Tag: Soviet

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X is a game in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. The word X is created from a combination of “Greek for four” and the engineer’s favorite sport.
Due to the circumstances of the Cold War, the game changed hands multiple times and even became part of the Nintendo vs Atari console wars, where it was called the “The Soviet Mind Game”.
Can you identify the game?

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Tetris. The word comes from "Tetra" + "Tennis"
Read More about the interesting history of the game.

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Following a rather tepid album release in 1986, influential English artist X had a bit of a brainwave and released a seventh solo album titled (in Cyrillic) СНОВА В СССР in 1988, consisting entirely of live-in-studio covers of older (English) rock and roll songs, and distributed only in the Soviet Union on the Soviet government-run Melodiya label.

Soon after, though, copies of the album began popping up outside the Soviet bloc (which, in a way, had been X’s initial intention), going for anywhere between $100-$250 in the US and up to £500 in the UK. This eventually led to a global release of the album in 1991, notably with the title misprinted as “СНОВА Б СССР”.

Who is X?

Show Answer
Paul McCartney, or "Пол Маккартни", as his name appears on the album cover.

"Снова в СССР" translates to "Back in the USSR" in English. McCartney had originally wanted to release the album outside of the usual distribution channels in the UK to make it look like copies were being smuggled in from the USSR, but his record label refused to allow that, so he decided to release it in the USSR itself as a gesture of peace, in keeping with the concept of glasnost.

Despite "Back in the USSR" being the title of a 1968 Beatles track, there are no Beatles songs on this album.