Tag Archives: gagarin

So! What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

Posted on by
6
rKKoclZozp1 370x500 So! What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

You will be quite a craftsman!

A Review of Occu­pa­tions in the Soviet Soci­ety: the high, the low and the marginal.

The Pro­fes­sional Ori­en­ta­tion in the USSR meant, first and fore­most, a process of advis­ing the youth on the future career choices. A group of teach­ers and fresh grad­u­ates of a col­lege would go to high schools to give talks to school kids in order to deliver the first hand infor­ma­tion on voca­tional choices. Every occu­pa­tion is regarded highly in the Soviet Union  — well, this slo­gan turned out to be quite untruth­ful. Please read on find out about the dif­fer­ences in social lad­der between the dif­fer­ent occu­pa­tional groups. The hier­ar­chy of labour was a prime ele­ment in social dis­crep­an­cies in this country.

Con­tinue read­ing →

More pictures of Soviet Moscow 1960s by Mark Riboud

Posted on by
8
RU38 500x333 More pictures of Soviet Moscow 1960s by Mark Riboud

Moscow, 1960s

This is our fourth 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.  As always, click on the mag­ni­fy­ing glass icon to see the pho­tos in detail.

Please fol­low us on twit­ter and stay tuned.  Oh, and thanks for being such a won­der­ful crowd!

Con­tinue read­ing →

Cold Clone War

Posted on by
72
buran vs shuttle large1 410x500 Cold Clone War

Buran VS Shuttle

Accord­ing to the Soviet pro­pa­ganda, every­thing which wasn’t invented by the ancient Chi­nese, was invented by the Soviet engi­neers in the USSR. Ah, they were said to invent the best weaponry, the best tanks and the best cars.

In real­ity, of course, the path of inven­tions had a very mod­er­ate devel­op­ment but in order to keep the morale up, Soviet gov­ern­ment had the engi­neers copy­ing things off their Amer­i­can, Cana­dian or Japan­ese coun­ter­parts. Cer­tainly, noth­ing is wrong with it  per se– such strate­gies usu­ally allow to save time and money by buy­ing and recre­at­ing a licensed ver­sion. How­ever, the root of all evils is the men­tioned Soviet brain­wash on the topic of Soviet  supe­ri­or­ity in all fields of engi­neer­ing research and  development.

Let’s have a closer look at who really invented what.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Wanted: Astronauts. Pay: Average. Perks: World Fame.

Posted on by
5

In the late 1950s, when the Cold War between the USSR and the USA was at its peak, the next step of flex­ing the power mus­cle was the space explo­ration. Since both coun­tries were try­ing really hard to outdo each other, it was only a mat­ter of time before one would take over.

The way it hap­pened, the USSR got ahead. When in April 1961 the first man went into the outer space and orbited the Earth, the world went berserk over the new, well, horizons.

kosm11 500x400 Wanted: Astronauts. Pay: Average. Perks: World Fame.

We are the cham­pi­ons, my friend.

But what took him so long?

Con­tinue read­ing →