On 18 March 1965 Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave a space capsule and, tethered to it, float freely in orbit – to space-walk. He was pilot of the Voskhod 2 mission ...

had declared independence from the Soviet Union in March 1990. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the Soviet president in 1991, has refused to testify. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved in December ...