Ett nytt träd planterades då jag passerat 20% av den totala sträckan i The Conqueror Events Challenge Space Race – Space Exploration.

Samtidigt, fick jag även det tredje och fjärde vykortet.

Central to Soviet philosophy is historical materialism. This theory, first put forward by the philosopher Karl Marx, posits that power rests in the ownership of the means of production (that which produces goods: land, factories, tools, etc) and that history moves forward in stages, propelled by class struggle as those who lack access to the means of production to redistribute them. The Soviets point to how merchants of the cities replaced the Medieval nobility as the rulers of the world, creating liberalism, democracy, capitalism and the urban working class. Now that the revolution is won, and the means of production are in their hands, the working class will replace the capitalists.

The Soviets aim to abolish private property (wealth and materials used to invest in business ventures to create more wealth, not personal property such as cars, clothes, toothbrushes, etc), and to manage workplaces and the economy democratically (though in practice, the Soviet system favours top-down, relatively undemocratic central planning). The state announces its international mission to create a new human culture that is equal, free from oppression, class distinctions, and economic exploitation, where work and wealth are apportioned according to the basic principle of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

But the reality is not so utopian. Almost as soon as the Bolshevik Revolution triumphs, a bitter civil war begins. Those who support the old monarchy fight the revolutionaries. Western powers, including the USA, the British and the French, who are worried about their own workers’ revolutionary desires, invade the fledgling state. The Tsarists and the invaders are driven out, but in 1924, Lenin dies, and Joseph Stalin begins to consolidate his grip on power, which will result in a brutal dictatorship. Ideological enemies are purged in mass executions, millions are exiled to frozen labour camps in Russia’s arctic north, and Ukraine is plunged into a horrific famine.

Stalin rules over the USSR as an even more grotesque criminal begins to dominate Europe. Adolf Hitler’s Nazis invade the Soviet Union in 1941, besiege its second city, Leningrad, devastate the countryside and waste cities.

The USSR allies with the Americans and the British, and, after winning the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, pushes the Germans back, entering Berlin in April 1945. The Soviet people have played the biggest role in defeating the Nazis, and they also suffered the most. Soviets and Americans both have bled for peace, but now their leaders set the stage for a new conflict. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the USA and architect of the New Deal, is replaced by Harry S. Truman, a fervent anti-communist. He sees the Soviet Union as a threat to world peace and American dominance, and believes that the Soviets wish to spread totalitarian communism around the world and subvert liberal democracy. 

The Soviets confirm these fears. They install communist governments in all the nations they have liberated from the Nazis, with little attention paid to the wishes of their citizens. East Germany, Poland, Romania, and many others are turned into client states. Visiting the US in 1946, Winston Churchill states that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent”, on one side, the free democratic West, and on the other, the communist East, separate and irreconcilable. In 1946,  the Long Telegram is sent from a US diplomat in Moscow to Truman, accusing Stalin of attempting to enslave Europe and spread communism across the world. 

The USA responds forcefully, though it is still unclear if Stalin has any designs on world domination whatsoever. The CIA uses covert tactics and voter suppression to successfully undermine communist movements in Italy and France who are about to be democratically elected, they support the far-right dictatorship in Greece in its civil war against communist revolutionaries, and they allow many high-ranking members of the Nazi party to remain in office, closing off control of Western Germany to the left and allowing war criminals to escape justice. Finally, they initiate the Marshall Plan, a massive program of financial aid to help rebuild Western European countries, on the understanding that they remain within the American sphere of influence.

A climate of fear grips the Soviet Union. In 1949, the USA flies three B-29 Superfortresses (the same craft used to drop nuclear bombs on Japan) in tight battle formation deep into Soviet airspace, their undersides painted white to reflect the light from a nuclear explosion. For a moment, the Soviets expect annihilation, but the bombers turn round, satisfied in their demonstration of power.

The Soviet Union must level the playing field. In 1949, they complete their first successful test of a nuclear bomb. In occupied Germany, they race to steal as much machinery and schematics as they can. In Mittlewerk, at first they find nothing, but then, in a vault missed by the Americans, they find V-2 schematics, and even materials for a more advanced rocket, one that could travel across the Atlantic.

