Soviet Life

Old colour photos from Russia - Moscow street

The Potemkin effect: Colour photos from Russia in the black-and-white days

Soviet Life, Tech Meets History & Totalitarianism /

There is a fantastic collection of old colour photos from Russia — Tsarist Russia, to be exact — taken between 1902 and 1912 on the Boston Globe site. Strictly speaking, they’re not colour photos — the photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) — shot each image three times, using a red, green and then blue filter. He later combined them to get an approximation of reality. […]

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My Perestroika documentary screenshot

Not my perestroika: Shades of might have beens

Books & Movies, Soviet Life /

Every year, on September 1, Russian children start their first day of school. All of them, en masse. And before them, it was Soviet children. My mother went to school in pinafored uniform, braids and bows in her hair, flowers in her arms. Twenty years later, a carbon copy photo of my cousin doing and wearing the same thing. It’s a ritual I never participated

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The Kitchen Debate - Nixon and Kruschev meeting in Moscow at the American National Exhibition, 1959

Live, in the kitchen, from Moscow

Soviet Life /

So this happened – 1959, Moscow, at the Kruschev and Nixon meeting in, where else, a kitchen. It took the Kremlin until 1959 to realize how starved for things the nation was. In July of that year, Moscow’s Sokolniki Park hosted the American National Exhibition. …In just two week two million Russians had had their faces mashed into a perfect tableau of Yankee wealth. The

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Anna Sui makeup display representing Russian tchotchkes

Do Russian and Soviet memorabilia an immigrant make?

Immigrant Experience, Soviet Life /

I talked about Russian tchotchkes a few weeks ago. And then recently, I spotted this make-up collection from Anna Sui, and though it’s called “Dolly Girl” and references wind mills, it has an unmistakable waft of the Slavo-folksy to me. $27 worth, no less. I’m not a fan of the Russian “look”—tchotchkes, nostalgia, kitsch, call it what you will—Soviet kitsch or Russian folkiness—thanks, but no

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Quote from Unsung Icons of Soviet Design book, by Michael Idov: The core of the Soviet consumer experience was the same for decades. Nobody gave a thought to where these horrors came from or who designed them. They had no provenance. You inherited them at birth, all at once. They were part of life's kit, an ever-receding background noise.

On Russian tchotchkes and Soviet design

Books & Movies, Soviet Life /

A very long time ago (in internet years), I had a Twitter conversation with blogger and general funny girl Vicki Boykis (@vboykis) about our attitudes towards Russian tchotchkes. The original link is dead, but it was probably something along these lines. Her response was an unequivocal “yea,” while I was firmly on the “ugh, why?” side. (Need another example of Vicki’s interesting love for things

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In which I am immersed in Russian music but would have preferred herring

Immigrant Experience, Soviet Life /

I was at a wedding this past weekend. Both parties are Russian Jews, who left shortly after communism collapsed, and both have maintained a strong Russian (/Soviet) Jewish identity. Unfortunately, this did not translate into a dinner of herring and pickled tongue, but rather, into an evening of almost exclusively Russian music — actually more like a mishmash of Israeli/Russian/Soviet music — courtesy of the

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Vintage radio representing BBC Russia

Radio days of the revolution: Goodbye Soviet Russia, hello North Korea

Soviet Life, Tech Meets History & Totalitarianism /

After 65 years, BBC Russia shut down its radio service this week, with all the attendant “end of an era” sighing. That era ended 20 years ago, but hey, who doesn’t appreciate an opportunity to wax nostalgic. If you read anything at all about dissidence in the Soviet days, tuning into illegal radio broadcasts is a central image. In the 1970s and 80s, refuseniks used

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