One night — it was in June 1889 — there came a ring to my bell. … We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the linoleum. Our door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff, with a black veil, entered the room.

The Soviet movie illustration of this book. 1979. Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson.

Really. In June 1881, just like that, Sherlock had linoleum, which was nothing extraordinary at the time — given he was presumed to somewhat struggle financially, and thus his need to share a flat. In the USSR — and this is the point I am making now — linoleum was one of the highest sought-after products until at least early 1980. I wouldn’t believe it myself, but I remember how excited my Mum was when in 199o we managed to “secure” some of this precious material to floor the kitchen in our apartment.

What was the price of those space exploration programmes if linoleum was a scarce commodity at least for a century after it became widespread in the rotten, capitalistic West? You feel my pain?

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3. Oleg Popov, The Sad Clown

In about six weeks this remarkable man will celebrate his 80th Birthday. Who is he? The most popular clown of the Soviet Union, also known as the Sunshine Clown, Oleg Popov is true icon of its own. Born in 1930, he had on of the toughest upbringings ever — yet he managed to become one of most recognisable people of the 20th century: he also was in Guinness Records Book for “being popular in the West and in the East”.

On top of his game. Oleg Popov in 1976.

He was training to be a plumber when, at the age of 17, his friends took him along to the local circus — overwhelmed, he later said there was no way back. He started learning acrobatics, gymnastics, tricks; he spent all of his time and money on learning about the famous clowns and their techniques. It did not take him long to become famous: his natural talent and an open smile made wonders.

In his interview for the Russian newspaper Arguments and Facts, Oleg Popov is reminiscing about the happiest day of his life:after Stalin’s death in 1953, all entertainment was banned as a deep mourning was announced. So the circus he was working at was shut, and those weeks of not doing what he loved was torturous. It took over two months for the ban to be lifted, and even then he was briefed not to joke “too much”. So coming out on stage and receiving a huge round of applaud made Oleg realised that it wasn’t only him who missed performing — it was also the spectators who needed laughter.

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Meat, butter, pay rise!

Novocherkassk is a small town in the South of Russia, also known as the unofficial capital of the Cossacks, the Slavic military community. Unfortunately this town was the place of a huge tragedy, when in 1962 the civilian demonstration was opened fire on.

The turmoil started on June, 1 when the Soviet government announced the grocery price increase of about 30 per cent. The riot began at the progressive electro locomotive factory: just before the price increase, the salary had been lowered, which already was below the living minimum (about a hundred rubbles). The workers demanded an explanation, and threatened to strike. Faced with an ultimatum, the CEO Kurochkin mounted the platform and demanded that people went back to work. ‘If you do not have enough money for meat, buy the liver pie’ answered Kurochkin with the snarl.

This phrase sparked the unrest. The news about the riot quickly spread through the factory, so more and more labourers stopped their work. Someone made a fire using the portraits of the country leader Nikita Khrushchev as fuel. At the same time the factory illustrator drew some posters with the workers’ claims. Later, for writing four words “Meat, butter, wages increase” on the poster he was imprisoned for 12 years.

Novocherkassk Mosaic Wall

The strike leaders sent the representatives to other factories of the region – so a large meeting was scheduled for the day after.

By the evening the army entered the town, headed by the vice-minister of internal affairs, as well as a huge group of government representatives. The order to arrest the riot instigators was issues, but it failed to stop people from protesting – by now, the crowds were approaching the town centre and the City Council offices.

Perhaps the tragedy could have been avoided if the Saturday was not a working day. People came to the factory and gathered in front of the factory building. With the red banners and portraits of Lenin in their hands, the march to the town centre had begun. While they were moving through town, a lot of students and ordinary city dwellers joined the demonstration – mainly because of idle curiosity. No one could imagine that it may turn to carnage, mayhem and years in prison.

The crowd came to the main town square and broke into the City Council building: off the balconies speeches were being made addressed to the public and the Soviet government, demanding wage increase and better price policies.

Meanwhile the army troops kept arriving from the neighbourhood regions. The situation was labelled as coup – it is still unknown whether the order to open fire was issues by Khrushchev himself, but the reality was that it was very unlikely without his approval.

About fifty soldiers of special troops tried forcing people back. First some soldiers made the warning one-off shot in the air. Immediately there was a shout from the crowd that it was blank shooting – so the people made a move at the soldiers. That moment the fire was opened.

People rushed in all directions causing chaos. Several dozens of people were on the ground, with blood all over. The whole thing did not last an hour.

Right away the fire fighters were called to wash the blood off the square and posters with a promise of a dance party for the following day were put up to make the citizens forget about the tragedy

The news about shooting quickly spread around the town. The spontaneous protest meeting of outraged people continued in the night after the tragedy. Introducing a curfew the army troops forced people to leave the square. The next few days were the real challenge for thousands of citizens who were afraid that they had been caught by the KGB photographers during the march. That time the government leaders discussed various options to prosecute the people involved in the unrest. Some of them even proposed to deport all the town citizens to the Middle Asia.

The Soviet government feared that the news about the riot in a small town would spread around the country and around the world. To prevent this, the KGB attracted several special machines to control the radio frequencies which could transmit the information about the tragedy. All the mail sent from the town of Novocherkassk was opened and looked through.

Novocherkassk Riots Memorial

Long after the unrest the KGB officers found the leaflets with claims and slogans about the protest. The tragic outcome was 33 persons lost and 90 injured. 122 people were arrested where 7 were blamed for terrorism and were later executed. The majority were imprisoned for 10–15 years for participating in abortive riots.

The cases were revised after the resign of Khrushchev. Some people were later released, but it was poor consolation for families of the killed civilians.

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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!

At the winter market. Moscow, 1960s

The old between the new. Moscow, 1960s

Presenting to the class. Moscow, 1960s

The one and only V.I. Lenin. Moscow, 1960s

I am the October’s leader! Communists forever. Moscow, 1960s

In the fields. Moscow, 1960s

At the factory. Moscow, 1960s

By the Moscow river. Moscow, 1960s

Y. Gagarin — glory of the Party! Moscow, 1960s

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Fall’s Gifts / Rainy Day by A. Suprun from the book “Amateur Photography”, Kiev 1986

A small collection of photos from two photography books published in the 1980s in the USSR. All photographs from this set are by amateur photo artists from the republics of Ukraine (Amateur Photography, 1986) and Moldovia (Moldavian Artistic Photography, 1985). Please remember to click on the magnifying glass icon to see the full-size image.

Life by P. Balan

Red Flags by A. Lykov

The Elements by A. Lykov

The Window by A. Palamar

Graphics by P. Bodu

Again, if you need to clar­ify what is on the pho­tos — do not hes­i­tate to ques­tion. Many thanks to a Russian photographer Liubov Sautina for sending us these pictures. Please visit her Flickr page.

Just a quick recap on our availability via other resources. Here is us on twitter. Our RSS feed is here — realussr. The latest addition to our team is realussr facebook application — check it out! Soon we will have a featured authors’ page, with portraits and lifestories so you would be able to put a face to a name and also leave feedback. In short, stay tuned — there is so much more to come!

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Just like John Lennon or Elton John, in 1970s David Bowie was an iconic figure of the Western music scene. Nicknamed Chameleon of Pop for his flamboyant outfits, pale make up and eccentric tunes, David Bowie made a train tour of Russia, all the way from Vladivostok to Moscow, eighteen days in a sleeper.  Back in the days, when the Cold War was in its prime, getting a permission to look behind the Iron Curtain was an incredible phenomenon by itself. Well, did David  enjoy himself while in the USSR? Let’s see.

David Bowie in the Red Square, Moscow, April 1973.

While in Moscow, apart from visiting the top 10, David did not get up to much. He visited GUM, a Russian version of Bloomingdale’s, where he got a pair of souvenir underpants and some soap. He enjoyed the May Day Parade, which he later described as “incredible”; however, he also called the Moscovites “cold people’, stating that the Siberian crowd is a much warmer lot.

May Day Parade, Moscow, 1973

Interestingly enough, soon after David got back to the civilised world, the Western media labelled these photos fakes, which was understandable: a prominent singer walking about in a communist country, and even more so, taking the longest train in the world? Incredible!

Sightseeing in the USSR

The Trans-Siberian Express is not only the longest train ride in the world — 5,350 miles from Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East to Moscow — but it is considered by railroad buffs to be the last great train ride on earth.

David, who spent most of his time while on the train in a kimono, did not mind singing for the train passengers every now and then. The people travelling seemed to enjoy his songs although they probably did not realise who he was. He also had a camera which he had bought in Japan, which he kept using continuously, shooting everything around him.

Just about to board the Transsiberian Express

David wrote in his diary then:

We had these two fabulous attendants, Danya and Nadya. I used to sing songs to them, often late at night, when they had finished work. They couldn’t understand a word of English, and so that meant they couldn’t understand a word of my songs! But that didn’t seem to worry them at all. They sat with big smiles on their faces, sometimes for hours on end, listening to my music, and at the end of each song they would applaud and cheer! They were a wonderful audience — it was a real pleasure to sing to them.

The train journey was eighteen days long.

David  left the USSR by a plane bound for Germany.   West Berlin, with its neon lights, taxis, doormen in their red uniforms with shiny buttons and the cold champagne waiting in the hotel suite, was just incredible. But there was just one thought in our minds, wrote David:

How to get as quickly and inconspicuously as possible to a hot bath, a good hair wash, and a suitcase full of lovely, fresh, clean, beautiful clothes.

From DB’s personal notebook: “It was an old French train from the turn of the century, with the most beautiful wood veneer, decorated oval mirrors, and velvet couches. Really it was like something out of a romantic novel or film.”

In all honesty, there is a lot of discrepancies in the story of David touring Russia. His own personal diaries are brief and inexpressive — apart from calling Russia “incredible”, David does not bother with further notes. The photos he took never saw the daylight. Most importantly, there is a controversy about his travel companions: there are numerous references to the other foreigners sharing his sleep car or encountering him on the train, and this seems to be fairly improbable. But nonetheless, considering that the Beatles never made it to the USSR, Ziggy Stardust was lucky enough to actually visit the country behind the Iron Curtain.

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A good example of how the ideas to make a new car were born is the story of the factory “Communar”. The Minister of Car Manufacturing made a call to the factory where designers thought over the scheme of a new Ukrainian car and literally said: “I heard you were going to make a spring suspension from the “Volkswagen” but I actually like the Italian Fiat-600”. Shortly the factory commenced the production of ZAZ-965 –nearly the exact copy of the Fiat.

ZAZ-965

By the way, the next model of ZAZ was the replica of German NSU Prinz 4. This car was remembered by the nicknames “Soap Box” and “Big-eared”.

The car for the middle class which replaced “Pobeda” was labelled  in the honour of the great Russian river “Volga”. The design of the car was very much identical to the design of Ford Mainline, 1954, purchased by GAZ as a pattern alongside with Chevrolet Belair and Plymouth Savoy. Even before the new car was put into production, the popular Soviet magazine “Ogoniok” awkwardly published pictures of these three cars with an arrogant headline: “New Soviet cars for the middle class”.

Volga

Despite the popularity of Volkswagen around the world their Soviet copy was not really popular among the consumers. To produce another mass car the Soviet government signed the  contract with Italian Fiat. The capacity of the factory allowed to produce about five thousands cars per year.

At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was ruling the country: he was passionate about cars and racing. In 1965 he got an exclusive American Lincoln Continental sent to USSR right from the Car Exhibition in New York.  The car was purchased by the Soviet Ambassador and was built by the company Lehman & Peterson. This had brought stretch limousines into the fashion.  Lincoln was sent to ZIL where the engineers made a copy which was sent to production by the anniversary of the Great October Socialistic Revolution in 1967.  No doubt, the original Lincoln was much more elegant and graceful than its replica ZIL-114.  Nevertheless, the new Soviet limo was not that bad.  In early 1970s the car was redesigned, based on another American sample. A Cadillac Fleetwood 75 was turned into a ZIL-115 — to serve the aged and weak-minded Soviet leader.

Right up to the collapse of the USSR the Soviet car industry used the same procedure of shameless copying. In order to build “Moskvich-1241″, the engineers slightly disfigured Chrysler 1501. Famous “Zhiguli” was copied from Nissan Sunny 1978 although later they were slightly modernized by the engineers of Porsche.

Probably, “Niva” were the only exception – it was made in a way to make people to cry. That car was ‘too-Russian’ to be good.

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In early 1930s without any licensing arrangements the Soviet engineers copied the first limousine car  for the Communist party executives. In 1932 six limousines were copied off the American Buick 90L. However,  later the factory production line was switched to producing caterpillar tractors,so the limousine business was shifted to Moscow Stalin Factory.

ZIS-101

The car, based on the engine of the Buick and the body copied off the Cadillac, was given another non-poetic name, ZIS — 101.  It also had Buick radiator bars.

By the beginning of the Second World War there were three huge car factories in the USSR.  Despite the fact that the USSR already had its own highly educated and talented engineers,  the very first post-war limousine ZIS-110 was also a copy of an obsolete American car.   When making a decision about the launch of a new car, the engineers selected four models – Packard 180, Packard Clipper, Cadillac 75 and Cadillac 63.   Stalin himself was to make the decision, and he picked the Packard 180.

Chaika

In August 1945 the Soviet government issued a decree on the opening the Moscow Factory of Small Capacity Cars.   The same decree established the technical features of the new car as well as the commencement dates for the production lines.   The patterns for the new car were also selected by Stalin.  The Soviet leader liked the pre-war German Opel Cadette.  In order to please Stalin, the Soviet engineers urgently found several trophy C-38.   The cars were dismantled and the designs of the parts were sketched.  The first five engines were made by November 1946 and the cars were on the road by the end of the same year.  Interestingly enough, thenext generation of cars under the brand “Moskvich” was made on the basis of American Ford Prefect and Ford Taurus rather than the German range.   The samples of those cars were purchased abroad.

