April 28 in Russian history

1799: Russian army, led by the count Alexander Suvorov of Rymnik, liberates Milan. In 1798, Russia joined the anti-Napoleon coalition (Great Britain, Austria, Turkey, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). A joint Russian-Austrian army was formed to liberate the Northern Italy, occupied by the French troops. First, it was planned that the army will be led by archduke Joseph, but Austria asked Russian emperor Paul II to send Alexander Suvorov. Suvorov, who never lost a single battle in his life, was sent in retirement in February 1797 and lived in a village under the police surveillance. In February 1799 Paul II summonned him and appointed the commander of the joint army. In April, Suvorov arrived to Italy and on April 27 in the first battle, known as the battle of Cassano d'Adda, defeated the French army. On the next day, the army entered Milan. A little bit later, he won two more battles in Trebia and Novi. After the Northern Italy, Suvorov planned to attack France through Grenoble, Lyon and Paris, but the allies, Great Britain and Austria, trying to avoid the increase of the Russian influence in the Mediterranean, ordered Suvorov to leave the Austrian army in Italy and to lead the Russian troops to Switzerland to join the 40,000-men army of general Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov and to attack France from Switzerland. Suvorov led his men through the Alps, incessantly maneuvering, and finally reached Switzerland. Unfortunately, general Korsakov, betrayed by Austrians, lost a battle at Zurich and had to retreat to Vorarlberg. In October 1799, Russia broke the alliance with Austria and Suvorov was ordered to return to Russia. After this campaign, he earned the titles of Prince of Italy, Count of the Holy Empire, prince of Sardinia, Generalissimo of Russia's Ground and Naval forces, Field Marshal of the Austrian and Sardinian Armies. In May, 1800, Suvorov died.

1813: Another great Russian Field Marshal, Mikhail Kutuzov, died on April 28, 1813, in Bunzlau (now Bolesławiec, in modern Poland). Less than 8 months passed after his victory in Borodino, probably the greatest feat of his life.

1968: Comedy The Diamond Arm (Brilliantovaya Ruka) is released. The movie became one of the favourite comedies in USSR and Russia, but I wouldn't call it "the best Soviet comedy ever made", as Wikipedia suggests. Anyway, a lot of people still love it, watch it and quote it. The plot is like this. A group of smugglers plans to bring diamonds to the USSR and sends one of them to a foreign country. His foreign partners confuse an ordinary Soviet tourist, Semyon Gorbunkov, for him and put diamonds into the bandage on his broken arm. The largest part of the movie is how the smugglers try to get the diamonds back and Gorbunkov, assisted by policemen, avoids their traps and finally helps to arrest them. The best thing in the movie is a lot of catchphrases, still widely recognized by most of us here. When your friend forgets something, just say reproachfully: "Semyon Semyonych!", and he will slap his head and say: "A-ah!". :) Oh, and of course, the actors. They are brilliant. Andrei Mironov, Anatoli Papanov, Yuri Nikulin -- a real constellation.

March 2 in Russian history

Today's Day in Russian history will be unusual. It will be a collection of the events all over the world which happened on this day in 1960s, which afffected the lives of many people in the USSR and defined our mindsets for two-three decades

1964: The Beatles start filming The Hard Day's Night. The movie was not shown in the USSR, but the music became widely known and loved.

1965: USA begin operation "Rolling Thunder" in Northern Vietnam. The "American militarists and imperialists" became a cliché of the Soviet propaganda. Not without a reason, but by that time we already knew that the propaganda lies. Even in the cases when they were saying truth, we didn't believe them. For example, when we saw photos of poor districts of New York, we thought something like: "Ha, you won't cheat me anymore!" or "What they don't tell us is that their welfare payments are larger than our salary!" I sometimes think that if the Soviets didn't lie to their own citizens, USSR could have lasted much longer.

1968: Syd Barrett leaves Pink Floyd. Oh, we really loved PF. The Wall and the Dark Side of the Moon were the favourite albums of the intellectual wannabes. The sound of helicopter rolling from the speakers standing on a window-sill filled the yards. We knew a lot of legends about Syd Barrett, but as it turned out, none of them was even close to the reality.

1969: The incident on the Damansky (Zhenbao) island, when 30 Chinese soldiers crossed the border and killed a group of Soviet border guards. In the 1970s the war with China seemed inevitable. We sang humorous songs about Chinese paratroopers, told anecdotes about the Chinese crossing the border "in small groups, from 1 to 2 million men" and were reluctantly preparing to leave the dangerous cities to a village to wait till the war ends.

1970: Alexander Tvardovsky was forced to resign from the post of the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir literary magazine. Tvardovsky was a writer and a poet. In 1962, he published "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn in Novy Mir and turned the magazine into the favourite reading of the Soviet intelligentsia. His resignation became another symbol of the end of the liberalization of 1960s.

And, of course, I can't forget this anniversary: in 1859, a boy named Sholom Rabinovich, was born in Pereyaslav, near Kiev. 25 years later he grows into Sholom-Aleichem, one of the greatest authors writing in Yiddish. He was often called "the Jewish Mark Twain", which says a lot about his style and writings. In 1905, after pogroms, he was forced to emigrate. He spent his last years in Geneva and New York, where he at last met Mark Twain, who said that he thinks of himself as of the American Sholom-Aleichem.