On May 9 the Russian people and other people of the former Soviet Union celebrate Victory Day. It was the Red Army of the Soviet Union that utterly defeated the Axis armies in Operation Bagration and on its march to Berlin. Militarily the D-Day invasion of continental Europe by the U.S. and its "western" allies was a mere diversion from the huge Soviet offensives in the east. By end of August 1944 the German forces and their allies had essentially lost the war.

This graph, too little known, shows the huge sacrifices the Russians and others made. It explains why the Russians remember their victory.

Nikita Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 was one of the greatest sources of myths about the Great Patriotic War, its absurdity stretching to claims that Joseph Stalin used a globe to plan operations. Other myths, often just as absurd, have since emerged, some of them historiographic, others fantasies borne of propaganda.

Russian online newspaper Vzglyad offers a Top 5 of the most common myths surrounding the titanic 20th century struggle.

Objects from two lost underwater cities recently discovered off the Egyptian coast are being revealed to the public in a "blockbuster" British Museum exhibition.

French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio first discovered Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, submerged at the mouth of the River Nile, in 2000 - over 1,000 years after they were swallowed by the Mediterranean and covered in sand.

The exhibition will feature more than 200 spectacularly preserved finds from the ancient cities, including a 5.4 meter-high (17.7 ft) granite statue of the Nile flood God, Hapy, and a 1,200-year-old statue of the Greek Goddess, Isis.

Goddio, president of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (which he founded in 1987), excavated over a dozen historic shipwrecks before turning his attention to uncovering Egypt's lost world - equivalent in size to that of Paris - in 1996.

However, Goddio's work is far from over - the 68-year-old estimates he's uncovered only 5 percent of the sunken world so far.

"Pompeii is a very small city. They started archaeological excavation there in the 18th century - and it is still not excavated fully. Thonis-Heracleion covers an area that is three times the size of Pompeii," Goddio told the Telegraph.

A century ago, the tranquil island of Martinique was violently interrupted by a massive volcanic eruption choking the foothills of Mount Pelee, wiping out a town and killing thousands.

Life for the townspeople of Saint Pierre changed in an instant on the French-owned Lesser Antilles island after its neighboring volcano rained hellfire on May 8, 1902.

According to earth scientists at the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, an intense build-up of volcanic gases within the Caribbean mountain caused the "violent explosion" at around 8 a.m., just as people were waking up or starting work.

One of the little-known chapters of history was the widespread famine in Iran during World War I, caused by the British presence in Iran. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Britain became the main foreign power in Iran and this famine or--more accurately--'genocide' was committed by the British. The document in the American Archives, reporting the widespread famine and spread of epidemic disease in Iran, estimates the number of the deceased due to the famine to be about 8-10 million during 1917-19 (1), making this the greatest genocide of the 20th century and Iran the biggest victim of World War I (2).

It should be noted that Iran had been one of the main suppliers of food grains to the British forces stationed in the empire's South Asian colonies. Although bad harvest during these two years made the situation worse, it was by no means the main reason why the Great Famine occurred. Prof. Gholi Majd of Princeton University writes in his book, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, that American documents show that the British prevented imports of wheat and other food grains into Iran from Mesopotamia, Asia, and also the USA, and that ships loaded with wheat were not allowed to unload at the port of Bushehr in the Persian Gulf. Professor Majd argues that Great Britain intentionally created genocide conditions to destroy Iran, and to effectively control the country for its own purposes. Major Donohoe describes Iran of that time as a "land of desolation and death" (3). But this event soon became the subject of a British cover up.

Britain has a long record of its several attempts to conceal history and rewrite it in their own favor. The pages are filled with conspiracies that were covered up by the British government to hide its involvement in different episodes that would tarnish the country's image. One of the clear examples is the "Jameson Raid"; a failed coup against Paul Kruger's government in South Africa. This raid was planned and executed directly by the British government of Joseph Chamberlain under the orders of Queen Victoria (4) (5). In 2002, Sir Graham Bower's memoirs were published in South Africa, revealing these involvements that had been covered up for more than a century, focusing attention on Bower as a scapegoat for the incident (6).

