Historama, April 7

Soviet engineers at the Mars military base in Ulyanovsk, east of Moscow, sent an image of a champagne bottle to a computer in Moscow on New Year's Eve.

Since 1994, IT enthusiasts have been gathering at the site to celebrate the birth of the Internet in Russia.

World’s largest iron ore basin discovered

Today in 1923, iron ore was extracted for the first time from the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, the largest iron ore basin on Earth.

Russian astronomer Pyotr Inokhodtsev discovered The Anomaly in 1733.

Unusual thunderstorms and flitting compass arrows were just some of the clues that 200 billion tons of iron ore lay hidden beneath the Earth there.

However, it was not until 1883 that these anomalies were attributed to the presence of the iron ore.

The deposit forms about half of the world’s iron reserves.

Read more on this event in Russian history in our "Russia Now" section

Former Prussian land become part of the USSR

On this day in 1946 the Königsberg region was established in the USSR and later renamed the Kaliningrad region.

Originally part of Prussia, it was annexed by Lithuania in 1923 and turned over to the USSR according to the Potsdam Agreement following World War II.

Although heavily damaged during the war, its towns still have many examples of authentic Prussian architecture.

Enjoy Kaliningrad views in the RT Galleries

Much of the original German and Lithuanian population was deported and the region was repopulated with Russians.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the region became separated from Russia by Polish and Lithuanian territories.