A merchant’s house. Early twenties.

A her­itage build­ing now

The city of Ufa, the cap­i­tal of Bashkiria, is a town with the pop­u­la­tion of just over a mil­lion, at about 1500 km dis­tance from Moscow. It is beau­ti­fully set at the con­flu­ence of the Belaya and Ufa rivers, on low hills to the west of South­ern Urals. The city was founded in 1574 at the orders of Ivan the Ter­ri­ble, and the name mean­ing “small” in Tur­kic. It is a well kept city with lots of green­ery, wide alleys, parks and plen­ti­ful his­toric buildings.

Today’s post is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from our usual for­mat, as the mod­ern pic­tures of the city are, well, mod­ern and not of the Soviet epoch. It is still nice to see, how­ever, how the city has been chang­ing over the past hun­dred years  —  and the old pho­tographs are still full of life and very easy on the eye.

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An old cal­en­dar of 1964 pic­tur­ing a set of remark­able cit­i­zens of the world: a Soviet per­son next to its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part. Sadly there is no anno­ta­tion left to fig­ure what the mes­sage was — infor­ma­tive, pro­pa­gan­dist or other, so the faces below are torn out of con­text. But it is still nice to have a look at some Soviet artist’s work.

It would have been a brief post, so we thought we’d include the major achieve­ments of these great men.

Movie Pro­duc­ers: Sergey Eisen­stein & David W Grifith

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My iPad has really got me read­ing recently. On iBooks almost all of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture is free, so I am read­ing a book by Arthur Conan Doyle  — The Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip. There was a pas­sage that struck me as remark­able (or, as Conan Doyle would put it, rather singular):

One night — it was in June 1889 — there came a ring to my bell. … We heard the door open, a few hur­ried words, and then quick steps upon the linoleum. Our door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff, with a black veil, entered the room.

The Soviet movie illus­tra­tion of this book. 1979. Vasily Livanov as Sher­lock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson.

Really. In June 1881, just like that, Sher­lock had linoleum, which was noth­ing extra­or­di­nary at the time — given he was pre­sumed to some­what strug­gle finan­cially, and thus his need to share a flat. In the USSR — and this is the point I am mak­ing now — linoleum was one of the high­est sought-after prod­ucts until at least early 1980. I wouldn’t believe it myself, but I remem­ber how excited my Mum was when in 199o we man­aged to “secure” some of this pre­cious mate­r­ial to floor the kitchen in our apartment.

What was the price of those space explo­ration pro­grammes if linoleum was a scarce com­mod­ity at least for a cen­tury after it became wide­spread in the rot­ten, cap­i­tal­is­tic West? You feel my pain?

As pre­vi­ously stated by George Orwell, war is peace. So when Wal­ter Ulbricht, the Leader of the Ger­man Social­ist Unity Party, on June 15, 1961 said: “No one has the inten­tion of build­ing the wall!”, it took only about two months for the con­struc­tion to begin. The run­down state of the East­ern part was forc­ing peo­ple to flee in the search of bet­ter lives in the West of Ger­many: in the first six months of the year 1961, about 150 000 peo­ple left their houses. How­ever, more stayed — and so the Wall did not only sep­a­rate the city — it cut fam­i­lies in halves.

On the morn­ing of August 13, 1961 the Berlini­ans woke up to the first layer of bricks being erected.

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The super­plane car­ry­ing a Buran.

In 1984 the big coun­try needed a big plane. Antonov Design Bureau was entrusted with devel­op­ing of a plane for large-sized cargo trans­porta­tion. A six-motor super heavy tur­bo­jet plane An-225 «Mriya» («dream» in Ukran­ian) became the prod­uct of the design­ers’ four-year work. The air­craft, which will cel­e­brate it’s twenty years anniver­sary of its first test flight, still remains the absolute cham­pion in terms of load-carrying capacity.

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Chem­i­cal pho­tog­ra­phy as we know it today was not invented in a day — one of the stages in devel­op­ing was the glass neg­a­tives pho­tog­ra­phy, when the   glass plates were cov­ered with a pro­tein emul­sion — invented in 1841, the process was clunky and dif­fi­cult to repro­duce. Those images can now be iden­ti­fied by the uneven coat of emul­sion, rough edges, thick glass and maybe even photographer’s thumbprint on it.

All in all, below are the 20+ images from the glass neg­a­tives — the shots of Soviet coun­try­side life, shot around 1928. Peo­ple, har­vests, views, tools — what­ever the pho­tog­ra­phy afi­cionado encoun­tered.  Con­sid­er­ing that this is pre-film, the spirit of these pho­tos is mind blow­ing. We hope you’ll share our excitement.

A fash­ion­ista.

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