Sources

The whole source base as a citation file

All 422 source records of this page in one file, for BibTeX, EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, Pandoc or a spreadsheet. One record per distinct address, not per work: a work cited in twelve dossiers is one record that names all twelve, but a work read at three different addresses stays three. Every record carries the full citation as it was recorded, in its note field, together with what state the source was verified in and which dossiers it stands in. The first record of each file is this page, so that the archive itself can be cited.

Author, title, year, journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI and ISBN are filled only where they could be taken out of the recorded citation word for word: 314 records carry a separated title, 163 an author, 188 a year, 403 an address. Where a field could not be taken that way it is absent rather than guessed, and the citation stands in the title field instead. No record is shorter for it: the full citation is in every one of them.

1 of the 423 sources is not in the download. It is an internal working note that says of itself that it is not evidence, and it does not belong in a bibliography.

What a source count does and does not say

The count is the number of entries in the research file for that dossier, not a measure of depth. Some entries were read in full text, some are a catalogue record, a set of Crossref metadata or a search result with title, date and wording. The verification note on every entry says which of those it is.

The names and life dates come from the dossier pages themselves, so that this page invents no second spelling. Citations stand as they were recorded on 29 July 2026, with volume, issue and page abbreviations, month names, publisher formulas and place names set into English; where the record also carried a summary of what the source says, that summary was left out, because the paragraph above each list already says it.

One line, not the whole record Each dossier below carries a single line of divergence: the sharpest point at which the check found the page and its sources apart. It is a selection. The check recorded 467 points across the 71 files, most of them smaller than the one shown, and some of them confirmations rather than objections. Nothing on this page should be read as the complete list of what the check turned up, and a dossier with no divergence line is not thereby certified correct.

The research files hold 437 addresses, 430 of them in an address field and 7 only inside a note. The 430 were called up once more on 30 July 2026, after the research had closed: 405 answered, 19 came back with a bot check or a paywall, which says nothing about the page under it, and 6 did not answer at all. The ones inside notes were not part of that pass. An entry whose address did not answer is listed here without a link and says so, so that no dead link on this page carries a retrieval note. Where a record gives an http address and the same address answers over https, the link goes to https.

Where the sources were consulted Each of the 71 dossiers below carries one line on how its sources were reached. For 4 of them that line names a place and a month, because a field note and a source entry meet at a detail that can be checked in both. 14 of them stand next to a trip recorded in the research trail that none of their sources came out of, and the line says that too. The remaining 53 were worked from published editions and digitised copies. It is the provenance of the reading, not of the archive: it says where the file was worked on, not that the institution named holds the papers.

4 of the dossiers below carry a link into the field notes, 4 links in all, and each of them stands next to a source the field note actually produced. Where a trip is recorded but no source came out of it, the line above says so and no link is set. Those links come from the research trail the archive pages use and from the provenance record, not from a list kept on this page.

Tamara Aleksandridi

1924-09-26 - 2020-05-23 · War radio operator who built the M-1's and M-2's CRT memory; professor at MADI from 1985

What the checking found Everything narrative rests on a single long interview at the Virtual Computer Museum, while the technical facts come from her own paper on the M-1, including the Academy of Sciences resolution of 22 April 1950, a memory on eight oscilloscope tubes holding 256 words of 25 bits, and acceptance of the technical report on 15 December 1951.

Divergence from the page The anecdote that Bruk took Aleksandridi for a man's name hangs on a single Habr article without an apparatus, is absent from all four serious sources, and is still asserted once on the page as the reason she was hired.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Isaak Bruk

1902-11-08 - 1974-10-06 · Holder of the first Soviet computer patent, creator of the M-series small computers, founder of INEUM

What the checking found The core data are covered twice over: Malinovsky's biographical chapter of 1995 and the Great Russian Encyclopedia agree on inventor's certificate no. 10475 of 4 December 1948, on the M-1 from the Academy resolution of 22 April 1950, and on the INEUM directorship from 1958 to 1964.

Divergence from the page The sentence that the Strela was completed by the team around Rameev and Bruk is factually wrong: the machine was built at SKB-245 under chief designer Basilevsky, and Rameev's move there is what ended the collaboration with Bruk.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Nikolai Brusentsov

1925-02-07 - 2014-12-04 · Chief designer of Setun, the world's only serially produced ternary computer

What the checking found Three of the eight sources are Brusentsov's own texts, so the narrative of a brilliant machine strangled by bureaucracy comes from his pen; the only independent source for numbers is the Great Russian Encyclopedia, with series production from 1962 to 1965 and 49 machines built.

Divergence from the page The page says about 4,500 operations per second, while the original description Brusentsov co-wrote says several hundred operations per second, so the widely repeated figure stands against the earliest source.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Vsevolod Burtsev

1927-02-11 - 2005-06-14

What the checking found There is no critical biography, only institute texts, an obituary and a paper co-written by a family member, and on two hard numbers the sources contradict each other: Lenin Prize 1964 in the obituary against 1966 in the paper and in bigenc, ITMiVT directorship until 1985 against until 1984.

Divergence from the page The dossier follows the obituary in both cases and presents it as fact, although that is the minority position among the sources.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Anatoly Dorodnitsyn

1910-12-02 - 1994-06-07 · Founding director of the USSR Academy's Computing Centre; aerodynamicist; IFIP president 1968-71

What the checking found IFIP's own list of presidents has Dorodnitsyn for 1968 to 1971 and Kaoru Ando of Japan for 1983 to 1986, confirmed by the Russian museum biography and by the Russian Wikipedia.

Divergence from the page The page header claims IFIP president 1983-86, and the source of the error is identified: the English version of the museum page carries those years while its Russian sister page has the correct interval.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Andrei Ershov

1931-04-19 - 1988-12-08 · Father of Soviet programming; founder of the Novosibirsk school and of school informatics

What the checking found The best position in the book: there is a scholarly maintained online archive of his papers at the Institute of Informatics Systems, a Western IEEE biography, and the full text of the main paper with the only page reference verified anywhere in this research (WCCE 81, Lausanne, part 1, pp. 1-17).

Divergence from the page The formula about programming as a second literacy is dated 1985 on the page; it comes from the IFIP and UNESCO lecture in Lausanne in July 1981.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Elena Glivenko

1928-04-01 - 2020 · Head of the software team for Kartsev's M-4 to M-10 missile-warning computers

What the checking found The thinnest file in the book: the whole tradition comes from the circle of the Virtual Computer Museum and the former INEUM staff who publish there, and the only source from a different system is Math-Net.Ru.

Divergence from the page Math-Net.Ru gives her dates as 1928 to 2020, while the dossier names no date of death and so implicitly presents her as living.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Viktor Glushkov

1923-08-24 - 1982-01-30 · Cybernetics visionary, creator of the OGAS project

What the checking found For OGAS there is a freely available PDF, Gerovitch's paper InterNyet, which carries the figures of the network design page by page: more than 100 organisations visited in 1963, 100 to 200 large centres, 20,000 smaller computing centres, 20 billion roubles over 15 years.

