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# An archive of photographs of Stalin's Moscow and other Soviet cities, taken by a US embassy employee expelled from the country for espionage, found in the cupboard of an old house
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-chulane-stargo-doma-naiden-arkhiv-snimkov-stalinskoi-moskvy-i-drugikh-gorodov-sssr-sdelannykh-vyslannym-iz-strany-za-shpionazh-sotrudnikom-amerikanskogo-posolstva/
- Published: 2025-03-06T06:32:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:30:55.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Moscow, Society

While in Moscow, Major Martin Manhoff of the US Army, attached to the embassy, was restricted in his movements, yet he managed to take unique photographs of a Soviet world of sharp contrasts. Major Manhoff served at the US embassy in Moscow from February 1952 until June 1954, when he was expelled from the USSR for espionage. During his two years in the Soviet Union, Manhoff travelled a great deal and recorded most of what he saw on colour slides and 16-millimetre colour film.

The Moscow of his pictures is neither Western nor Eastern, nor quite European. Most of what he captured is a remarkable eclecticism of architecture and human types from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Manhoff filmed Moscow street scenes from a car with a driver, and together with his wife he made vivid notes on life in the Soviet Union of the early 1950s, a country closed to outside eyes.

The sizeable collection of colour photographs and the 16-millimetre film he shot documented the rapid development of Soviet infrastructure against a backdrop of poor and harsh everyday life.

Leaving the country in 1954 under accusations of espionage, Major Manhoff took with him the reels of film and hundreds of colour slides and negatives that he had made on his travels. All of these materials ended up in a storeroom of his house in Washington State, where they lay unknown to anyone for more than half a century. They have now been published as the “Manhoff Archive” by Radio Free Europe, with the assistance of the historian and translator Douglas Smith.

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