Calendar Items in Brief

May 12, 1999

Georgian Lev Sarkisov became the oldest person in the world to climb Mount Everest. He was 60 years and 161 days old at the time – one day older than the previous record-holder.

May 13, 1934

Celebrated Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam was arrested. He died in a labor camp in 1938. His works and even his name were banned in the USSR for more than 20 years.

May 18, 1944

On orders from Iosif Stalin and the Defense Committee, the Crimean Tatars (nearly 190,000 of them) were deported to Central Asia, Siberia and the Central Volga regions. Nearly half died in transit and during the first months of their life away from home. 

May 20, 1754

Empress Elizabeth (Yelizaveta Petrovna) issued a decree founding the first Russian bank, the Dvoryansky (“Noblemen’s”) Bank.

June 14, 1859

Chechnya was annexed as a part of Russia.

June 25, 1904

Vladimir Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, journeyed to Switzerland, where they would live in exile until 1917.

June 30, 1974

Ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defected while on tour with the Bolshoi Theater in Canada.

June 25, 1959

Nikita Khrushchev had promised to show the United States “Kuzma’s mother” (an untranslateable expression that, apparently, Khrushchev used merely to confound his translators). In any event, when US President Richard Nixon visited Moscow on this day, Khrushchev showed Nixon Moscow. The two leaders jointly cut the ribbon at the American National Exhibition in the capital, where the leaders conducted an impromptu “kitchen debate,” arguing over the comparative merits of Soviet and American consumerism.