Divergence from the page The page turns this into over a thousand enterprises and up to 20,000 terminals in factories, a figure ten times too high and a conversion of computing centres into terminals.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Leonid Kantorovich

1912-01-19 - 1986-04-07 · Mathematician who invented linear programming and won the USSR's only economics Nobel Prize

What the checking found Number, wording and content of the secret directive 1990-774ss/op are covered twice, in English by Kutateladze and in Russian on the Rosatom history portal, which names the calculation of the critical mass of plutonium as the task; nobelprize.org answered every request with 403, so announcement day, prize sum and ceremony date remained unchecked at the primary source.

Divergence from the page On the plywood problem Kantorovich contradicts the page himself: he writes of five machines and eight kinds of material, the page of eight machines and five kinds of plywood.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Mikhail Kartsev

1923-05-10 - 1983-04-23

What the checking found Four of the six sources come from the same institution and two of them from the same author, Rogachev, whose institute chronicle of 1998 is the sharpest account of the dates; the technical description of the M-4 gives a 23-bit word, 50,000 additions per second and the world's first hardware square root.

Divergence from the page The unit numbers on the page are uncovered: instead of over 100 sets by 1985 and about 200 M4-2M, the sources give over 50 machines M4-2M and M4-3M between 1965 and 1969.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Anatoly Kitov

1920-08-09 - 2005-10-14 · Military computing pioneer, first to propose a nationwide computer network

What the checking found The rehabilitation article on the basic features of cybernetics is available as a full-text reprint (Voprosy filosofii 1955, no. 4, August), and the letters to Khrushchev are covered three times over, by the family biography, by a peer-reviewed IFIP paper and by Gerovitch.

Divergence from the page Exactly this core is missing from the page: the timeline ends in 1958 and has no entry for the letter of January 1959, for the Red Book in autumn 1959 or for the expulsion from the party in 1960, although the subtitle announces the network idea of 1959.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Ekaterina Lavrishcheva

1937-03-27 · Software-engineering pioneer at Glushkov's Institute of Cybernetics; Yushchenko's student

What the checking found There is no independent biographical research, all the detailed life accounts most probably go back to her own hand, and only the publication records are independently checkable, among them the joint paper with Yushchenko in Kibernetika in 1972.

Divergence from the page The single timeline claim on the page, birth on 27 March 1937 in Stavropol, is covered, but the page leaves out a career documented into 2023 and does not make clear whether she is alive.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Sergei Lebedev

1902-11-02 - 1974-07-03 · Chief designer of MESM and BESM, father of Soviet computing

What the checking found Lisovsky's eyewitness account supplies the precise MESM dates, first demonstration on 6 November 1950 and acceptance by the commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on 25 December 1951, and Malinovsky dates the call to Moscow laboratory no. 1 to March 1951 rather than 1950.

Divergence from the page Both MESM dates are missing from the timeline, which breaks off as early as 1946, although the page lists Lebedev as chief designer of MESM.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Alexei Lyapunov

1911-10-08 - 1973-06-23 · Mathematician without a diploma, intellectual father of Soviet cybernetics

What the checking found The subtitle Mathematician without a diploma is supported by two sources, enrolled 1928 and expelled after eighteen months because of his noble descent, but it stands against Wikipedia summaries that give an MGU degree in 1933, so it is both covered and contested.

Divergence from the page The 1955 paper on which his role as head of the rehabilitation of cybernetics rests is missing from the timeline, which already ends in 1954.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Boris Malinovsky

1921-08-24 - 2019-11-13 · Chief designer of the Dnepr control computer; chronicler of Soviet computing

What the checking found The position is circular: four of the seven sources go back to Malinovsky himself and the Ukrainian museum says so openly, and independent of him there are only the Russian museum biography, Wikipedia and the ICFCST chronology, which dates the Dnepr to 1958-1961.

Divergence from the page Five of the nine timeline entries are about other people, Bruk, Lebedev and Rameev, although the page promises nine referenced events for Malinovsky.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Vladimir Melnikov

1928-08-18 - 1993-05-07

What the checking found The hardest source is a finding-aid entry of the Academy archive, fond 2061, recording the Institute of Cybernetics Problems with Melnikov as director from 1983 to 1994, while the Russian museum and encyclopedia texts visibly go back to one and the same template.

Divergence from the page The contest between Elbrus and Melnikov's BESM-10 told on the page appears in none of the sources checked.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Bashir Rameev

1918-05-15 - 1994-05-16 · Self-taught chief designer of the Ural computer family

What the checking found Inventor's certificate no. 10475 of 4 December 1948 is covered word for word in three sources, while the date of birth is disputed inside one and the same institution: computer-museum.ru carries 15 May and 1 May 1918 side by side, and the Russian Wikipedia writes explicitly 1 or 15 May.

Divergence from the page The page contradicts itself: header and schema.org block give 15 May, the first timeline entry gives 1 May, with no explanation.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Alfred Sarant / Philip Staros

1918-09-26 - 1979-03-12 · American engineer and Rosenberg-ring spy who fled to the USSR and co-founded Soviet microelectronics

What the checking found The record splits into an American strand, Usdin's monograph at Yale University Press plus his article in the CIA house journal, and a Russian one, which is itself divided, because the Virtual Computer Museum puts two competing Staros biographies side by side and adds a text on the falsification of the history of Soviet microelectronics.

Divergence from the page The page contradicts itself on the Zelenograd position, one entry making Sarant scientific director and a second correctly making him deputy, which is what both sources checked support; the date of birth in the header is covered by no source.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Ekaterina Shkabara

1912-12-01 - 2002-11-21 · Lead engineer of the MESM control unit, co-author of the first Soviet programming textbook

What the checking found Her role in the MESM project is on the record, the minutes of the first session of the closed scientific council of 8 January 1951 name her, while everything biographical comes from the autobiography she wrote in 1991, reproduced in a Ukrainian newspaper portrait of 2007.

Divergence from the page The damaging episode, that as party secretary in 1950 she reported Lebedev's recruiting to the Ukrainian Central Committee, appears in no source checked, not even in her own autobiography.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Sergei Sobolev

1908-10-06 - 1989-01-03 · Youngest Soviet academician, atomic bomb mathematician, shield of cybernetics

What the checking found The biobibliographical index of the Sobolev Institute (4th edition, Novosibirsk 2013, 156 pp., ISBN 978-5-86134-196-7) gives the life dates word for word, and the Academy archive gives the exact election dates, corresponding member from 1 February 1933 and full member from 29 January 1939.

Divergence from the page The same index dates the entry into Laboratory no. 2 to 1944 and the Steklov directorship to 1942-1944, while the page gives 1943 and the outbreak of war in 1941.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Kateryna Yushchenko

1919-12-08 - 2001-08-15 · Creator of the Address programming language, first Soviet woman Doctor of Sciences in programming

What the checking found The official obituary of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Visnyk 2001, no. 9) is available as a PDF and puts it more strongly than the website: she was the first person in the USSR to be awarded the doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences for work on programming, not the first woman.