The records that were destroyed to cover up British crimes around the globe, or were kept in secret Foreign Office archives, so as to, not only protect the United Kingdom's reputation, but also to shield the government from litigation, are indicative of the attempts made by the British to evade the consequences of their crimes. The papers at Hanslope Park also include the reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records that show ministers in London knew of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya and roasting them alive (7). These records may include those related to Iran's Great Famine. Why were these records that cover the darkest secrets of the British Empire destroyed or kept secret? Simply because they might 'embarrass' Her Majesty's government (8).

Centuries of unpredictable climate may have been partly to blame for the fall of the western Roman Empire. A detailed record of 2500 years of European climate has uncovered several links between changing climate and the rise and fall of civilisations.

Climate fluctuation was a contributing factor alongside political failures and barbarian invasions, says Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, who led the project.

Büntgen used tree rings to build up a history of European climate. Using nearly 9000 samples from oak, pine and larch, Büntgen and colleagues were able to reconstruct how temperatures and rainfall in western Europe changed over the last 2500 years.

Cosmic rays allow us to slice through the structure of a pyramid, revealing the ancient and fine engineering at its heart.
You may have wondered what the inside of a pyramid looks like. Not the cavities and passages you see on The Mummy - the actual structure of the creation, how it was built to last all these years.

The pyramids of ancient Egypt are around 4,500 years-old. They've stood the test of time, great monuments on the landscape. Dusty gold and majestic.

Now, we can learn a little more about them thanks to cosmic rays. Archeologies have begun to utilise new technology to better refine our understanding of pyramids' internal make up.

You won't find it in history textbooks, but the Roman Empire's rise to dominance in Egypt and the Middle East may have been influenced by a series of volcanic eruptions that reduced rainfall.

These eruptions could have contributed to the sabotage and destruction of the Ptolemaic Kingdom on the Nile, paving the way for the rise of Cleopatra and the Roman Empire - and, ultimately, the modern Western world.

The Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt and North Africa in the final three centuries BC, known as the Hellenistic period. Now, teamwork between volcanologists and historians has revealed a close match in timing between volcanic eruptions and domestic unrest, revolts and uprisings that led to the kingdom's downfall.

"So far, Hellenistic history has never had any climate component," says Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University. Bringing in the impact of climate shocks on the unfolding of history is important, he says.

"There were revolts and social unrest from 245 BC onwards, down to the mid-first century BC," Manning told the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, last week. "One involved the entire river valley along the Nile for 20 years."

At the heart of the unrest were starvation and famine in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, where grain harvests were critically dependent on annual flooding of fertile plains by the East African monsoon.

A team of international scientists has made a remarkable discovery, unearthing more than a ton of fossils and dinosaur remains in Antarctica. Some of the fossils are believed to be 71 million years old.

The team, consisting of 12 scientists from the US, Australia, and South Africa, made the discovery during a trip to James Ross Island, located near the northeastern extremity of the Antarctic Peninsula.

"[We found] things like plesiosaurs and mosasaurs - a type of marine lizard made famous by the recent film Jurassic World," Dr. Steve Salisbury from the University of Queensland, who took part in the mission, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Salisbury added that the "really great fossils" were "all shallow marine rocks, so the majority of things we found lived in the ocean."

Dramatic evidence has revealed the presence of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who became Buddha, as far west as Persia. Family seals and records found at Persepolis, the ancient capital of the fourth Persian Emperor, Darius the Great, have been identified and associated with the names of Siddhartha Gautama and his father, Suddhodana Gautama.

The Persepolis Seals identified royals and other important personages within the Persian ruling sphere. Guatama was the name of the royal family of the Saka kingdom.

Analysis of Seals PFS 79, PFS 796 and PF 250 found among the collection of important seals in Persepolis, the Persian capital of Emperor Darius I, are purported to be the Gautama family according to an interpretation by Dr. Ranajit Pal (The Dawn of Religions in Afghanistan-Seistan-Gandhara and the Personal Seals of Gotama Buddha and Zoroaster, published in Mithras Reader: An Academic and Religious Journal of Greek, Roman and Persian Studies. Vol. III, London, 2010, pg. 62).