Photo of Chinese space capsule Shenzhou, aka Divine Vessel or Divine Land, after returning from space to a successful touchdown in Mongolia via parachute. The Chinese program progressed, with substantial Russian help, from unmanned flights, to missions carrying animals and manequins, until finally, on October 15, 2003, a Chinese astronaut was sent into space. We found this image and others at a French website here.

Italian actress Sophia Loren gets a leg up in this photo from an unknown Russian film magazine. 

James Bond soundtrack albums and singles, with production art covers, plus paintings by Frank McCarthy, Robert McGinnis and others.     

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a stray dog into space. She had many names, but the international press picked up on Laika and that is how she has been known since. Her purpose was to provide crucial data about whether humans might be able to survive the conditions of launch and weightlessness. In that respect, her mission was a success, but she did not survive the flight, nor was she ever intended to, since the Soviets had not yet developed a way to retrieve orbiting capsules. Popular myth states that Laika starved to death after a few days floating in space, but that isn’t true—she actually died a few hours after launch due to stress (read: terror) and heat. The latter was due to a malfunction in the capsule, but it’s easy to imagine the former might have killed her anyway. But Laika lives on, sort of. In 2008, Russia unveiled a monument in her honor, built near the Moscow research facility that prepared her for spaceflight. It’s a statue of Laika standing on top of a rocket.     

Above is a worldwide assortment of the creepiest posters we could find in honor of Halloween. Interestingly, Halloween is getting more popular internationally all the time. Where we live it was virtually ignored as recently as ten years ago, but nowadays it’s not a rarity to see both kids and adults dressed in costumes for the occasion. Trick-or-treating hasn’t quite taken hold, just because the layout of the communities don’t really allow for it, but adopting new personas or playing characters is something everyone seems to love, no matter where they live. Everyone likes a good scare, too, and these films do the job nicely. They are Halloween, Halloween again, Rosemary’s Baby, Zombie Holocaust, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Squirm, Return of the Living Dead 2, The Shuttered Room, Evil Dead 2, Hellraiser, Suspiria, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Vampire Women, The Omen, The Thing, The Shining, Backwoods, Fright Night, and Seuseung-ui eunhye. Happy trick-or-treating. 

One of the more interesting pulp events of the 1960s occurred when a little-known ballet dancer named Rudolph Nureyev broke away from two Russian guards at Le Bourget airport in Paris and dashed through a security station shouting in English, “I want to be free!” His sprint into Western arms made him internationally known, rocked the dance world, and strained relations between the Soviet Union and France. It was one of the first high-profile defections, and the inside story had all the pulp elements we love best—secret romance, political intrigue, lots of headlines, and a fascinating personality at the heart of it all.

For three weeks prior Nureyev had been performing in Paris with his troupe, the Leningrad Kirov Ballet, and in his off hours enjoying the City of Light with society friends. News of these associations had filtered back to Moscow and, concerned, Soviet authorities decided to summon Nureyev back to the motherland for a chat. For two weeks they had trying to get him sent home, but Kirov directors and the Soviet embassy in Paris had been deliberately unhelpful. Finally, on the day the Kirov was supposed to board a flight to London for the next leg of their tour, two Soviet security guards intercepted Nureyev and told him he was wanted in Moscow. His dash for freedom minutes later set off a chain of events that would end with him receiving asylum in France.

Most assumed Nureyev had been thinking of defection for quite a while, but Soviet records declassified in the late 90s suggest he planned to return home. There were rumors he had fallen in love with a beautiful Chilean heiress named Clara Saint—in fact, this story was reported in much of the Western press—but in reality Nureyev was gay and had been seriously involved with a male dancer from Leningrad named Taja Kremke. It was Kremke who convinced Nureyev his talent would never flourish in the Soviet Union, but still, left to continue his tour with the Kirov, Nureyev likely would have flown home at its completion. Despite his general unhappiness, it seems to be the actual arrival of the security guards that triggered his defection. When the guards appeared he immediately knew he was in deep trouble and feared returning to Moscow meant he would not be allowed to dance anymore.

News of the defection broke huge. The West gleefully used it deride the Soviets, who had been riding high on the triumph of sending the first human into space two months earlier. Soon the Clara Saint story began to be widely reported. But it soon became obvious neither politics nor love had been the primary trigger of the event, but a burning desire to dance and live unhindered. Nureyev got his wish—residing in the West he expanded his dance repertoire and acted in motion pictures. He also took advantage of his more permissive surroundings by pursuing relationships with famous men such as Tab Hunter, Eric Bruhn, and Anthony Perkins, and by posing for a very famous set of nude photos exposing his celebrated endowment. But he lost almost as much as he gained—he was completely cut off from his family back in Russia, and didn’t see his mother again until she was dying. Nureyev himself began to die from AIDS around 1990, and finally succumbed January 6, 1993. He was perhaps the greatest ballet dancer of the twentieth century, and the event that forever changed his life happened today in 1961.  