Divergence from the page The page dates the doctorate to 1966 and narrows the superlative to women, while the author's abstract of the doctoral dissertation is dated 1964 in the list of works.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Vladimir Chelomei

1914-06-30 - 1984-12-08 · Designer of the Proton rocket and of the military Almaz stations flown as 'Salyut'; Korolev's great institutional rival

What the checking found The concrete Almaz data all come from Anatoly Zak's RussianSpaceWeb, which states that it relies on material and information from the successor company NPO Mashinostroyeniya: launch of OPS-1 as Salyut 2 on 3 April 1973, launch of OPS-2 as Salyut 3 on 25 June 1974, the onboard cannon Shchit-1 from the Nudelman design bureau.

Divergence from the page The cannon shot in orbit, carried on the page as the only weapon ever fired in space, is neither dated nor confirmed in any source checked; what is covered is only that the station was armed.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Boris Chertok

1912-03-01 - 2011-12-14 · Deputy chief designer for control systems at OKB-1; author of 'Rockets and People', the great insider chronicle of the Soviet programme

What the checking found All four volumes of Rockets and People are freely available as NASA PDFs, SP-2005-4110 to SP-2011-4110, and were checked at title, imprint and dedication pages, while the catalogued papers at the Smithsonian, sova-nasm-2009-0036, were reachable only as a search result because the page answered with HTTP 403.

Divergence from the page Korolev's deputy from 1946 to 1974 is wrong at both ends, because according to the RIA chronology Chertok became deputy chief designer only in 1957, and Korolev died in 1966.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Konstantin Feoktistov

1926-02-07 - 2009-11-21 · Engineer-cosmonaut who designed Voskhod and Soyuz and flew on Voskhod 1; a rare civilian in orbit and an architect of the stations

What the checking found The award card index of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence at Pamyat naroda covers the unit, the 1st independent parachute battalion, and the Hero's star of 19 October 1964, but not the wartime episode itself, which comes from his memoirs Traektoriya zhizni, Vagrius 2000, and travelled from there into the whole literature.

Divergence from the page First non-pilot does not hold, because the physician Boris Yegorov was on the same flight; first designer in space would be the correct formula.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Yuri Gagarin

1934-03-09 - 1968-03-27 · First human in space (12 April 1961); a global icon whose fame outran the secret machine that launched him

What the checking found The government decision on the crash of 28 November 1968 is verifiable with title, issuing bodies and a complete reference (AP RF, f. 3, op. 78, d. 1058, ll. 72-75, certified copy), but its wording was not retrieved, which is why the research file says nothing about the cause established.

Divergence from the page The 108 minutes and the ejection-seat exit, both core statements of the page, are covered by no source retrieved; the ESA page gives neither launch time nor flight duration.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Oleg Gazenko

1918-12-12 - 2007-11-17 · Physiologist who prepared the dog Laika, led the Institute of Biomedical Problems, and built Soviet space medicine

What the checking found The load-bearing source is an obituary in the British Medical Journal of 2008, 336:394, which confirms the directorship at the IBMP from 1969 to 1988 year by year and names 48 dogs flown before Gagarin, of which 20 died; a correction notice in the same journal records Laika's death by overheating.

Divergence from the page The often quoted sentence that the mission was not worth the death of the dog is found in seven identically worded places and in none of them with agency, date or occasion.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Valentin Glushko

1908-09-02 - 1989-01-10 · Master of the Soviet rocket engine; Korolev's rival and denouncer, later head of NPO Energia and father of Energia-Buran

What the checking found Arrest on 23 March 1938 and a sentence of eight years on 15 August 1939 are covered from two independent Russian databases, while the interrogation record with the statements against Korolev is available in no source, neither in wording nor with an archival reference.

Divergence from the page The page's formula that Korolev's enemies later included Glushko inverts the chronology, because Glushko had been in prison since 23 March 1938, three months before Korolev's arrest.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Nikolai Kamanin

1908-10-18 - 1982-03-11 · Air-force general who selected and commanded the cosmonaut corps; his secret diaries record the politics of every crew, the women included

What the checking found The diaries Skrytyi kosmos are covered with publisher, division into volumes and period, Infortekst-IF, 1995 to 1997, four books for 1960-1963, 1964-1967, 1967-1968 and 1969-1978, and are available in the full-text mirror militera.lib.ru, but the entries on the selection decision itself were not read.

Divergence from the page The judgement about the abler Ponomaryova is uncovered and goes back essentially to Ponomaryova's own account; on top of that, Kamanin's official year of birth 1908 is, according to his son Lev, predated by one year.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Yelena Kondakova

1957-03-30 · Engineer-cosmonaut; among the first women to make a long-duration flight (Mir, 1994-95) and to fly the Space Shuttle

What the checking found As the only dossier in the book it rests almost entirely on contemporaneous institutional documentation, three NASA sources cover Mir expedition 17 with 169 days and STS-84 from 15 to 24 May 1997, though the NASA biography in one place wrongly calls the first flight Soyuz TM-17 instead of TM-20.

Divergence from the page One of the first Russian women to ride the American shuttle is put too cautiously, because by the sources checked she was the first, and a second could not be shown.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Sergei Korolev

1907-01-12 - 1966-01-14 · The anonymous 'Chief Designer' of Sputnik, Vostok and Soyuz; a Gulag survivor who ran the Soviet space programme

What the checking found The start of the programme is covered hard, decree of the Council of Ministers no. 1017-419ss of 13 May 1946 is online in full text with an archival reference (GA RF, f. R-5446, op. 3as, d. 23, ll. 216-224), and the repression data come from a card database with paragraph, sentence and rehabilitation date.

Divergence from the page That same decree does not name Korolev, and the designation OKB-1 is an anachronism for 1946, because what was created then was NII-88, with OKB-1 formed inside it only in 1950.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Alexei Leonov

1934-05-30 - 2019-10-11 · First human to walk in space (Voskhod 2, 1965); artist-cosmonaut and commander of the Apollo-Soyuz handshake

What the checking found The only inside view of the suit failure is Leonov's own account The Nightmare of Voskhod 2 in Air & Space, January 2005, in which he describes bleeding off the excess pressure through a valve and gives the time outside as over 10 minutes, while the recorded figure is 12 minutes 9 seconds.

Divergence from the page The last of the pioneering cosmonauts is wrong, because Boris Volynov from the same 1960 group is alive.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Vasily Parin

1903-03-18 - 1971-06-15 · Physiologist and academician, responsible for the medical side of Soviet crewed flight from 1956 to 1971 and a director of the IBMP; imprisoned under Stalin, rehabilitated to shape cosmic biology

What the checking found What is covered above all are the judicial dates, arrest on 18 February 1947, charge under article 58-1a, sentence on 8 April 1948, release on 29 October 1953 and full rehabilitation on 13 April 1955, while the obvious archival source on the imprisonment, the RAW project on repressed scientists, is no longer reachable at all after a DNS failure of the domain.

