Well, here are the soviet “rigid airframe airships” or blimps for short (even though blimps don’t really have a rigid airframe). Anyway, if you ignore these formalities, you can see that Soviets were actively developing and using their blimps…
The interesting story behind a blimp your looking at right now, was that on September 6th 1935, due to a strong wind gust this blimp was blown off the airbase even though it had 60 anchored cables tying it to the ground. Long story short, a captain of the ship (N.S. Gudovancev) that at the time was on the ground, was able to catch one of the supporting cables and climb on to the ship, when it was already 120 meters up in the air. In the cabin , there were 4 adults and 11 children. When the height was 800 meters, he was able to start the engines and 5 hours and 45 minutes he safely landed the blimp after the bad weather had passed. The captain who had saved the ship (as well as people) received an Order of Red Star.
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