Anti-communist public activity in Hungary, fueled by the Jewish problem and escalated in the fall of 1956 into a massive uprising marked by bloody events, not only extremely aggravated the situation in this country, but also posed a serious threat to global geopolitical stability. However, this catastrophic and fraught with a global nuclear cataclysm scenario, fortunately, was not realized, and thanks to both the decisive measures taken by the leadership of the USSR and the proactive actions of individual responsible persons, including the Soviet ambassador in Budapest Yuri Andropov.

Mobilizing society for the implementation of the project of “building communism”, the leadership of the USSR, headed by Khrushchev, sharply intensified the fight against the underground production of scarce consumer goods, as well as illegal buying and reselling of foreign currency, jewelry, antiques, imported clothes and shoes. The fate of the arrested organizers and participants in such a business, as well as the officials who “covered” it, was decided at trials that took place in the early 1960s. in Moscow and other cities. Since there were many Jews among the main defendants who were sentenced to death, there was a certainty in the West that these trials were anti-Semitic. However, this version contradicts the real facts, which is proved in this рaреr.

The establishment of a peaceful life in Belarus after its liberation from the Nazis in 1944 was associated with the solution of a host of complex problems in such basic spheres of social life as economy, state and public security, ideology, ineffective personnel policy. These problems were most critical in the western regions of the BSSR, where the situation was complicated by the forcing of Sovietization. The post-war normalization in the Republic was negatively influenced by the undercover struggle for the first secretary post of the Central Committee of the CP(b)B. The arbiter in it was Stalin, who constantly manipulated the nomenklatura groups.

In the case of Anatoly Sharansky, as in a drop of water, the final stage of the history of the Soviet Union was reflected. When in the 1970s this activist of the Jewish movement challenged the communist empire, it was still strong enough to withstand all threats, including internal one. But by that time, it had largely lost its former repressive potential and could no longer punish opponents of the regime so mercilessly as it had been under Stalin. Only thanks to the softening of the Soviet system after the death of the dictator, Sharansky managed to survive, although, of course, this would never have happened had he not had the courage and inner psychological strength necessary to survive in the harsh conditions of camps and prisons. The decisive moment was that in the future this liberalization intensified more and more, ending with perestroika. And if this development turned out to be fatal for the Soviet system, then for Sharansky, on the contrary, it was salutary, allowing him to gain the upper hand in the confrontation with it.

Very short leadership of the General Secretary of the CPSU Konstantin Chernenko, which continued a little more than a year and crowned the stagnant-gerontocratic period of the USSR, was filled with historical symbolism. Leadership of Chernenko was indicated a very clear message: the Soviet socio-political system built by Stalin for a strong authoritarian leader, is not able to function normally and it begins to degrade with the weakening of the Supreme power in the country. Unfortunately, the ruling elite was unable to adequately respond to this and other challenges, it failed to implement the correct reform of the state and establish a constructive dialogue with society. This fatal failure was most clearly manifested in the years of Gorbachev's perestroika, which caused predetermined catastrophic finale of the USSR.

Since times of “late Stalin” the Soviet nomenklatura was afflicted with anti-Semitism. In the subsequent period this systemic ailment weakened to a considerable extent and lost its repressive component. Yet it continued to exist finding its manifestations predominantly in form of restrictions imposed on career advancement of Jews. Having become the leader of the USSR Brezhnev had to live with such paradigm though he personally was not a hater of Jews. Moreover, Brezhnev had some sympathy to Jews. Though he did not went to the open conflict with anti-Semitism of the Party apparatus he nevertheless spoke for development of the Jewish culture in the USSR, felt a sympathy and provided the covert protection to so prominent master of the theater satire as Arkady Raikin and to other Jewish representatives of creative intelligentsia.

The Jewish emigration has played an important role in the history of the USSR in the last two decades of its existence. The Jewish emigration became a catalyst and a litmus paper that contributed to and demonstrated the USSR degradation and its forthcoming fall. At the same time it was a bargaining chip in then leaders of the USSR attempts to rectify political, economic, and scientific-technological cooperation with the West and thereby to reinforce the Communist regime. However the contrary happened: having raised a little the “iron curtain” for the Jewish emigration and violated conservative air-tightness of the Soviet empire the Soviet leaders unwittingly accelerated the systemic enthropy process. The responsibility for that falls, to a large extent, on Leonid Brezhnev, a man who was, in his own way, a worthy person though he was vaingloriously fascinated with the visionary “real Socialism” and “Peace program”. Consequently, Brezhnev was unable to prepare the Soviet society to those pivotal trying trials it had to encounter soon.

Gustave Flaubert asserted: “Do not touch idols… their gilding will remain on your fingers”. But the principal heroine of this article, the beloved woman of Mayakovsky Lilya Brik did not follow Flaubert’s warning. To save Mayakovsky’s original heritage Lilya Brik in 1935 requested assistance from Stalin, the living Soviet god who at that time announced Mayakovsky “the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch”. However Lilya Brik did not bask in fame of this propaganda myth. As early as from the mid-1950s Lilya Brik became the target of permanent propaganda attacks organized from above: as a lady of cosmopolitan Weltanschauung and sexually liberated in her personal life and, furthermore, a Jewess Brik obviously did not fit the official image of faithful and ideologically consistent girl friend of the proletarian poet. This article narrates how the CPSU officials and specialists in literary studies engaged by the party officials tried to rewrite in retrospect the love history of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik making her the femme fatale guilty of the poet’s death.

In many ways the USSR won the war against Nazi Germany (the war became the first global war of engines) due to the fact that the country had a powerful aircraft industry that was in the process of dynamic development. That is why it is so important to reconstruct the process of organizational consolidation and scientific and technological modernization of the aircraft industry in the tense international situation of the late 1930s and the industry’s subsequent functioning in the extreme circumstances of the wartime. That should be done with all known historical facts taken into account and with no prejudice and no bias. The author has tried to do exactly that. In his attempt the author undertook, perhaps, for the first time, a study of a controversial role I.V.Stalin played in management of the Russian aircraft industry on the eve of the Great Patriotic War and during the war. Readers are free to judge whether the author succeeded or failed in solution of this very complicated task.

Making use of archive documents that previously were classified the author seeks to understand the background of complex conflict emerged in the second half of the 1950s between leaders of the USSR and the Soviet writers' union on one hand and Howard Fast, the prominent American writer, on the other hand. Trying to comprehend why Fast was the most published and the most highly paid foreign writer in the most cruel years of Stalin’s rule and why he, as if suddenly decided to put the end to his relations with the Communism and the USSR (and did that in the scandalous way) in the earlier years of Khrushchev’s liberalization the author presents his own documented version of this contradictory situation that does not lend itself to an univalent assessment.

Gennady Kostyrchenko, a prominent historian, challenges the authenticity of the official biography of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov who was in charge of the KGB for many years and by the end of his life became a head of the USSR and the CPSU for a short period. Having scrupulously examined numerous historical evidence and documents, including documents from the state archive collections the author demonstrates in detail how this prominent political leader «corrected» his own personal data for the sake of a successful career and concealed his true social background that could be dangerous at those times. Andropov carried out this first special operation on creation of his own legend so neatly and fundamentally that it is still impossible to reveal his real past to the very end. It remains just to speculate about his real parents, his ethnic origin, and place of his birth.