Tag Archives: French

The Fearsome Threesome – Lenin and His Lovebirds

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437px Lenin in Paris Poster Lenin v Parizhe Youtkhevitch Yutkevich Claude Jade 364x500 The Fearsome Threesome – Lenin and His Lovebirds

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!

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Christian Dior in Moscow: a Fleeting Sense of Happiness

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19 500x329 Christian Dior in Moscow: a Fleeting Sense of Happiness

1959. The offi­cial photo shoot, images cour­tesy of LIFE archives (Howard Sochurek)

The Khrushchev’s Thaw was to bring change to many aspects of the Soviet life, and fash­ion was  one of them. The deci­sion to allow the Soviet fash­ion design­ers to learn off their French coun­ter­parts was made as high as at the gov­ern­ment level, which implic­itly put fash­ion above pol­i­tics or inter­na­tional ide­o­log­i­cal regimes. The colour of the Soviet Union, a generic grey, was about to be mixed up with the mot­ley and lithe palette of the French fashion.

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Dirty Dancing Soviet Style

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Just like any­where else in the world, the Soviet young­sters wanted to social­ize, to lis­ten to the music and to dance. The night­clubs were unheard of – any­thing of that kind would have been announced as pro­mot­ing debauch­ery or morally wrong lifestyle habits. So the best one would hope for were the dis­cothe­ques – the spe­cial dance occa­sions, orga­nized by the offi­cials on a weekly basis. They always had a des­ig­nated super­vi­sor – a school prin­ci­pal or a city coun­cil rep­re­sen­ta­tive in charge.

first 478x500 Dirty Dancing Soviet Style

A Soviet dis­cotheque, most likely late 1960s.

Often enough, espe­cially in the small cities, these dance events were the only source of enter­tain­ment. Movies were scarce and arrived in towns infre­quently; the cir­cus would visit once a year; and libraries just didn’t do it.

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Sexy Soviet Underwear. Not!

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svetlichnaya1 Sexy Soviet Underwear. Not!

Late 1960s. Actress Svet­lana Svetlich­naja is doing a wee strip dance for a movie. This was prob­a­bly the most R-rated scene of the Soviet cinematography.

Due to a series of not so for­tu­itous events ( the Great Octo­ber Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, the First World War, the over­all run­down of the young Soviet coun­try) women never had their needs attended to prop­erly. Under­wear was made, first and fore­most, for the work­ing class with no pref­er­en­tial treat­ment for the females so women had no choice other than to wear those sex­less gar­ments.  This is prob­a­bly the sad­dest part of the Soviet history.

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Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Communism. Part 1 of 2

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The great short­age of almost every­thing required for nor­mal well being was one of the most dis­tin­guished fea­tures of the Soviet econ­omy. Surely, there was food, clothes and some cos­metic goods in the Soviet shops in 1950s-1970s but the vari­ety was incred­i­bly poor.

0 2a6d0 e51f4cc8 orig 417x499 Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Communism. Part 1 of 2

How­ever, the phi­los­o­phy was that the Soviet peo­ple were used to com­par­ing their life stan­dards with the ones of the Sec­ond World War – so any small-time lux­ury was very warmly wel­comed. Being a nation of plain tastes, the Soviet peo­ple were happy to be buy­ing things made in the USSR – they under­stood that even not so long before, it was impossible.

Many peo­ple still asso­ciate the fra­grance “Red Moscow” with their child­hood. All women, espe­cially those who wanted to be ele­gant, were in love with this per­fume.  “Red Moscow”, cre­ated exclu­sively for the Russ­ian Empress Maria Feodor­ovna, in 1913, had quickly become a tremen­dous suc­cess both in Rus­sia and abroad. Henri Bro­card, the owner of the largest Russ­ian fac­tory of pomades, per­fumes and soaps before the Rev­o­lu­tion; had cre­ated the per­fume “The Empress’s Favourite Bou­quet”. When in 1917 his fac­tory was nation­alised and renamed into the “Zamoskvoret­skiy Soap Fac­tory No 5”, the per­fume was also renamed as “Red Moscow”.

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