Enter Sergei Korolev. Famous for his work on early Soviet cruise missiles, he fell foul of Stalin and has spent the last six years in labour camps and prisons. Now, traumatised and emaciated, he has been plucked out, given his freedom, and placed in control of the Soviet Rocket programme. His task – work backwards through the bewildering mess of the Nazi schematics and build a rocket that can enter space and drop a nuclear-tipped warhead on the continental United States. 

Stalin believes that once this is achieved, the USSR will be safe. A nuclear attack on one nation will result in a retaliatory nuclear strike, and the world will end. The price is simply too high for one nation to attack first. This is Mutually Assured Destruction – the twisted, dangerous logic that underpins the new Cold War. After the Soviets make their first successful test of a nuclear bomb in 1949,  the two superpowers cannot fight each other directly. Instead, the battle will be fought in the realm of culture, scientific development, and in the anticolonial struggles of the global South, which is now emerging free from European colonialism and looking for an ideological path to a better future. The arms race grows out of this conflict, and following it, so does the Space Race.

Fredagen den 15:e augusti var det dags för teater med Robert & Carina på Sundspärlan i Helsingborg.

Det går framåt i Gabriels och min utmaning mot stjärnorna.

Idag fick jag ett nytt vykort.

In the clement beach town of Yalta in the Crimea, the victors meet. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the USA’s president, Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, prepare to set the contours of the post-war world. The Nazi Empire is divided into spheres of influence; the east of Europe, and the east of Germany is largely left in the hands of the Soviets, whilst the West comes under American influence.

In February 1945, months before the Western Allied forces enter Germany, a special task force is set up by US Army Intelligence. This is T-section, which will later become Operation Paperclip, tasked with gathering Nazi technology and scientists, especially those with a hand in the V-2 rocket design. 

In April 1945, US forces enter the German provinces of Thuringia and Saxony, in the east of the country. The Americans know that, as per the Yalta agreement, this area will soon have to be turned over to the Soviets. However, the provinces are renowned for their wealth of factories, laboratories, and missile launch sites. With the clock ticking, the Americans work to lift as much technology and as many German scientists as possible before the deadline. Operation Paperclip begins.

The Mittelwerk Factory in Nordhausen, central Germany, is a prime target. Though in the Soviet zone, American troops arrive first. Here they find a massive underground factory building jet engines, V-1 buzz bombs, and V-2 ballistic missiles. The Americans take everything, every blueprint, spare part and engineer. 

Nordhausen is not a normal factory. It is buried deep underground and is a vast network of tunnels and vaults. Slaves do all labour here; those caught up in the Nazi holocaust. Jews, Roma, communists and other so-called ‘deviants’ are forced to work in horrifying conditions until they die from injury, overwork or starvation. The Americans who liberate the labour camp are appalled, a report commissioned after the site’s discovery states, “this factory is the epitome of megalomaniac production and robot efficiency and layout. Everything was ruthlessly executed with utter disregard for humanitarian considerations. The record of Nordhausen is a most unenviable one, and we were told that 250 of the slave workers perished every day”. Still, their moral outrage does not stop them from spiriting the site’s managers, members of the high Nazi command, and engineers to the USA, and away from justice. 

The greatest prize is found not in the industrial heartlands of the Reich, but in the pristine snowy Alps of southern Bavaria. Wernher von Braun, engineering genius, designer of the V-2 rocket, Nazi Party member and participant in the crimes of the holocaust, flees here. He is running from both his former comrades in the SS, who have been tasked with his execution, and the advancing tide of the Red Army, whom he believes will indict him for his work at Mittelbau-Dora, the concentration camp which provided the slave labour required to construct the rocket. In May 1945, he and a team of important engineers surrender themselves to a unit of American soldiers, and in a matter of weeks, he is on an aeroplane headed for Fort Bliss, Texas.

In the end, three hundred rail-car loads of V-2s and their components are captured and shipped to the United States, and 126 of their principal designers, including Wernher von Braun, travel to America to help the US understand the technology. The Soviets arrive in Nordhausen to find the factory almost totally picked clean. With Von Braun, his team of engineers and all the schematics and blueprints of the Nazi Rocket Programme in their hands, the USA begins to take the lead in the race.

London, December 1944.