In our continuing chronicle of mid-20th century tabloid magazines we have a new player—Whisper magazine. Whisper was founded as a girlie magazine in 1946 by Confidential owner Robert Harrison. By the time he sold out in 1958 Whisper was already a clone of Confidential in style and content, although sometimes it sported a simpler cover motif with a celeb framed inside a circle. In this example from 1956, the circle becomes a blood red disc reminiscent of the old Short Stories covers, but which is probably supposed to suggest werewolves. The spotlight here is on George Sanders, one of the more interesting Hollywood characters of the time. Born in Russia, Sanders was British by lineage, and built a film career playing aristocrat types, often with an air of menace. This was most aptly displayed in 1950's All About Eve, a role for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Sanders was known as a smooth operator, but his personal life was a wreck. He married four women over the years—including serial bride Zsa Zsa Gabor, and her older sister Magda. He would have been between marriages at the time of Whisper’s alleged strike out with an unnamed ingénue, but he’d be back in the saddle by 1960, marrying actress Benita Hume. Health problems eventually robbed Sanders of his acting talent and he finished his career in the low budget stinker Psychomania. Eventually, he also lost the ability to indulge in his beloved hobby of playing music, which prompted him to destroy his piano with an axe. Not long after, he took a fatal dose of Nembutal, leaving behind a suicide note addressed to the world that read in part: I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck. 

In Russia, everything seems to have a spy movie twist. Today, the convoluted murder trial of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya ended in acquittals for four defendants. Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the Kremlin, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building on 7 October, 2006. The killer was believed to be Chechen national Rustam Makhmudov, but he escaped Russia using a fake passport, leaving his two brothers Ibragim and Dzhabrail to stand trial along with two others on charges that they aided and abetted the killing.

But the prosecution case fell apart after a series of suspicious events, including the disappearance from evidence lockers of SIM cards, computer discs, and a surveillance recording purported to show the killer entering Politkovskaya’s flat. However, the case against the Makhmudovs and other two defendants was generally considered to be weak, with or without the stolen evidence. Prosecution lawyers claim this is because the key players are not the men on trial, but highly-placed political figures Politkovskaya often slammed in her articles.

Many suspect the villain may be Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin ruler of Chechnya, who was a frequent Politkovskaya target. Kadyrov is right out of a Bond movie. Sometimes referred to as the Idi Amin of the Caucasus, he rules Chechnya like a king and has a private army known as Kadyrovites who are documentably responsible for numerous crimes, including beatings, torture sessions, and one decapitation complete with a public display of the severed head. Asked about his possible involvement in Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, Ramzan Kadyrov asserted: “I don't kill women.”

After a career spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Russian KGB agent-turned-billionaire Alexander Lebedev has finally figured out the West’s Achilles Heel—there’s nothing it won’t sell. At least, that’s what a lot of English observers said today, when it was announced that Lebedev was set to buy London’s venerable Evening Standard.

The Standard was launched way back in 1837, and as of 2006 was circulating more than 250,000 papers daily. But the rightwing imprint’s readership has been dropping steadily, and the resultant financial difficulties spurred a push to sell. It’s unclear as yet what Lebedev, who is the 358th richest man on the planet, will do to revive the Standard, but it’s also unclear whether he even cares. He told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “As far as I’m concerned this has nothing to do with making money. There are lots of other ways.”

Today in Thailand, Viktor Bout took the stand in his trial to fight extradition to the United States for conspiring to provide weaponry to Colombian FARC rebels. Bout, who is a Russian national, allegedly made an arms deal with men he thought were potential customers, but who were in reality American undercover agents. If Thai authorities decide to turn Bout over, he faces charges in America of conspiring to kill U.S. officers, employees and citizens, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.

Bout said in court, when asked his profession, that he is a businessman involved in aviation and construction. However U.S. authorities, as well as the United Nations, claim he is an international arms dealer known as The Merchant of Death who has provided weaponry to warlords and dictators in Afghanistan and Africa, and is so well known that he was the subject of a book, and provided inspiration for Nicholas Cage’s character in the film Lord of War.

Among Bout’s alleged exploits are the hijacking of 200,000 assault rifles en route from Bosnia to Iraq, and the breaking of an arms embargo to Liberia. Bout said he traveled to Bangkok to relax and to meet with a Thai businessman about an airplane deal, and claimed he was arrested because he is a pawn in an American plot. He denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I did not commit any terrorist acts. The US is trying to use this to cover up its internal problems and prevent good relations between Thailand and Russia.” Bout faces a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted.