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

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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