The con­cept of peace in the Soviet Union had always been empha­sized with great pas­sion. The coun­try which was born out of a bloody rev­o­lu­tion and lived through the Red Ter­ror and the Great Purge man­aged to adopt a very strange ide­ol­ogy: the USSR was announced to be one of the most peace­ful coun­tries on Earth. More­over, the belief that the Soviet Union is the power behind the world peace was staunchly pro­moted. Often the polit­i­cal lead­ers would announce them­selves as peace­mak­ers in the West, or Africa, and would con­sider their actions as peace­ful  — despite the fact that the rest of the world saw it dif­fer­ently. This is what hap­pened in Afghanistan in 1979, for instance.

But this col­lec­tion of posters is still a very neat one:  draw­ings pro­mot­ing world peace, many with slo­gans which do not make much sense. Often kids had to do this kind of draw­ings at school, as early as of the age of 7 or 8 — I remem­ber doing that myself, even though the words “apartheid” or “dis­crim­i­na­tion” didn’t mean much.  Let us know what you think — your feed­back is impor­tant. Please fol­low us on twit­ter @realussr. Thanks a lot!

Our peace has been saved — keep it that way!

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 2%

The Com­mu­nal Bridge, back then (late 1970s)

The Com­mu­nal Bridge, nowadays.

The unof­fi­cial cap­i­tal of Siberia, the city of Novosi­birsk was founded in 1893 with the ini­tial pop­u­la­tion of only 8,000 peo­ple. By the time of the Great Octo­ber Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917,  it grew to the pop­u­la­tion size of 80,000. The name, lit­er­ally mean­ing New Siber­ian City, was adopted in 1926 — and since then, the town had become to grow and prosper.By 1962, Novosi­birsk became the youngest city in the world to have the pop­u­la­tion of 1 mil­lion — it only took about 70 years. Now it is an impor­tant indus­trial, cul­tural and socioe­co­nomic hub of the country.

We realise that 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.

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 4%

The only per­son to escape the Iron Cur­tain by swimming.

By job he was an oceanog­ra­pher, by heart he was a dreamer, by nation­al­ity he was a cit­i­zen of the planet Earth — in short, he was an extra­or­di­nary guy. Yet his per­sonal file in the USSR was stamped as “not wor­thy of an exit visa” so he was not allowed to leave the coun­try, even if it was for a hol­i­day. So in Decem­ber, 1974 he jumped a cruise boat “The Soviet Union” off the coast of the Philip­pines islands — and he swam to freedom.With no food or drink, no swim­ming equip­ment apart from flips and gog­gles, he swam to the shores about a hun­dred kilo­me­ters for three days — com­pletely alone at sea.

Since his child­hood, Slava Kurilov had been very keen on swim­ming and he loved the sea so deeply, he made it his career — he was an oceanog­ra­pher, a deep sea diver. He knew the sky — all the major con­stel­la­tions, he knew mete­o­rol­ogy, he had a vivid inquis­i­tive mind  — he also spoke good Eng­lish, had a sis­ter liv­ing in Canada and his father was in a Ger­man prison camp dur­ing the WWII, which also con­sid­ered some­what of a treach­ery. A few times Slava applied for a per­mit for research trips out­side the coun­try, but to no avail — the rea­son being “endan­ger­ing the secu­rity of the USSR”.

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 18%

You’re in the army now

The com­pul­sory two years of mil­i­tary ser­vice was a rite of pas­sage for every Soviet guy. When one turned eigh­teen — unless for sick­ness or injury — it was time to be called in for the mil­i­tary life — two years in the bar­racks. Usu­ally away from home, this period of time was meant to train and edu­cate the men should there be a war. It included phys­i­cal train­ing, polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, cur­rent affairs, weaponry and so on — a good many posts can be writ­ten on life in the army! Today, how­ever, we want to take a dif­fer­ent look on this sub­ject. The guys usu­ally bonded well and dur­ing their spare time cre­ated so called “Dis­charge Albums” — like scrap­books, they were full of pho­tos, songs lyrics, quick notes from the bud­dies etc. This par­tic­u­lar one has a very neat selec­tion of wee hand drawn episodes of the army realities.

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 20%

Joseph E. Davies was the sec­ond Ambas­sador to rep­re­sent the United States in the Soviet Union in 1937 – 1938.

His daugh­ter, the twenty years old Emlen Knight Davies, took some pic­tures of the sur­round­ings. These images, cour­tesy of her pri­vate col­lec­tion, were on dis­play in Moscow for the anniver­sary of the Spaso House — the offi­cial diplo­matic residence.

These 19 images por­tray Moscow in a slightly dif­fer­ent view — the entire pre-war epoch ended was just about to end, and those times, still full of life and char­ac­ter, still look very charming.

Emlen Knight Davies, at the age of 20 (ish)

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 13%

Paris, city of love, brought them all together. A Russ­ian movie of 1981.

The offi­cial his­tory often misses a very impor­tant and inter­est­ing point in the course of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion – not every­body knows that Vladimir Lenin, a for­mi­da­ble mind behind the Great Octo­ber Patri­otic Rev­o­lu­tion and the leader of all com­mu­nists, had less than straight­for­ward love life – apart from a wife, he had a mis­tress – and not only that, these two women knew each other and got on very well!

Read more »

Pop­u­lar­ity: 8%