Mars500 is a collaboration between the European Space Agency, Russia and China, to simulate a 500-day manned mission to Mars. The crew of six men entered their sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, in June 2010 and emerged in November 2011. Their ‘spacecraft’ is constructed from sealed containers linked together to provide 550 cubic metres of internal space. The project includes a 20-minute time delay in communications between the crew and the outside world, just like a real Mars mission would. The crew members were Alexey Continue reading →

Vasilii Hazkevich (Russia) covered 21,199 km (13,172 miles) on an unmodified tractor from 25 April – 6 August 2005, starting and finishing in Vladimir, Russia.

The longest line of ice skaters was achieved by 252 participants in Votkinsk, Russia, on 9 March 2008.

The longest marathon playing Mahjong is 33 hr 3 min 48.58 sec and was achieved by Oleg Petrov, Anton Khantimirov, Mark Efremov and Nickolay Demyanov (all Russia) in the exhibition center “Sibir” in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, on 14-16 December 2012.

The longest running children’s magazine is “Murzilka”, a monthly literary and art publication for children aged 6 to 12 published by UAB “Editors Murzilka” (Russia). Murzilka launched on 16 May 1924 and has appeared monthly and without interruption for its 87 years of existence since, except for 25 double issues in the years 1931 to 1933 and 1939 to 1946. Overall, 1,015 issues were produced as of 28 December 2010. Prominent past contributors include Agniya Barto, Kornej Chukovsky, S. Marshak, M. Prishvin, K. Paustovsky, S. Continue reading →

The world’s longest run without changing trains is one of 10,214 km (6,346 miles) from Moscow, Russia to Pyongyang in North Korea. One train a week makes the journey by this route, which includes sections of the famous Trans-Siberian line. It is scheduled to take 7 days 20 hours 25 minutes.

The coldest permanently inhabited place is the Siberian village of Oymyakon (pop. 4000), 63°16’N, 143°15’E (700 m 2,300ft), in Russia, where the temperature reached -68°C (-90°F) in 1933 (the coldest ever recorded outside Antarctica).

The record for the most basketball three pointers made in one hour is 835 and was achieved by Vladislav Raiskiy (Russia) at the Hall of the Tauras-Fitness Ltd, St. Petersbourg, Russia, on 23 November 2008. Vladislav Raiskiy managed 835 shots in 914 attempts and success rate of 91.3 %

The Russian town of Dzerzhinsk (population 285,000 in 1995) is the world’s most polluted industrial town. In Dzerzhinsk, 440km 275miles east of Moscow, life expectancy is only 42 for men and 47 for women.  Note by consultant Michael Flynn (October 2011): Record confirmed (although this is mostly as a result of news services quoting Guinness).

Lake Karachay in the Chelyabinsk province of Russia has accumulated 120 million curies of radioactivity and absorbed nearly 100 times more strontium 90 and caesium 137 than was released at Chernobyl.  If a person stood on the shore of the lake he would receive a radiation exposure rate of 600 roentgens an hour.  This is 2,000 times greater radiation than that emitted during a normal chest X-ray and strong enough to kill a person within an hour. The lake is near a Soviet nuclear facility Continue reading →