Nearly 25 years have passed since the once-powerful Soviet Union ceased to exist, but its secrets and mysteries still excite the imagination of many people.
Sputnik tells you some of these stories that could be proven or disproved over time, once the archives of the no less mysterious and dreaded KGB are revealed, which still remain under the seal of 'Top Secret'. Until then, all we have left is to make assumptions.
The Treasure of the Communist Party
These are large gold reserves, supposedly belonging to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which after their disintegration were plundered and distributed among a narrow circle of people. The hypothesis was first mentioned by the publicist Alexéi KonstantÃnov and became a hot topic in the early 90's, serving as an argument for series and documentaries. It is rumored that then interim Prime Minister of Russia Yegor Gaidar hired the detective agency Kroll Associates to investigate the fate of such a treasure, but the investigation yielded no results.
Nuclear briefcases
In 1997 General Aleksandr Lebed mentioned in a conference that in the time of the USSR "about 100 briefcases" were elaborated that apparently they appeared like a common baggage, but that in their interior contained small nuclear bombs. To the greater concern of those present, he revealed that at least half of these were lost after the disintegration of the Union. Later, the Russian Ministry of Defense denied such information, assuming that Lebed actually referred to mines. Be that as it may, that story still does not let many speculators sleep.
The Caribbean Crisis
We have all heard about that moment in which the world was at the point closest to total annihilation. More than half a century later, the archives of the negotiations between Fidel Castro, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev are still classified. Knowing them could shed light on what lessons the parties learned from that conflict and the reasons that led the USSR to establish its nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles (about 144 kilometers) off the US coast.
How real was the possibility of mutual nuclear extermination?
Even after the Caribbean Crisis, the world has been, on more than one occasion, on the verge of a nuclear apocalypse. One of the most known cases occurred on September 26, 1983, when the Soviet Union's defense systems indicated that the United States had launched a nuclear attack. The lieutenant colonel on duty that day, Stanislav Petrov, thought that "no one starts a nuclear war with only five missiles" and decided not to activate the protocol of response. Different sources refer to about a dozen similar failures in control systems, both in the US and in the USSR, but apparently the human factor has always kept us safe. Until now.
The Fleita program
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, several Soviet scientists and researchers published their memoirs, several of which referred to a secret program called 'Fleita' -'flauta ', in Spanish. According to the monographs, the scientists had the mission to elaborate "psychotropic substances and biological agents for special operations of the KGB".
How big was the defense program of the USSR?
Throughout the USSR's existence, the US intelligence services tried to calculate the military expenditures of its counterpart. The communist system, for which what counts is not the value of commodities, but the human effort employed to obtain them, made it impossible to calculate them by conventional economic methods. According to the CIA, the military sector of the USSR reached 15-17% of its GDP in the late 1980s. Other sources raise that figure to an incredible 40%. Be that as it may, the military doctrine of the USSR has so far been the only one to achieve balance with the United States.
How far did the space program of the USSR come?
It is common knowledge that the Soviets were pioneers in most branches of space exploration. The first to launch an artificial satellite, a living being, a human, the first woman in space and the first living orbital station. The first to send a space probe to the Moon and photograph its hidden face, to reach other planets like Venus and Mars ... All this provoked endless conspiracy theories that suggest, in particular, that the Soviets were actually the first And even Mars and Venus, but that those projects were not revealed, since they were missions without a plan of return and the remains of the cosmonauts still remain somewhere in our solar system.
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