Divergence from the page Parin did not co-found the IBMP in 1963, the Kaluga museum names Korolev, Burnazyan and Keldysh as the initiators, the first director was Lebedinsky, and Parin took over the leadership only in 1965.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Valeri Polyakov

1942-04-27 - 2022-09-07 · Physician-cosmonaut who spent 437 days 17 hours 58 minutes aboard Mir (1994-95), the longest single spaceflight ever, a deliberate Mars-mission rehearsal

What the checking found The NASA Mir chronicle, TP-1998-208920, was read in full and dates the breaking of the record to 9 January 1995, when Polyakov had been aboard for 366 consecutive days and so passed the 365-day record of Titov and Manarov; a Mars-flight rationale does not appear in it.

Divergence from the page 19 September 2022 is the date of the Roscosmos announcement, while Geroi strany and the Russian encyclopedia give 7 September 2022 as the day of death.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Valentina Ponomaryova

1933-09-18 - 2023-11-08 · Rocket-engine engineer and the only pilot of the 1962 female cosmonaut group; back-up for Tereshkova, she waited two decades for a flight that never came

What the checking found The Kaluga museum and the Russian encyclopedia agree on the hard dates down to the file numbers, admission to the women's group on 3 April 1962 by Air Force order no. 92, appointment as second backup on 10 May 1963, discharge on 1 October 1969 by order no. 945.

Divergence from the page The date of death on the page is wrong, because the Kaluga museum's obituary of 10 November 2023 and the Russian encyclopedia give 8 November 2023; she therefore died at 90 and not at 89.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Viktor Savinykh

1940-03-07 · Engineer-cosmonaut who, with Dzhanibekov, boarded and revived the dead, frozen Salyut 7 in 1985, one of the most impressive in-space repairs in history

What the checking found Portree's Mir Hardware Heritage, NASA RP-1357, was read in full and supplies the engineering with page numbers: Soyuz T-13 as the first craft to dock manually with a dead station (p. 51), frost on walls and equipment and air samples before the hatch was opened (p. 99), a fault in the sun sensor as the cause and two destroyed batteries (p. 185).

Divergence from the page The icicles on the walls on the page stand in no source, Portree writes of frost and Geroi strany of 0 degrees and frozen water supplies.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Svetlana Savitskaya

1948-08-08 · Second woman in space and first woman to walk in space (Salyut 7, 1984); test pilot and world aviation record-holder

What the checking found Only five sources could be retrieved for this dossier, the most solid being Portree, NASA RP-1357, p. 98, with the spacewalk of 25 July 1984 lasting 3 hours 30 minutes and the URI tool used to cut, weld, solder and coat metal samples.

Divergence from the page Savitskaya did not leave the cosmonaut corps in 1986 but retired from active service only in October 1993, and she entered the Duma in December 1995.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Valentina Tereshkova

1937-03-06 · First woman in space (Vostok 6, 1963); a textile worker and amateur parachutist chosen from the 1962 female cosmonaut group

What the checking found The radio transcripts of Vostok 6 are edited and available with a citation, Istoricheskii arkhiv 1998, no. 5-6, pp. 219-226, that is, published only 35 years after the flight; of these only the metadata record was read, not the text.

Divergence from the page The backup for Vostok 6 was Irina Solovyova, with Ponomaryova only second reserve, and the round figure of 126 parachute jumps stands in no source checked, what is covered is more than 100.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

1857-09-17 - 1935-09-19 · Deaf schoolteacher and self-taught theorist; derived the rocket equation and the philosophy of spaceflight the Soviet programme took as scripture

What the checking found No digitisation of the first publication of 1903 in Nauchnoe obozrenie no. 5 exists, what is available is the Kaluga edition of 1926 revised by the author himself, 128 pp., digitised by the Presidential Library, and the supplement of 1914, 20 pp., at the Internet Archive, while the wording of the fundamental equation can be checked only in Chertok, volume I, p. 3, where it stands on equal footing with Ivan Meshchersky's work on the motion of variable masses.

Divergence from the page The famous cradle quotation cannot be covered in the form given on the page; what is verifiable is the planet is the cradle of reason, traced to Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniya 1912, no. 3, p. 16, not to 1911.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Boris Yegorov

1937-11-26 - 1994-09-12 · First physician in space (Voskhod 1, 1964); a medical doctor who studied the vestibular system in orbit

What the checking found Geroi strany supplies the hard data from decrees and certificates, flight from 12 to 13 October 1964 lasting 1 day 17 minutes 3 seconds, Gold Star no. 11228, head of department at the IBMP from 1964 to 1984, and a portrait at Pro Kosmos covers his rejection in 1962 for short-sightedness and his admission only in May 1964, five months before the launch.

Divergence from the page The statement married six times is uncovered, four marriages can be shown by name.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Ary Boender

1956 (unconfirmed) · Dutch monitor; made the earliest surviving recording of the Buzzer (1982); Numbers & Oddities

What the checking found What is covered is the newsletter, and to the month: the first Numbers & Oddities column was written in January 1995, appeared in February 1995 in the newsletter of the Worldwide Utility News Club, and the series runs to issue 337 of October 2025 and is held in the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications at the Internet Archive.

Divergence from the page The central claim of the page, that Boender made the oldest surviving Buzzer recording in January 1982, hangs on the description of a YouTube video; what is covered is only that he has monitored numbers stations since 1982 (Radio World, 27 January 2014), his own recordings page lists no 1982 recording, the month of January is covered nowhere, and the birth year 1956 stands in none of the five sources.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Pieter-Tjerk de Boer

1972 (unconfirmed) · Dutch computer scientist (PA3FWM) who wrote the first WebSDR software (2008), making the Buzzer listenable worldwide

What the checking found The project page websdr.org gives three dates instead of one: the first shortwave WebSDR set up at the radio club of the University of Twente on Christmas Eve 2007, public announcement in April 2008, beta phase with selected stations in November 2008.

Divergence from the page The page's line that he builds the first WebSDR in 2008 therefore hits the announcement, not the build, physicist holds only for the degree of 1996, since de Boer took his doctorate in computer science in 2000 and is today associate professor of communication systems, and the birth year 1972 stands in an IEEE Xplore search result alone.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Akin Fernandez

c.1963 · Founder of Irdial-Discs; compiler of The Conet Project (1997), the definitive numbers-station recordings

What the checking found The work data of the Conet Project, 1997, four CDs, 150 recordings and a thick accompanying book, agree across the label page, the Internet Archive holding, the Wave Farm archive, the music press and a reference work, and the Wilco connection is documented with the sample Phonetic Alphabet Nato in the outro of Poor Places in Rolling Stone on 23 June 2004.

