Iron Curtain on the external borders and tough censorship inside the country allowed the Soviet leadership to keep global catastrophes, great tragedies, and even the existence of entire cities secret for decades.
Kyshtym tragedy
A real nuclear disaster occurred in 1957 at the Mayak chemical plant near Kyshtym, a small town in the Chelyabinsk region. But they learn about it, and even then not in full, only 30 years later, when an even greater tragedy wakes up in Chernobyl.
The source of the accident was the container in which the radioactive waste was stored. It was a kind of huge stainless steel cylinder covered with concrete. At the same time, the design had one feature - in the event of an emergency it was impossible to get close to it for emergency repair work.
This was probably an oversight of the developers, perhaps they were simply confident in the reliability of their brainchild. Nevertheless, at the end of September 1957, all the coolants in the structure went out of order at once. And since the repair was difficult, the cooling system was simply turned off.
A few days later, an explosion thundered in the storage, where there were 80 cubic meters of nuclear waste. It was so strong that nuclear clouds rose one and a half kilometers into the sky, and a cloud formed above. Further it gets worse. In less than a day, radioactive fallout began on a large territory exceeding 20 thousand square kilometers, affecting several regions - Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen.
As a result of the disaster, more than 10 thousand people lost their homes - their homes were simply destroyed by the blast wave. In total, about 300 thousand people have suffered from radiation in one way or another.
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Talk in the USSR about what happened near Kyshtym was nipped in the bud - even though the West already knew about the accident. The Soviet Union first recognized information about the disaster as reliable only in the late eighties, when the whole world was frightened by the name of another Soviet town - Chernobyl.
Holodomor
This fact is one of the most discussed today; Ukraine especially likes to remember it in the light of the events of recent years. The policy of collectivization, food appropriation and grain procurement, pursued by the Soviet government in the 20-30s of the last century, led to famine in some regions of the USSR. He was especially terrible in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. But millions of people who died of hunger in peacetime could spoil the "image" of the country of victorious socialism. Therefore, the Holodomor, especially cruel in the 1932-1933s, was never written or spoken about for many, many decades.
Moreover, in those hungry years, when people were dying in whole villages, whole performances were performed in front of Western journalists, and their eyes were presented with real "Potemkin villages" with clogged store shelves, clean streets and well-fed villagers, whose role was played by "responsible party workers ".
Until now, scientists and historians argue about the number of deaths from hunger in those years - sometimes the figures of 7 million people are called. But the difficulty of historians lies in the fact that the population census conducted in the USSR in 1937, which could have helped in research, was also classified. But in any case, we can talk about millions of people in the country who died of hunger.
The terrible secrets of the Katyn forest
After the next partition of Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union got not only part of its former territories, but also about half a million captured Poles. Most of the Soviet authorities handed over to the Germans, the rest - about 40 thousand - were assigned to the camps. However, in 1940, when the Kremlin was already realizing the possibility of a war with Germany, Beria raised the issue of too many Polish officers, former intelligence workers and nationalists before Stalin. Such an "army" of prisoners could become a real gift to a potential enemy - therefore, a decision was made for the Poles to consider their cases in a special order and, if necessary, use shooting. In fact, this decision of the Kremlin "bosses" was a sentence for 25 thousand Poles. In the spring of 1940, groups of 350-400 people began to take them out to the Katyn forest and shoot them in front of a huge ditch dug in advance.
Later, the USSR quite successfully shifted the blame for these mass shootings onto the Nazis, until the nineties denying its involvement in this tragedy. And, interestingly, thanks to their intelligence agencies, the United States and Great Britain knew from the very beginning what was actually happening in the Katyn forest. However, not wanting to spoil relations with the USSR, both Churchill and Roosevelt did not give the obtained data a move. Everything began to emerge much later - and then the time came for our country to admit that there are also pages in its history that can be called shameful.
Accident at Baikonur
It was 1960. At the Soviet cosmodrome, they were preparing for the first launch of the R-16 intercontinental rocket. However, half an hour before the start, trouble happened - one of the engines spontaneously started. Tanks with fuel immediately collapsed and began to ignite. The investigation showed clear violations in preparation for the launch - and according to all the rules, it should have been postponed until the official conclusion of the commission.
But these are long months, which means that we will not once again catch up and overtake the United States, with which the USSR had a tough space rivalry. This means that those who are guilty will not be very happy. Moreover, the commander-in-chief of the missile forces, Mitrofan Nedelin, who personally oversaw the P-16 project on site, had an unambiguous order from above to launch a rocket by the Day of the Great Revolution. Therefore, the breakdowns were fixed quickly and superficially and the rocket was launched again. Rather, they tried to start. A powerful explosion took place, which blew it off the face of the earth, and then literally burned everything in a circle of several hundred meters.
Everyone, including Nedelin, who was on the launch pad, died instantly. And of those who were at a distance, not all managed to escape - the temperature around was so high that people burned to death. In total, more than 80 people died that day, and about fifty more were injured. Understandably, what happened at Baikonur was immediately strictly classified, and Nedelin was declared dead in a plane crash. All relatives of the victims were simply notified of the accident, but without details.
True, some information still leaked into the foreign press, but the USSR first confirmed the fact of the tragedy at Baikonur only in 1989.
Smallpox escaped from the laboratory
Already today it has become known that at the end of the 40s of the last century in the USSR, on one of the sparsely populated islands of the Aral Sea, a super-secret laboratory was created to develop the latest biological weapons. At first, scientists worked on the viruses of bubonic plague and anthrax - later they began to test smallpox.
According to unconfirmed reports, by 1971, the developers managed to create a vaccine-resistant smallpox virus - that is, a virus that could not be treated with the usual methods.
But to confirm the "effectiveness" of the invention, it had to be tested in the fresh air, which was done in the same 71st. However, the virus got out of control of scientists and began to spread instantly throughout the area, causing a severe outbreak of smallpox.
Infection was detected in dozens of people, hundreds of people were forcibly taken from their homes for quarantine, and about 50 thousand local residents were vaccinated. Nevertheless, the true extent of the epidemic was strictly classified - and even now, when that tragedy is more or less known, there is no exact data on the number of victims and possible victims of the lethal smallpox that escaped from the hands of scientists.
The Soviet Union hid its terrible secrets from the world carefully and for a long time. Many disasters of those years did not even have archives left - much becomes known only from the testimony of surviving eyewitnesses, whose words can be believed or doubted. But one thing is invariable - the history of the USSR, like that cemetery of sunken ships, still keeps many secrets and unsolved secrets.