The Com­mu­nal Bridge, back then (late 1970s)

The Com­mu­nal Bridge, nowadays.

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 had become to grow and prosper.By 1962, Novosi­birsk became the youngest city in the world to have the pop­u­la­tion of 1 mil­lion — it only took about 70 years. Now it is an impor­tant indus­trial, cul­tural and socioe­co­nomic hub of the country.

We realise that today’s post is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from our usual for­mat, as the mod­ern pic­tures of the city are, well, mod­ern and not of the Soviet epoch. It is still nice to see, how­ever, how the city has been chang­ing over the past hun­dred years — and the old pho­tographs are still full of life and very easy on the eye.

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