Mil­i­tary Dis­charge Hand­made Scrap Book and Comics Album
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. The guys usu­ally bonded well and dur­ing their spare time […]

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The Moscow under­ground metro sys­tem, opened in 1935, is well known for its ornate dec­o­ra­tions, out­stand­ing archi­tec­ture and art­work. Most of that art is in the social­ist real­ism style, which has its pur­pose of rein­forc­ing the goals of social­ism and com­mu­nism. In 1932 Joseph Stalin intro­duced the decree “On the Recon­struc­tion of Lit­er­ary and Art […]

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When the new Soviet coun­try was born, the peo­ple were promised a won­der­ful future under the social­ism  —  just a few more years, the bill­boards boasted  —  and we’ll live in a glo­ri­ous state. How­ever the early days were more than gloomy: the  run­down econ­omy, dis­ori­ented soci­ety, the reek of fear and uncer­tainty  —  and that clearly can be seen through […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Here is a fine col­lec­tion of images of Moscow win­ters, dat­ing from 1920s till 1991. Sadly many places por­trayed on these pho­tographs are gone now, just like the Soviet Union itself, yet lest we for­get.  Please read on to see the image of the first set of traf­fic lights in Moscow CBD in late 1930s, […]

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