Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union, was a cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space. Traveling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. By achieving this major milestone in the Space Race he bec…
These photographs were taken in 1980 by Bruno Barbie and Carl De Keyser and show the everyday life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union was a country descending into chaos, torn apart by natural and indu…
This collection presents the most interesting advertising posters which were shown not only in the Soviet Union but also in other parts of the world. These types of advertising posters and cards were hung in offices, shops, hotels, and published in various …
These posters were published in the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”) from 1922 to 1941. The main purpose of the magazine was to thwart any religious beliefs that were supposedly too distracting for the working class. The magazi…
The subcultures in the Soviet Union, a country cut off from the West by the infamous Iron Curtain, were a form of open youth rebellion against ideological and cultural stagnation. Stilyagi, goths, hippies, bikers, punks, rockers, and metalheads formed c…
In May 1985, as one of the first measures under the new general secretary of the Communist party, Michael Gorbachev, the last big Soviet-style campaign was set in motion, a campaign to curb alcohol consumption. It was a forceful and ruthless campaign, w…
These vintage photos, taken by Sten-Åke Stenberg, depict the street scenes and everyday life in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. The Soviet 1970s was long. Coinciding with the rule of Leonid Brezhnev from 1964 to 1982 in both scholarly and popular u…
In October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong claimed victory and formed the People’s Republic of China. Socialist regimes now held power across one-fifth of the globe, ruling a combined population of almost 800 million people. Maintain…
This card was used by police in the Soviet Union to identify different nationalities by facial phenotypes. Originally it was developed by a group of Soviet criminologists based on various mugshot collections. The exact date is unknown, however, based on…
An unauthorized photo of Stalin inside of the Kremlin shows the very moment he was informed that the German armies had advanced in Kyiv (August 1941). What you see here is a man who up until a few weeks before had absolute confidence in Plan A, and who now…
These two pictures are shown side by side in the Andrei Pozdeev museum. The museum caption reads: "(Left) The artist Eugen Stepanovich Kobytev the day he went to the front in 1941. (Right) In 1945 when he returned”. This is the human face after four years …
The Soviet sniper girl Kyra PetrovskayaKyra was born in 1918 on the coast of the Black Sea in Crimea. Some sources say that her original name was "Cyrus." Her father was a decorated pilot in the Imperial Russian air force, receiving the Order (Cross) of Sa…
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made "once-famous personalities vanish" and crafted photographs …
Nowadays it's hard to believe that thousands of people would be willing to stand out in the cold for hours just to try a McDonald’s hamburger. But when the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the whole city went mad. The Moscow McDonald’s initia…
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union used more women in combat than any other country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women sprang to join the war effort, enlisting as nurses, clerks, cooks, manufacturing etc. Among them were hundreds of remarkab…
On April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, and several hundred staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers wer…
At the end of 1950s a real sensation happened in Moscow: Christian Dior models came to visit the capital of the Soviet Union. Muscovites who wandered into GUM, the USSR’s premier department store, were treated to an extraordinary scene: a trio of willowy F…
In June 1941 Hitler ordered a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, and for most of the next year the German army routed the Soviet troops, capturing thousands of square kilometers of their country in the process. In August 1942 the German VI Army had …
The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, …
Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the German codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which commenced on June 22, 1941. It was to be the turning point for the fortunes of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, i…