Tag Archives: glasnost

May, 1st: Soviet Labour Day.

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1984 marochkin May, 1st: Soviet Labour Day.

Parade of 1984, city of Ufa. Photo by N. Marochkin.

Day of Inter­na­tional Sol­i­dar­ity of the Work­ing Class, or Labour Day — was cel­e­brated in Rus­sia on May, 1st  from 1919 to 1990. A pub­lic hol­i­day for each every city, every town­ship or vil­lage had a parade organ­ised: flags were car­ried, posters and ban­ners were up, kids had red bal­lons and por­traits of the gov­ern­ing men were on dis­play. The atten­dance usu­ally was com­pul­sory, but judg­ing by the pho­tographs now, I don’t think any­body minded: it looks like peo­ple had fum there. By May the weather was usu­ally sunny and crisp, and this hol­i­day was a lit­tle more that a pro­pa­gan­dist activ­ity: it was a uni­fy­ing event. Please read on to see some faces behind the crowd.

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Behind the Myth Veil

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Please wel­come our new author Vadim Costyrin with his first but seri­ous post on the present days of those born in the USSR, brought up by the Yeltsin’s coup and now left to seek their national and cul­tural iden­tity all by themselves.

54 500x348 Behind the Myth Veil

A per­for­mance at a kindergarten.

Once the USSR inspired us with fear, now this coun­try does not exist. We have the big Rus­sia and a lot of small and not so small, whim­si­cal republics, for the right to include which in the sphere of their influ­ence there fight politi­cians of the super­pow­ers. Together with the Soviet Union we have lost Rus­sians — our antipodes — against whom we willy-nilly matched. It may seem that it is a vic­tory — but Rus­sians want the USSR back, and after only two decades there are much more fears and threats.

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Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

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28 500x333 Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

Image cour­tesy of Léonard Gianadda, a Swiss pho­togra­her who vis­ited Moscow in 1957.


This is prob­a­bly one of the length­i­est and most con­tro­ver­sial top­ics to attempt, yet it is very impor­tant for our blog to  answer — or at least to raise  this ques­tion. If you have been fol­low­ing us for a lit­tle while, you would know that by mid 1980s the atmos­phere in Rus­sia was tense. The mir­a­cle of doing well in the WWII had been wear­ing out. The total deficit of every­thing and the black mar­kets did not con­tribute to keep­ing the morale up. The Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter as well as war action in Afghanistan had drained the coun­try both finan­cially and psy­cho­log­i­cally. The pub­lic resent­ment was grow­ing: the com­mon joke was that you could find truth any­where except in Pravda and the news any­where except in Izves­tia. (both are the Russ­ian news­pa­pers, the first one lit­er­ally mean­ing truth and the lat­ter one – news). For years the gov­ermnent had been run­ning in the red but it did not catch up with them till late 1980s – and it was too lit­tle too late for a change.

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