Divergence from the page The personal data run counter to that, David Segal's portrait of 3 August 2004 writes that he is now 41, which leads to 1962 or 1963 and not to 1965, and for the founding of the label Fernandez himself gives 1985, not the 1987 on the page.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Gerardo Hernandez

1965-06-04 · Cuban intelligence officer; spymaster of the Wasp Network exposed by the Atencion numbers station

What the checking found Four central dates stand word for word in one and the same body of court papers, the appendix to the certiorari petition: arrest on 12 September 1998, conviction on 8 June 2001, date of imposition of sentence 12 December 2001 and, in the sentencing document 1:98cr0721-001, a date of birth of 4 June 1965.

Divergence from the page The numbers-station link is exactly what is missing there, the words Atencion, numbers station and shortwave do not occur anywhere in the appendix, the files speak of encrypted radio messages to Hernandez's call sign, the attribution to the Atencion station comes from specialist journalism (Slate, 6 July 2010), and the two life sentences run concurrently by the document, not one after the other.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

David E. Hoffman

1953 (unconfirmed) · American journalist; author of The Dead Hand (2009), Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

What the checking found The first edition of 2009 at Doubleday is covered through the Kirkus review of 1 August 2009, while the publisher's page documents only the Anchor paperback of 2010, 496 against 608 pages, so anyone citing page numbers must give the edition, and the Pulitzer Prize of 2010 hangs on the National Security Archive at GWU because pulitzer.org was unreachable behind a Cloudflare block.

Divergence from the page No evidence was found for the sentence that the book rests on interviews including Yarynich, the birth year 1953 stands only in a Wikipedia infobox without a reference of its own, and the distinction between Perimeter and the Buzzer is an interpretation by the website, because UVB-76 does not appear in Hoffman at all.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Vladimir Kotelnikov

1908-09-06 - 2005-02-11 · Soviet radio scientist; sampling theorem; independent proof of one-time-pad secrecy (traditionally dated 1941)

What the checking found Of the 1941 work the title is covered, on the basic principles of automatic ciphering, after Elektrosvyaz of 27 April 2021, while the text itself is not public: none of the sources quotes the proof or names an archival reference, which makes reportedly classified on the page the right wording.

Divergence from the page On the birthday the sources differ, the Russian Academy of Sciences writing 10 September 1908 against 6 September 1908 in the Great Russian Encyclopedia, in Bykhovsky and in Wikipedia, and the sampling theorem was formulated in 1932 and published only in 1933, which the page merges into 1933.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Franz Kuzminsky

1922 - 1991 · Chief designer of the Duga over-the-horizon radar (the 'Russian Woodpecker') at NIIDAR

What the checking found The technical role is covered twice, by Dubrovsky and Kostyuchenko in Privolzhskiy nauchnyi vestnik of 2012 and by Zepelev in Voennaya mysl of 2018, including the calibration phase from 7 November 1971 and the detection of Baikonur launches over 2,500 km by the test installation near Nikolaev.

Divergence from the page The personal data do not carry that, the only biography found, RTI Stories, reachable only as a search result, gives 3 November 1922 as the birthday and 1968 as the start of his work as chief designer, while the page's chief engineer at NIIDAR in December 1963 occurs in no source.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Simon Mason

1962 (unconfirmed) · British shortwave listener; author of Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery (1991)

What the checking found The work is catalogued, at Open Library as Secret Signals. The Euronumbers Mystery, Tiare Publications 1991, ISBN 0936653280, the person is not: no usable source was found for year of birth, place of residence, occupation or start of monitoring, and his website simonmason.karoo.net is offline and covered only indirectly through Wikipedia, AmateurRadio.com of 6 June 2010 and SpyNumbers.

Divergence from the page Uncovered therefore are the birth year 1962, the year 1996 for the website going online, which is attested only for 2010, and Mason's role in circulating the ENIGMA newsletters.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Ana Belen Montes

1957 · Senior DIA analyst who spied for Cuba for about 17 years via shortwave numbers messages; arrested 2001

What the checking found The hard numbers-station evidence stands in the reproduction of the FBI affidavit at Latin American Studies: the hard disk copied on 25 May 2001 held 150 five-figure groups beginning 30107 24624, and the same numbers in the same order were broadcast on 6 February 1999 on 7887 kHz by a Spanish-speaking female voice.

Divergence from the page The official original of this affidavit could not be found, and three smaller statements of the page failed: in the only source on him the father is an Army colonel and not a military physician, the place of birth is covered only as a US military base in West Germany and not as Nuremberg, and the day 28 February is confirmed in no source.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Stanislav Petrov

1939-09-07 - 2017-05-19 · Soviet air-defence officer who judged the 1983 missile alert a false alarm, averting escalation

What the checking found Rank, the false alarm of 26 September 1983 with five missiles reported, its cause in sunlight on clouds and the death on 19 May 2017 in Fryazino are covered through Arms Control Today, Smithsonian and TIME, while no declassified Soviet primary document on the incident exists: the Western account rests on Petrov's own statements from 1998 and 1999 and on the memoirs of General Votintsev, which could not be pinned down bibliographically.

Divergence from the page The timeline of the page contains, with the founding of the Yuzhnoye bureau in 1954, an event that belongs to Mikhail Yangel; Petrov was fifteen at the time.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Rimantas Pleikys

1957-11-25 - 2021-01-24 · Lithuanian broadcaster and ex-minister; author of Jamming (1998)

What the checking found The life dates are official, the Lithuanian parliament giving 25 November 1957 and 24 January 2021 in its notice as well as the office of minister of communications and informatics from 1996 to 1998, and Jamming exists in two versions, the self-published text of 1998 at Open Library and the five-language online edition of 2004 at oldradio.lt.

Divergence from the page The weightiest open claim is the timeline entry on the channel-marker reading of 2005: Priyom.org carries the channel-marker interpretation as a state of knowledge without an author, neither the year nor the attribution to Pleikys could be covered, and no source confirms that Jamming deals with utility signals such as the Buzzer.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Claude Shannon

1916-04-30 - 2001-02-24 · American mathematician; founder of information theory; proved the perfect secrecy of the one-time pad

What the checking found Both key papers are available in the original, the 1948 facsimile identifying itself in the header as a corrected reprint from the Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423 and 623-656, July and October 1948, and the 1949 paper as a digitisation of the original issue, vol. 28, no. 4, October 1949, pp. 656-715.

Divergence from the page The page nevertheless shows eleven events, four of them about Kotelnikov, who has a dossier page of his own, and Kotelnikov's supposed one-time-pad proof of 1941 could not be shown in any checkable source outside Wikipedia mirrors and fan wikis.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Chris Smolinski

1966 (unconfirmed) · American shortwave monitor and software developer; runs the 'Spooks' numbers-station mailing list and spynumbers.com

What the checking found The single timeline entry of the page is covered contemporaneously: the first issue of Numbers & Oddities, no. 01 of April 1998, in full text at the Internet Archive, lists voice stations under Chris Smolinski and records that the newsletter is sent to the members of the Spooks mailing list.

