Photos from the "old days"

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DLD

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A friend linked to these on FB. These were taken in Minsk (then the capital of Belorussia, a "republic" in the USSR, now a capitol of the independent Belarus) in 1985-87.

That's the Chernobyl era (which was on the Ukrainian side of the border but only a couple of hundred miles away). We left about a decade earlier but very little changed up until perestroika of 1987, when the private businesses became legal.

https://news.tut.by/society/651387....2UL0nrPKIf4uwa_YgYQo5UNof_g_tJ8hb6wy8Gk_GLaZ4
 
Grug said:
Fascinating little timecapsule of images! Thanks for sharing it.
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Thanks.

They remind me that all the family photos we have from there are in black and white. Nowadays, the photogs shoot on Canon and Nikon and whatnot and everything sort of looks like everywhere else. But back then everyone, with the exception of the nationally recognized masters, shot on the Soviet equipment and Soviet film and neither was of the highest quality, which added to the overall perception of that time.
 
In 1959, during the Khrushchev Thaw era, Christian Dior and a coterie of his models visited Moscow.

Christian+Dior+in+Moscow,+June+1959+(53).jpg

Yes, those were aliens from outer space ... or, to be more exact, France.

PS. These photos appeared in Life Magazine, so they're available on the internet too.
 
Neat bit of time capsule there

I can read Cyrillic, but my Russian (and/or Ukranian... Mongolian too for that matter) are horrible to nonexistant. That's it's own fun exercise in decription
 
mcbob said:
Neat bit of time capsule there

I can read Cyrillic, but my Russian (and/or Ukranian... Mongolian too for that matter) are horrible to nonexistant. That's it's own fun exercise in decription
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Most of those are staunchly anti-old times. The last page belongs to a fairly well-known blogger from Minsk. His point was that these old photo-ops were still showing a miserly lifestyle.

Which gave me an idea to look for videos. Apropos that it's a reply to McBob.

 
mcbob said:
I can only assume those photos predate the invention of the Adidas tracksuit
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The tracksuits (mostly Adidas) were the official uniforms of the street thugs working for the mob outfits. That made some sense since :

a) a foreign brand was a sign of wealth
b) a track suit was "warm enough" for the Russian summers.
c) It gave a freedom of movement to beat someone up.
d) the goons were generally recruited from the various sports clubs (preferably boxing, martial arts, wrestling, weight lifting, hockey). The crime boss in Leningrad/St. Peter, who was a major influence on one of his ex-trainees named Vladimir Putin, came out of a SamBO (Russian copy of judo) club. The top boss in Moscow was a Greco-Roman heavyweight. His main enemy was also a SamBO trained tough guy.

Quickly, however, the street crew chiefs went toward the "blue jeans and a black leather jacket" look to distinguish themselves from the entry level hoodlums. Then, at some point, that became a de facto uni.

5a32793e15e9f949373f67e2.jpg

Two side stories :

back in 1978, our Israeli relatives (who had been living there since the Palestine days of the 1920's) sent us a clothing parcel. Among them were the blue jeans (that I pleaded and begged for), some pants and shorts for my parents and two T-shirts. One was Puma, another from Adidos. That's right, with an "O". A few years ago, as I remembered that story, I decided to search for the various Adidas fakes online and discovered that there were over a dozen of them. I also remembered that, for the two months that I wore it back in the motherland, I had it under an unbuttoned fall jacket, so only the first three letters were clearly visible. Paired with size 44 Levi's - I was 30 at the time and pinched the rest with a clothespin - I was almost Mr. Cool.

And, from the "Delivery Boy" (aka the "Courier", aka the "Gopher Boy") film that I linked on the Soviet Era Films page, the main female heroine wears an Adidas sweater upon her introduction. The studio couldn't figure out how to dress her, so the actress - a very lovely Anastasia Nemolyaeva, who was 16 at the time - brought her own clothes to the set. She could afford them, so to speak, because her father was a well respected cinematographer, her aunt Svetlana a well known actress, her grandfather a well known director. I actually missed the significance of her outfit because I saw the movie for the first time on YouTube in 2006 or so, about twenty years after its release, and was unable to grasp the zeitgeist of the film. Its American equivalent would be a 16-YO girl with a $60,000 BMW.

nemolyaeva_33.jpg
 
Back in the late 1960's, the Soviet geologists discovered humongous reserves of oil and gas in Siberia. By 1974, they completed a natural gas pipeline that ran across the European portion of the USSR, across Poland and into northwestern Germany ending up near Rostock of what was then a friendly GDR. Since all those were closed economies, the exchanging rates were based on a barter system. The Warsaw Pact nations got oil and gas, while Soviets got this in exchange.

All in English.

https://www.rbth.com/history/331530-goods-socialist-countries-ussr
 
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Technically, not a photo but a clip from an old Soviet animated short called "An incredible match", accompanied by the "Football march" by Blanter. The march was played before every televised soccer broadcast.

 
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