The denouncement of the Stalin cult and a new seven-years plan to develop the Soviet economy for the period of 1959–1965 had  inspired the Soviet engineers to create more cars.  The flagman cars of that time were the ZIL-111 and GAZ-13 “Chaika” developed after the trial runs of best American executives cars.  The ambitions towads the rapidly changing American fashion had made the ZIL-111 obsolete by the beginning of 1960s.   That is why this car was later redesigned in the Cadillac style of 1960–1961.  Nevertheless, the production of GAZ-13 “Chaika” was continued without any changes in its design till the 1979.

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This time we are traveling to Kiev, the capital of one of the most significant Soviet states — the Ukraine. Below you will find pictures from a book called “Amateur Photographers”, published in Kiev in 1986.

If you would like to clar­ify what is on the pho­tos — do not hes­i­tate to ask.  Click on the mag­ni­fy­ing glass icon for a more detailed view of the full sized images. Please follow us on Twitter and stay tuned. Thank you.

An Encounter. (L. Sidorsky).

In the Artek (famous young pioneer summer camp) by V. Narkyavichute

You Get Half and I Get Half (A. Nesterenko)

Son of the Earth (A. Bovkun)

First Time to Watch by a Sickbed (L. Popov)

Future is Waiting by M. Polischuk

Many thanks to a Russian photographer Liubov Sautina for keeping these fascinating pictures.  Please visit her Flickr page.

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Once some music composer said  that “There are only seven notes which compose all the music in the world.  No wodner some songs sound alike”.  Undoubtedly,  all cars  have got four wheels, so plagiarism in the automobile industry is hard to pinch.  In this article we deliberately ignore a popular Soviet point of view that a steam locomotive, an airplane and the radio were not invented in Russia.  All we attempt here is to make a small digression into the history of Soviet automobile industry in order to identify its origins and its development.

ZIS-110

A Russian  philosopher Vasiliy Rosanov once noted that in Russia every single case of wealth originates from theft or extortion.  Historically, the economy of the Russian Empire before the 1917 was so deeply integrated into the European economy that the exchange of ideas, something, which now would have been hugely copyrighted, was very common.  Like, in 1901 in St Petersburg the carriage factory Freze and the Riga bicycle factory Leitner successfully assembled the French oil engines De Dion Buton as part of Russian carriages. Another factory Aksai in Rostov-on-Don purchased the license for the production of the American Oldsmobile Carved Dash.  In 1906 a Russian engineer Boris Lutskoy organised the assembling of  Mercedes cars for the Russian market. At last, the main pride of Russia – the automobile Russo-Balt — was made from foreign parts – the chassis with four-cylinder engine was adopted from a Belgian company with a Swiss name Fondu.

The October revolution of 1917 created  a popular in  Russia myth that all things have been invented in, well, Russia.  The reasons for that would be merely ideological: the new born country needed new morale.  According to an old Soviet joke, even “elephants come from Russia”.  The most progressive country in the World, as coined by the revolutionary communists, should strike the rest of the world with advanced technologies, the propaganda advised.  In order to create the real Soviet cars,  the communists established the Research Automobile Laboratory (later known as NAMI). The very first Soviet motor car NAMI-1 was actually a graduation project by a young engineer Konstantin Sharapov.   The car turned out to be so successful that it was put into production right away. Later,  in 1979, Konstantin confessed to copying  the charts for NAMI-1 off the Czech Tatra-11.

The notorious NAMI-1

During the period from 1927 to 1930,  the factory assembled 403 NAMI-1 models.  Despite all its advantages, this car was not planned for the mass production.  At the same time,  any manager of the robust mind realised that the Soviet Industrialisation needed mass production.   The Soviet Russia wanted giant factories, but what would be the product?

In 1929 the USA was stricken by a severe economic crisis.   As the result of this crisis, the production of Chevrolet halved, the production of Ford dropped three times!   Despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA, both Chevrolet and Ford offered their production to the Soviet government.  No need to guess,  shortly afterward the awfully cracked Russian roads were voyaged by the dazzling American beauties of all kinds.   The long rally was won by Ford A and, consequently, this car was put into production in the USSR.

The Soviet Ford

The first automobiles under the brand GAZ left the factory in December, 1932.  Quite rapidly these cars got nicknamed as “Soviet Fords”.   Even the logo was very similar – blue oval with the brand GAZ instead of Ford. The car was not a success, however,  as the open body and the lack of boot turned to be its main downsides. Within 5 years the new car GAZ M1 replaced the old model.   Now the body was copied from 1934 model of Ford, although the model was adapted to suit the severe Russian conditions. The front suspension was based on two springs rather than on one, unlike  in the American version, and the wheels were of a different shape.   Later on, the design charts for  GAZ M1 were utilised  for almost all Soviet-made cars.

To be contunied.

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