Archive · Faith · Paris
In Paris in the Days before Easter
Issue of Illustrated Russia (Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya) for 1 May 1926
Section
· 1929 stories
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Archive · Books · Society · Saint Petersburg
Émigré caricatures of early 1920s life in Bolshevik Petrograd
Illustrations to the rare émigré publication “There! Pictures of the Soviet Paradise” of the early 1920s. The new life in Bolshevik Petrograd is depicted by the authors with scrawny cows in city courtyards, starving people in a canteen, unbuttoned sailors and their drunken girlfriends from the Cheka, and workers sleeping
Archive · Nature · Ethnography
Not Caught, but Given
An Italian woman in the commune of Bagnara Calabra, known as the swordfish capital, with what turns out to be the chief local souvenir Photograph of 1945
Archive · The East · Society · People
German money for the Russian revolution and the project of a worldwide Islamic revolution
Lenin in a Wig, August 1917. Looking at this face, aflame with insidious schemes, one cannot help asking: was Lenin a German spy after all, or a German agent? That Germany financed the Russian revolution is known for a fact. What remains in question is precisely how the revolutionaries spent
Archive · Moscow · Observations · Mores · People
Interior of Andropov's apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in photographs from 1984
Andropov's flat at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The photographs were taken in 1984, after the General Secretary's death. A luxury interior from an era when the profession of interior designer, to all appearances, did not exist in the country
Archive · Faith · Observations · Science · People · Humour
Newton identified 2060 as the year of God's judgment from prophetic chronologies
Isaac Newton, according to his manuscripts of 1704, basing himself on his own interpretation of the Bible, above all the Book of Daniel, calculated that the end of the world would come in 2060. Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of the end of the world in 2060 rests on
NB! · Archive · Pop Culture · Humour
The Mischievous Monkey of 1917 Is Still Up to Her Tricks Today
Archive · Books · Ethnography
A Cossack with his Cossack wife, and Russians in national costumes
Illustration from the children's educational book of the early nineteenth century, "Cosmorama"
NB! · Archive · Geography · Maps · Moscow
Giant model of the Moscow Metro map installed on Okhotny Ryad in the 1930s
The Moscow Metro map as an octopus. The installation is a gigantic model of the metropolitan railway. It was set up in the 1930s in Okhotny Ryad
NB! · Archive · Cinema · People · Society Pages
Charlie Chaplin at a Fancy-Dress Party in 1925
Archive · Books · Museums · Society · People · Saint Petersburg
Pasted-over pages in books at the Akhmatova Museum and her poems about Stalin
The Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House holds collections of verse with pasted-over pages. It is reported that Akhmatova herself pasted these pages shut. What is beneath? Akhmatova's poems about Stalin. It is believed that Anna Andreyevna was compelled to write them in order to help her
Archive · Moscow · Observations · Society
Moscow's Theatre Square in the 1930s decorated with tractor models for May Day
I was leafing through an album of photographs of 1930s Moscow and came upon a picture of Theatre Square decked out for May Day with outline models of tractors and ploughs. You know, for all the naivety and artlessness of such agitational dressing of urban spaces, it looks far better