Divergence from the page Everything else stands weaker, no source gives the birth year 1966, Radio World in 2014 calls him a veteran numbers monitor and not an engineer, the 35,000 database entries could not be checked because spynumbers.com was unreachable behind an unverifiable TLS certificate, and what is covered is a start of monitoring in the late 1970s, not 1998.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Nicholas Thompson

1975 (unconfirmed) · American journalist; author of the 2009 Wired feature on the Soviet 'Doomsday Machine'

What the checking found The Wired article is covered by date, 21 September 2009, by issue, 17.10, and by content, though through Longreads and a full-text mirror, because wired.com and archive.wired.com were unreachable from the research environment.

Divergence from the page The short title used on the page is wrong, the original is Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine, the article does not mention UVB-76 at all, the claim that he fed the myth of the Buzzer as a trigger is an interpretation without evidence, and the birth year 1975 stands only in a Wikipedia infobox without a footnote.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Mikhail Yangel

1911-10-25 - 1971-10-25 · Soviet rocket chief designer; founder of the Yuzhnoye bureau that built the Perimeter command missile

What the checking found Life dates, the death on his own 60th birthday when he collapsed during the celebration at the ministry, the direction of the bureau from 1954 to 1971 and the assignment of the command missile 15A11 to Yuzhnoye are covered, and the data sheet adds government decision no. 695-227 of 30 August 1974 and combat duty from January 1985.

Divergence from the page It is the only dossier in this book whose research file finds no factual divergence in the page's own statements; three omissions remain open, that the 15A11 was based on the MR-UR-100UTTKh, index 15A16, that the entry on the founding of the Yuzhnoye bureau in 1954 also stands on the Petrov page, where it does not belong, and that the page calls Yuzhnoye one of the Soviet Union's two great missile houses, a judgement none of the checked sources makes in that form.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Valery Yarynich

c.1937 - 2012-12-13 · Soviet colonel; a developer of the Perimeter ('Dead Hand') retaliation system; key source for The Dead Hand

What the checking found The day of death is covered word for word through the obituary at Pressenza of 18 December 2012, but the most important result of the research is a finding against the narrative: Briefing Book 285 of the National Security Archive shows that Soviet generals contradicted one another in the BDM interviews, Danilevich stating that fully automatic release had been rejected as too dangerous, while others said the system was armed in crises.

Divergence from the page Three statements of the page are uncovered, the birth year 1937, extrapolated only from 72 years old in the Wired article of 2009, the function of deputy head of missile-weapons command for 1984, and the chain by which Bruce Blair had from Yarynich the details published in 1993.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Vladimir Bekhterev

1857-02-01 - 1927-12-24 · Neurologist; founder of reflexology and the Psychoneurological Institute; studied suggestion and telepathy

What the checking found Bekhterev's book on suggestion is digitised page by page in the second, enlarged edition of 1903 (K. L. Ricker, St Petersburg, 144 pp.), and Kesselring's paper in European Neurology 66/1 covers the Kremlin visit of 23 December 1927, the death on the following day, the immediate cremation against the family's wishes and the autopsy of the brain alone, 1,720 g, while expressly holding the poisoning thesis to be unproven.

Divergence from the page The dossier's claim that the effect vanished as soon as Durov left the room runs against the sources, where Bekhterev himself carried out two of the six classic trials successfully; the trials also date to 1919 and the overall statistics to the period up to early 1921, not to 1922.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Lavrentiy Beria

1899-03-29 - 1953-12-23 · Head of the NKVD to 1945 and of the reunified MVD in 1953; reputed overseer of the poison laboratory, and in charge of the atomic project and the sharashka system

What the checking found Fall, proceedings and execution in 1953 are densely covered by the edited volume Lavrentiy Beria. 1953, with 63 documents, MFD 1999, 512 pp., and by an interrogation record with a reference (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 171, d. 467, ll. 37-47), yet that very record of 22 August 1953 does not mention the poison laboratory, Mairanovsky or human experiments at all.

Divergence from the page For the Beria confession of 28 August 1953 asserted twice on the page the targeted search returned nothing, the published August records are dated the 5th, 7th, 14th and 22nd, and what is covered instead are Mairanovsky's statements of 6 and 7 August and Merkulov's of 29 August; the English Wikipedia also marks the sentence about supervision of the poison laboratory as needing a citation.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Alexander Bogdanov

1873-08-22 - 1928-04-07 · Bolshevik polymath; founder of the world's first blood-transfusion institute; died experimenting on himself

What the checking found The successor institution, the National Research Centre for Haematology, dates the founding resolution of the blood transfusion institute to 26 February 1926 and counts eleven successful exchange transfusions on Bogdanov himself before the twelfth, with the blood of a student who had inactive tuberculosis, ended fatally; the cause of death, a haemolytic transfusion reaction, is covered by Huestis in two journals.

Divergence from the page The student's malaria, the clinical notes kept to the last and his survival are covered by no source checked, because the institute account breaks off before the course of the death.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Friedrich Falz-Fein

1863-04-16 - 1920-08-02 · Landowner-naturalist who founded the Askania-Nova steppe reserve where Ivanov's hybrid work began

What the checking found Little peer-reviewed literature exists on Falz-Fein as a person and not one of the five verified sources is peer-reviewed, the substance sits with three Ukrainian memory institutions, and they name five competing turning points for Askania-Nova: zoo 1874, museum and botanical garden 1887, effective steppe protection from 1889, further protected plots in 1897 and 1898, and a state steppe reserve by decree of 8 February 1921.

Divergence from the page The dossier picks 1898 and calls it the oldest nature reserve in Ukraine, while the present custodian itself counts from 1921; the dedication in perpetuity appears in none of the five sources.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Nikolai Gorbunov

1892-06-21 - 1938-09-07 · Lenin's secretary and Sovnarkom administrator; the official who found the money for Ivanov's hybrid expedition

What the checking found The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 describes Gorbunov before the damnatio memoriae and covers exactly the office the dossier builds on, business manager of the Sovnarkom from 1920, and the repression database puts the arrest on 19 February 1938 and the execution on 7 September 1938 at Kommunarka and notes that the falsified death dates were corrected only in 1988, which is why hrono.ru still gives 1937.

Divergence from the page The claim for which Gorbunov is in the book at all appears in none of the six sources, neither the ten thousand dollars for Ivanov's expedition nor the month September 1925 nor any connection between Gorbunov and Ivanov; the birth date 20 June appears nowhere either, what is covered is 9 or 21 June 1892.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Ilya Ivanov

1870-08-01 - 1932-03-20 · Pioneer of animal artificial insemination; architect of the 1926-27 human-ape hybridization programme

What the checking found The standard work, Rossiianov in Science in Context 15/2, pp. 277-316, is covered only through the Cambridge article page with its bibliographic data, the full text could not be opened, so the timeline points in fact hang on the Russian Wikipedia and on the successor institution in Sukhumi, which states expressly that Ivanov helped to build the primate station but never worked there.

