User:Papa November/Removed content from Russians

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Contribution to humanity[edit]

Russian people have greatly contributed to the world of music, sports, science and arts. Notable Russian scientists include Dmitri Mendeleev, Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Alexander Lodygin, Pavel Yablochkov, Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky, Ivan Kulibin, Vladimir Zworykin, Sergey Korolyov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Andrei Tupolev, and Mikhail Lomonosov.

The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was Russian, and the first artificial satellite to be put into outer space, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union and was developed mainly by the Russian Sergey Korolyov.

Russian Literature representatives like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, and many more, reached a high status in world literature. In the field of the novel, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular were important figures, and have remained internationally renowned. Some scholars have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever.[1]

Russian composers who reached a high status in the world of music include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Russian people had a large part in the victory over Nazi Germany at World War II. During the war, the Soviet Union lost around 27 million citizens (most of them Russian), about half of all World War II casualties and the vast majority of allied casualties. According to the British historian Richard Overy, the Eastern Front contained more combat than all the other European fronts combined; the German army suffered 80% to 93% of all casualties there. Richard Overy also wrote it was on the Eastern Front that the war was won or lost, for if the Red Army had not succeeded against all the odds in halting the Germans in 1941 and then inflicting the first major defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, it is difficult to see how the western democracies, Britain and the US, could have expelled Germany from its new empire.[2]

  1. ^ "Russian literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 16 July 2007 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-29157>.
  2. ^ WWII historian Richard Overy, We must not forget how war was won.