Tag Archives: movies

An Old Curiosity Shop: The Museum of Soviet Life

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Ear­lier this year, a unique in its pecu­liar­ity museum was opened in Novosi­birsk, the Siber­ian cap­i­tal of Rus­sia. Pri­vately owned, this museum offers an insight into the days long gone, yet long­ing to be remem­bered: a col­lec­tion of the Soviet every­day arti­facts; sim­ple things that still matter.

Please wel­come our new author Maria Yukhi­menko, who has vis­ited this place and and pre­pared this report exclu­sively for the realussr readers.

DSC 0208 499x334 An Old Curiosity Shop: The Museum of Soviet Life

The USSR Museum: the facade.

The museum occu­pies a 1917 villa and is opened by appoint­ment only. The story goes that a long time ago this build­ing was used as an NKVD head­quar­ters (the KGB pre­de­ces­sor, that is). Well, it cer­tainly feels like it – the atmos­phere is gloomy enough: dark rooms, high stud ceil­ings, squeaky wooden floors.

How­ever, it turns out to have quite a bit of character…

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Experimental Soviet Homemade Photography

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From now on each Wednes­day Real USSR will try to bring you enter­tain­ing rather than infor­ma­tive posts – let us know how you like it.

0e59b 500x288 Experimental Soviet Homemade Photography

Sur­real NKVD: Catch me if you can

These pho­tos are from a pri­vate col­lec­tion of a typ­i­cal Moscow fam­ily. They are dated back to 1936 – 1940 -  the years known as the  period of Stalin’s most cruel polit­i­cal repres­sions.  Sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple are said to be affected: sen­tenced, shot or sent off to labour camps.

There is a Russ­ian movie about those times – “Burnt By The Sun” (Utom­len­nye Sol­ncem), which in 1994 won the Acad­emy Awards as the best for­eign lan­guage film (imdb rat­ing 7.9÷10). The story is about love in the times of polit­i­cal tur­moil, the love that sur­vives all fears of purges and uncer­tainty. Sur­pris­ingly enough, peo­ple still man­aged to try and have a few laughs dur­ing those harsh times.

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

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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?

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