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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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 […]

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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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In the USSR, the very first ice cream fac­tory was opened in 1932  —  when the Min­is­ter of Food Sup­ply (if trans­lated not too lib­er­ally) Anas­tas Mikoyan vis­ited the United States of Amer­ica and was so impressed with their ice cream, he decided that Rus­sia needed some­thing of the kind. So the ice cream mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and […]

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One of the main criti­sisms of the Soviet Union now, from an every day per­spec­tive, was the huge deficit of every­thing. The planned econ­omy failed to sup­ply a con­stant flow of goods nec­es­sary for the well being of peo­ple. It was not the mat­ter of inca­pac­ity  —  no, the means cer­tainly allowed to build space shut­tles or […]

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A Glance at the Soviet Lifestyle, Cap­tured by Marc Riboud.
This is our third post devoted to Marc Riboud, an out­stand­ing French pho­tog­ra­pher, who trav­eled exten­sively through­out the Soviet Union.  His images cap­tured an array of every­day life episodes from the lives of the Soviet peo­ple.  Here is the first lot  —  and here is the sec­ond one. […]

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