Notable Achievements
Various Russians have greatly contributed to the world of music, sports, science, technology and arts. Notable Russian scientists include Dmitri Mendeleev, Nikolay Bogolyubov, Andrei Kolmogorov, Ivan Pavlov, Nikolai Semyonov, Dmitri Ivanenko, Nikolai Lobachevsky, Alexander Lodygin, Alexander Popov (one of inventors of radio), Nikolai Zhukovsky, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolay Basov (co-inventors of laser), Georgiy Gamov, Vladimir Zworykin, Lev Pontryagin, Sergei Sobolev, Pavel Yablochkov, Aleksandr Butlerov, Andrei Sakharov, Dmitry Ivanovsky, Sergey Korolyov and Mstislav Keldysh (creators of the Soviet space program), Aleksandr Lyapunov, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Andrei Tupolev, Yuri Denisyuk (the first practicable method of holography), Mikhail Lomonosov, Vladimir Vernadsky, Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Sikorsky, Ludvig Faddeev, Zhores Alferov, Konstantin Novoselov, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy, Nikolai Trubetzkoy etc.
The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was Russian, and the first artificial satellite to be put into outer space, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union and was developed mainly by Sergey Korolyov who had a Russian father (his mother was Ukrainian).
Russian Literature representatives like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, and many more, reached a high status in world literature. In the field of the novel, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, in particular, were important figures and have remained internationally renowned. Some scholars have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever.
Russian composers who reached a high status in the world of music include Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Russian people played a crucial role in the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Russia's casualties in this war were the highest of all nations, and numbered more than 20 million dead (Russians composed 80% of the 26.6 million people lost by the USSR), which is about half of all World War II casualties and the vast majority of Allied casualties. According to the British historian Richard Overy, the Eastern Front included more combat than all the other European fronts combined. The Wehrmacht suffered 80% to 93% of all of its total World War II combat casualties on the Eastern Front.
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