Divergence from the page The 1929 line with the at least five volunteer women was found only in Wikipedia-derived aggregators and is uncovered; the same aggregators report that in June 1929 the only sexually mature male ape in Sukhumi died and the plan was therefore never carried out.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Ippolit Kogan

1921 - 2007 · Information theorist and professor who led the Soviet 'bioinformation' telepathy studies of the 1960s-70s in Moscow

What the checking found The declassified DIA report of 1975 describes the bioinformation section formed in 1965 at the Popov Society in Moscow and states that Kogan found no sector anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum examined in which telepathic transmission could take place; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia confirms the founding year and the parent organisation but does not name Kogan.

Divergence from the page Both life dates are wrong, a catalogue record of the Russian State Library covers a book by Kogan from 2004, and the roughly six thousand shielded image trials named in the dossier stand in a LiveJournal entry alone, not in the DIA report, which also dates from 1975 and not from 1972.

Where the sources were consulted Checked against the two inventories of fond R-2828 in the study room of the National Archives of Moldova in Chisinau, November 2025.

Research trailField note: An abandoned sanatorium in Moldova, November 12, 2025

Alexander Lebed

1950-04-20 - 2002-04-28 · Russian general; commander of the 14th Guards Army during the 1992 Transnistria war

What the checking found The text of the agreement of 21 July 1992 is available and binds the 14th Army to strict neutrality, that is, to exactly what it had not observed in July 1992; Lebed's own memoirs of 1995 have no Transnistria chapter according to their table of contents, so the dates for the taking of command come from the defence ministry website of the unrecognised PMR.

Divergence from the page Lebed became commander on 27 June 1992, the 23rd of June is the date of his arrival under the cover name Colonel Gusev, and more than four weeks lie between appointment, artillery strike on 3 and 4 July and agreement on 21 July, instead of the days claimed.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Trofim Lysenko

1898-09-29 - 1976-11-20 · Agronomist who ruled Soviet biology; banned genetics as 'bourgeois perversion' at the 1948 VASKhNIL session

What the checking found The session exists as a printed stenographic report of 1948, 536 pp. at OGIZ-Selkhozgiz, with Lysenko's opening address, the discussion speeches and the closing resolution, it ran from 31 July to 7 August, and Rossianov's paper in Isis of 1993 is the proof that Stalin edited the address by hand.

Divergence from the page According to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography Lysenko lost the VASKhNIL presidency as early as 1956, what is covered for 1965 is only his removal as director of the Institute of Genetics, and the phrase set in quotation marks as bourgeois pseudoscience reads bourgeois perversion in the source that covers it.

Where the sources were consulted Traced through the card catalogue at a library reading desk in Chisinau, May 2026.

Research trailField note: Moldova, library desk, May 30, 2026

Grigory Mairanovsky

1899 - 1964 · Toxicologist known as 'Doctor Death'; ran the secret NKVD poison laboratory, testing poisons on condemned prisoners

What the checking found Petrov's Memorial handbook reproduces the biogram from service files, with dissertation in June 1940 on mustard gas and skin tissue, arrest on 13 December 1951, sentence on 14 February 1953 and the figure of not fewer than 150 killed, taken from a letter by Semichastny and Rudenko of 3 March 1962 (GARF, f. 7523, op. 108, d. 171); it is the one number in this whole subject that comes from an official letter and not from Sudoplatov's memoirs.

Divergence from the page The Beria interrogation record of 28 August named on the page could not be found, what is covered instead is Mairanovsky's own statement of 27 August 1953, and the ten-year sentence was passed not on the day of arrest but fourteen months later, under art. 193-17 a and art. 179 of the RSFSR criminal code, not for a Zionist conspiracy.

Where the sources were consulted Read from the same downloaded scan at night on the dried out Aral coast, March 2022.

Research trailField note: Ships on Dry Land, March 14, 2022

Ivan Pavlov

1849-09-26 - 1936-02-27 · Physiologist of the conditioned reflex; first Russian Nobel laureate; headed the physiology department of the Institute of Experimental Medicine

What the checking found The institute's own history of the Institute of Experimental Medicine covers the founding date, 8 or 21 December 1890, the founder and financier, Prince Alexander Petrovich of Oldenburg, the Institut Pasteur as its model, the first director Eduard Shperk and Pavlov's 45 years at the head of the physiology department; nobelprize.org itself returned HTTP 403, which is why the Nobel details are the one point of this dossier resting on quoted wording in the search results.

Divergence from the page Pavlov ran the department of physiology, not the institute, whose first director was Shperk; the wording presided over the Institute of Experimental Medicine also stands in the schema.org block.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Mircea Snegur

1940-01-17 - 2023-09-13 · First President of independent Moldova; steered the country through independence and the 1992 Transnistria war

What the checking found Two independent media, the Romanian Digi24 and the Moldovan investigative paper Ziarul de Garda, date Snegur's death alike to 13 September 2023 at the age of 83 and give the term of office as 3 September 1990 to 1 December 1996; the agreement of 21 July 1992 is covered as existing and dated through the Moldovan government's register of documents, its wording was not retrieved.

Divergence from the page The schema.org block and the page header give 13 September 2025 as the date of death, the timeline on the same page gives 13 September 2023; the error sits in the machine-readable part.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Pavel Sudoplatov

1907-07-07 - 1996-09-24 · NKVD spymaster; ran assassinations, 'Laboratory X' and wartime special tasks; wrote the memoir 'Special Tasks'

What the checking found Petrov's biogram measures the memoirs against the service files and leaves standing what the files support, the Konovalets assassination of 23 May 1938 in Rotterdam, the direction of the special bureau for acts of individual terror in 1945 and 1946, and the text of the 1958 verdict, according to which the special laboratory for poison experiments on living people worked under Sudoplatov's supervision, while CWIHP Bulletin no. 4 documents alongside it why the 1994 book is useless as evidence, because its most spectacular claims broke on an archival document that surfaced two months after publication.

Divergence from the page The timeline runs arrest and prison sentence together, while in fact five years of pre-trial detention lie between arrest on 21 August 1953 and verdict on 12 September 1958, and the 1992 rehabilitation, which the handbook records as unlawful, goes unmentioned.

Where the sources were consulted Read from a downloaded scan at night on the dried out Aral coast, March 2022. Named in the same night's field note on the dried out Aral coast, March 2022, as the source of the term Laboratory X.

Research trailField note: Ships on Dry Land, March 14, 2022

Leonid Vasiliev

1891-08-19 - 1966 · Leningrad physiologist; heir to Bekhterev's 'mental suggestion' work; father of Soviet parapsychology

What the checking found Offices and dates are solid through the Biografika database of St Petersburg University, Bekhterev Institute 1921 to 1941, head of the physiological laboratory from 1923, experiments on paranormal phenomena 1932 to 1938, and the catalogue record shows that the English translation of 1963 is called Experiments in Mental Suggestion, not Suggestion at a Distance.