It is late 1944, and War rages across Europe. Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps has been defeated, and the Western Allies are advancing fast up the boot of Italy. The twin military defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk have collapsed the German line in Russia, and the Red Army is advancing across Poland. Just 3 months prior, the largest ever amphibious invasion the world has ever seen, D-Day, has Americans, Brits, and Canadians storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied Normandy. The liberation of Europe has begun.

The people of Britain have endured much. But now, thanks to the heroic victory of the RAF in the Battle of Britain back in 1940, the skies of this green and pleasant land are no longer darkened by the hated wings of the Luftwaffe. The Führer is boxed in; each day brings news of fresh disasters, and the Nazi Empire is falling apart in his hands. All he has left now is Vergeltung – Vengeance.

Vengeance is a missile. It lifts off from a hidden base deep in the forests of northern France. It flies, propelled by liquid oxygen and ethanol, in a great parabolic arc, ascending until, with a boom, it breaks the sound barrier. As it begins its descent, it travels at speeds exceeding 3,580 mph (5,760 km/h), guided by gyroscopes and an early analogue computer to its target.

Travelling faster than the speed of sound, it delivers its payload of 1,700 lbs (1000kg) of ordinance in total silence, anywhere in a 5-10km radius. This is the A-4 missile, better known as the Vergeltungswaffe-2 (or Vengeance-weapon), the V-2. Designed by engineering prodigy Wernher von Braun, it is the first-ever man-made object to enter outer space.

The weapon is intended to terrorise. Its inaccuracy and silence add a layer of fear that not even the whine of a descending Stuka dive bomber could reproduce. No detection system the British have can give any advanced warning, and no defence system can knock it out of the sky. You can’t see it coming. You feel the explosion before you hear it. One moment, your house, your life, your family are there, the next they’re not.

But, in the gleaming marble halls of Washington and behind the high walls of the Kremlin, the soon-to-be victors of the greatest war in human history begin to salivate. The Americans, terrified of communism spreading after the fall of the Third Reich, see the incorporation of Nazi technology as a vital way of gaining an edge over their ideological rivals, hanging destruction over the Soviets’ heads, and keeping Europe free from the totalitarian Red Menace.

The Soviets have seen their country wrecked: 30 million of their people have been killed by the Nazi war machine, and, on the horizon, a conflict looms with the USA – the greatest world power in history, which is moments from developing the atom bomb. Joseph Stalin, the USSR’s brutal dictator, sees missile technology as a way of levelling the playing field, defending his country from another invasion, and proving once and for all the superiority of Soviet communism over the corrupt capitalist democracies of the West. 

Both sides give the order – the looting of Nazi technology, machinery, blueprints, and most of all, personnel related to the development of the V-2 is of top priority. American GIs enter Nazi Germany via Belgium, and the Red Army marches into Pomerania. Ready, set, go – the Space Race has begun.

Idag fyllde Gabriel 11-år och som en del av hans presenter, så fick han av mormor Tina och morfar Jörgen, en utmaning i The Conqueror Events ”Space Race” serie.

En serie som består av tre utmaningar på vardera drygt 100 km.

Dessa avverkas genom dagliga steg.

Första utmaningen i serien Space Race, var ”Space Exploration” och både Gabriel och Jörgen fick sina startnummer.

Nu kör vi så det ryker!

Måndagskväll och det blev ett BAS-pass i 32-minuter i tempot 6:40, men det gick något fortare!

Idag blev det en eftermiddagsrunda, där Tina slog följe på sin elcykel.

Ännu ett BAS-pass i tempot 6:50.

Idag var det ”återhämtning” på schemat.

Det innebar tydligen 29-minuter i tempot 8:40, så det blev till att promenera lite fortare.

Dagens pass bestod av uppvärmning i 15-minuter i tempot 6:50/km.

Därefter blev det intervaller 2-omgångar med 5-st 40-sekunders löpning i tempot 4:00/km och 3-minuters återhämtning i tempot 8:00. Därefter 10-minuters återhämtning i tempot 6:50.

Av någon anledning bestämde jag mig för att springa inomhus på löpbandet idag.

Träningspasset ändrades från ett kort pass i tempot 8:40/km till 30-minuters löpning i tempot 6:50/km!

Det var rent ut sagt outhärdligt varmt att springa inomhus idag!