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The Soviet Union's aviation industry was far from the last in the world; moreover, for a significant part of its history, the USSR designed the best aircraft. True, this concerned mainly military equipment, but in the civilian sector, everything was not so smooth. Of course, there were exceptions here too. It is enough to recall the famous Tu-114, which many consider the most comfortable Soviet aircraft, and some even the most comfortable in the world, at the time. In the late 1950s, against the backdrop of Khrushchev's "thaw" and the expansion of international relations in the USSR, the issue of intercontinental passenger aviation became acute. The main representatives of Aeroflot's air fleet of those years - the jet Tu-104 and turboprop Il-18 - were not suitable for flights across the ocean and could not take on board a sufficient number of passengers. A new passenger aircraft was needed, capable of flying from continent to continent and at the same time carrying more than 100 passengers. In 1955, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev's OKB received a government order to develop an airliner for long-distance non-stop flights. The serial long-range bomber Tu-95 was chosen as a prototype for the new aircraft. Tupolev had used this method before - the passenger Tu-104 was previously built on the basis of the Tu-16 jet bomber. The new aircraft received the temporary designation Tu-95P (P - passenger) and the internal code "product 114".