Divergence from the page The parapsychology laboratory founded in 1960 rests on the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research alone, while the university source knows only a chair from 1944 to 1965 and no laboratory of his own, and the source from the history of science speaks of a special group in the 1960s.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

Nikolai Vavilov

1887-11-25 - 1943-01-26 · Botanist and geneticist; builder of the world collection of crop seeds; Lysenko's victim, dead of starvation in prison

What the checking found The interrogation record of 14 and 15 November 1940 is online in full text with its archival reference (Central Archive of the FSB of Russia, no. R-2311, vol. 1, ll. 226-276), and the repression database Otkrytyi spisok gives arrest on 6 August 1940 in Chernivtsi, death sentence on 9 July 1941, death in prison no. 1 in Saratov on 26 January 1943 and rehabilitation on 20 August 1955, each to the day.

Divergence from the page The figure of over 148,000 seed specimens for 1933 appears in no source, only differing totals without a reference year are covered; the death sentence also came eleven months after the arrest, while the timeline suggests they coincided.

Where the sources were consulted A visit is recorded in the research trail for this file, but none of the sources below came out of it: they were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies.

Serge Voronoff

1866-07-10 - 1951-09-02 · Surgeon of the 'monkey-gland' rejuvenation grafts; celebrity of interwar experimental biology

What the checking found Six of the eight records are pure Crossref metadata, so what is covered above all is that the Voronoff operation was discussed as a named procedure in Nature, JAMA, the Journal of British Surgery and the veterinary literature in 1925 and 1926; the only source evaluated on content is Remy's paper in French History 28/2, which dates the xenotransplantations to 1910-1930 and works out the racist grounding of the French debate.

Divergence from the page The monkey farm on the Italian Riviera in 1925, the place of death in Switzerland and the date 3 September are uncovered; Who Was Who gives 2 September 1951.

Where the sources were consulted The sources for this file were consulted at a distance, from published editions and digitised copies, so what it says rests on documents and not on anything seen on the spot.

The six sides that survive

All of it stands on one archive file. 880.rar is 301,403 bytes and holds six disk sides. Each side is 1001 sectors of 256 bytes, so 256,256 bytes to the side, and there are no others: these are the only bytes of this machine that anybody has published.

It was posted on oldpc.su in 2016. The physical eight inch disks were vazman's, and he gave them up. dk_spb read them and put the images online. The thread is on phantom.sannata.org and dates from that year. The download link is dead, and the copy I work from came out of a snapshot in the Internet Archive from August 2016, which as far as I can establish is the only one left anywhere. If you mirror these files, mirror their names with them.

The one thing nobody knows How dk_spb produced these images is written down nowhere I can reach. No post names the reading hardware, none names the image format, and in 2022 he is still asking about the disk format himself. So the only surviving bytes of this machine exist and nobody can say any more how they were taken off. I have never claimed they were read off working hardware, and I never will, because there is nothing to base it on.

The books that describe the machine

Seven files, six documents. Five of them are Iskra-226 documentation, one is a Western datasheet that stands here as context and not as a source about this machine. None of it is my work. I keep copies because the addresses these came from go dead, and each one carries whatever status it carried before I found it, which is why they are linked and not served from this site.

One document is in the repository twice, under two file names. Both files run to 171 pages, hold the same thirty five figures and the same 501,746 characters of text, and every page renders identically. Only the file properties differ, one save being older than the other. It is listed once here, because it is one book.

The strongest single line I have The 1987 programming textbook says, where it explains how the machine comes up, that the interpreter takes 249 consecutive sectors on the disk, that version number 0 is written in sectors 0 to 248, version number 1 in sectors 249 to 497, and so on. A sector is 256 bytes, so 249 of them is 63,744, and the versions begin at bytes 0, 63,744, 127,488 and 191,232. Those are exactly the four offsets I had measured off the headers in the images. A book printed in 1987 and a byte count taken in 2026 arrive at the same four addresses and at the same reading of what sits at them, and neither had to assume the other.

Eight builds across five years

A boot side has no catalog. It starts at byte zero and holds four slots of 63,744 bytes, and each slot opens with a 32 byte header: three words of entry vector, then eighteen characters of signature with a build date inside them. Cut apart properly, the three boot sides give eight distinct builds spanning 1981 to 1986, and every build is byte identical wherever it repeats.

Each of the eight is one file in the repository, under the date it carries, and firmware_extract.py is the tool that cuts them out. It is what produced the slot tables on the disk pages, so the tables and the files cannot drift apart.

A correction, and it was mine For three weeks I read the four slots as four writings of one interpreter and averaged across them. They are not copies, they are a version library, and on disk1side0 the majority vote wins BASIC 01 three times and writes it out under the PL5 name: 58,587 of 63,744 bytes wrong, with the descriptor table sitting at the BASIC 01 offset. Nothing here needs error correction in the first place. The wrong reading stays written down in the repository, because a corrected page that hides what it corrected is worth less than the correction.

5,842 lines of somebody else's software

Nineteen BAM programs off disk2side1 and four STIPENDIYA segments off disk3side0, 23 in all, 5,842 lines of BASIC. All 23 load and run under my interpreter and none of them crashes.

The count needs its method said out loud. 5,842 is the ascending line number run of the 23 listings as they are shipped, which is how the lister lists them. Counted by stored records instead it comes to 5,854. Both are measured correctly, they are two different measures, and the number on this page is the first one.

Why four of them were missing for weeks Four BAM programs would not decode. The lister pushed the start offset across the first 400 bytes, kept the run with the most ascending line numbers, and stopped at the first number that was not larger, which for these four gave one to three lines instead of hundreds. The loader never had the problem: it synchronizes on the record terminator, resynchronizes one byte further when a record is broken, and sorts the line numbers at the end. A program body does not have to be stored in ascending order. Once the lister followed the same rule, all nineteen decoded to exactly the line counts the survey had counted independently.

Disks that were not recovered from anywhere

These are mine, written in 2026, one game to a disk, each of them the same 256,256 bytes as the recovered sides, with the BASIC source next to the image. They are not evidence about the machine and this page does not count them as any.

They are listed because they close the loop the other way around. Reading a format can be wrong without anybody noticing; writing one that an independent reader then loads, parses and starts cannot. The mechanics of the older titles are common property, and no Soviet games disk has ever surfaced.

What stands behind this page

I keep the research in one place, and this is that place read out. The 71 research files are the ones I work from, and the counts here and the counts in the citation files come from a single reading of them, so the two cannot drift apart. A dossier without a result, a source I cannot classify, an address that no longer answers: none of those go up until I have looked at them myself.

The Iskra-226 entries come from the same two records the machine pages use, so that a book is described here the way it is described there. Every address into the repository is checked against the release tag first, and one that promises a file the tag does not carry does not go on the page.

Research closed 29 July 2026. Last revised 7 August 2026.