The Russian Language
Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Over 260 million people around the world identify Russian as their first language. This is a unique language that has no "definite" or "indefinite" articles, meaning that they don't use articles such as the English "the" or "an" which seems impossible to those who don't speak the language.
Cosmonauts
The Space Race was mainly between Russia and the United States. In the 1950s, people were very concerned about how would get to the moon first. In 1959, Russia took the lead with Sputnik and cosmonauts. Russia used their own citizens for test launches and lost many lives because of its less-than-ideal tests.