Lots of contention around the narrative. The original link should be removed and replaced with the original source that has what’s seems to be accurate and different narratives for the pictures. The linked site seems to simply steal what is a pretty nice coverage of the archive.
Interesting and sad to see the ratio of women to men doing hard manual work in these photos, even road repairs are done by women. It's mind boggling how devastating the war was for the country.
Ah, is that why... I noticed this too but assumed it was due to some communist ideal of gender equality leading to more women tradespeople, wishful thinking I guess
"It becomes evident that the parade was a carefully choreographed spectacle, designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s ideology and power to the world."
Ah yes, everyone known that in a TRUE democracy parades are spontaneously occurring events, self organizing to show the country's weaknesses and the population's biases.
Seriously tho, what does this mean, has anyone ever been to a parade and concluded it was neither coreographed, planned, or meant give a positive image ?
How do you determine people's enthusiasm is planned and orchestrated by looking at them ?
Are all parades proof the country is actually the torture Truman show or just the countries you're being payed to spy on ?
In my experience as an American, most of the parades I'm personally familiar with are organized by local groups rather than the government. Maybe you can read some ideology into the American Legion marching with flags, but it's more an exercise in giving the local high school band a chance to march, the Shriners an excuse to break out their clown cars, and maybe the whole thing is an advertisement for the 4H or FFA fair. That's not to say that the US doesn't have parades in the genre the article talks about—the Army 250th Anniversary Parade probably counts. But not every parade is a propaganda exercise.
Ugh, how I hate this sort of relativization coming from people who never experienced an actual authoritarian system.
By the age of 6, I was required to carry a standard paper lantern on the November 7th celebration of the Great October* Socialist Revolution, with my parents fully aware that presence and absence lists were maintained by the teachers, who would forward them to the school cadre bureaucrats keeping dossiers on the kids, who could alert the secret police to take a closer look at the repeat offenders, and who would definitely play a big role in allowing you later to enter high school or not.
My grandpa was subject to hearings and threats because his son (my uncle) had bad marks in the compulsory Russian language lessons and the spooks were convinced that he was bad at it on purpose, by being secretly taught animosity against the Soviet Union at home.
I wonder if you ever experienced this sort of paranoia and coercion from your government. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, this was the norm even during the late 1980s.
* Yeah, the October/November mismatch fits, because in 1917, then-Russia was following the Julian calendar and only later switched to Gregorian. Hence the difference of 18 days which was reflected in the timing of that parade.
As someone who grew up in the Soviet Union (during a later period), I found it really interesting to look at this photographs.
One thing worth pointing out: Moscow was very different from the rest of the country. It had better housing and infrastructure, the shops were stocked far better than elsewhere in the country, it had more grandiose architecture and richer cultural life and so on.
In many is ways it was the country's showcase city.
Not exactly. While it is true that Moscow had (has) more than any other city in the union - capitals of the republics had more that russian province, for example.
You'd rather live in Dushanbe (where I was born) rather then in russian city of the same population.
(1) Most countries have a lot of concentration of population, power, wealth in a capital city, for instance Tokyo, Paris, London, etc. In the 1970s it was generally understood that this causes political instability and increases vulnerability to thermonuclear weapons, see
By the 1990s it was a forgotten cause: countries weren't willing to give up a few points of efficiency facing the fierce competition and the cold war was over.
(2) Russia was particularly extreme at that time because, under Communism, Russia was transforming from a mostly agrarian country with spots of advanced thinking (Russian Futurists, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) to an industrial powerhouse that could challenge the United States. Ironically if there was anything about the Stalin years it was that Russia was highly successful at capital accumulation and around that time many "non-aligned" and less developed countries like India were hoping the USSR could help them do the same.
Karl Marx was mainly interested in the advanced industrial "core" but Lenin was more interested in "peripheral" countries that were exploited by the "core". The USSR was more about winning the international competition than it was about advancing the working class and the military threat from Germany, US and other countries meant the USSR had to develop as rapidly as possible so it reproduced an imperialist system internally with a division of labor that advanced industry around Moscow and a few other centers at the expense of the countryside, see
It unveils the stark contrast between the carefully constructed façade
presented by the Soviet authorities and the harsh realities experienced by
ordinary citizens.
I guess without examples of the "carefully constructed façade" its difficult to understand if there is a contrast. To me, the photos just look like ordinary 1950s street scenes. Waiting at Walgreens the other day I spent the time examining the store's decorative antique photos; aside from differences in culture and subject area, so many details of vehicles, building construction, clothing styles are remarkably similar.
You're arguing with LLM-generated text and yes, I don't think the photos actually show that. They don't seem to be making any political point at all.
The thing to understand about the USSR is that Moscow was a flagship city of a continental-scale empire obsessed with projecting an image of power and technological progress. It had grand construction projects, cultural events, subway, good schools, paved streets. Sort of like Pyongyang, if North Korea was a global superpower. The thing that sucked about Moscow wasn't that it looked drab, it was that you could get disappeared to a gulag or outright murdered for political speech or merely pissing off a government official, and that the government managed almost every aspect of your life (including where you work and live). Forget foreign travel, you even had restrictions on domestic travel. People born in rural areas couldn't move to Moscow unless they had political connections of some sort.
Life was far more miserable in the rest of the USSR, including all the republics and satellite states that Moscow approached as sources of cheap resources and labor to prop up the capital. Famine and all.
Reminds me of the old Soviet joke of somebody going to the butcher and asking if they have fish. The butcher responds we only have no meat here, you need to go to the fish shop if you want no fish.
Interesting article. Not a whole lot of crowing about US free society, and negative comparisons, I presume because of the US trending towards secret police and currently having a favorable view of Russia.
Dear Douglas Smith... and the website authors...
Thank you, heartfelt... for such an incredible work... for the effort, and you being a miracle...
To keep it in the infinite History of us... the Human...
Ineffably magnificent... no words may express it...
May you have even more success. stability, and peace...
Best, and kind regards...
https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html
Ah yes, everyone known that in a TRUE democracy parades are spontaneously occurring events, self organizing to show the country's weaknesses and the population's biases.
Seriously tho, what does this mean, has anyone ever been to a parade and concluded it was neither coreographed, planned, or meant give a positive image ?
How do you determine people's enthusiasm is planned and orchestrated by looking at them ?
Are all parades proof the country is actually the torture Truman show or just the countries you're being payed to spy on ?
I'm not sure what kind of special torture you'd employ to make people display that kind of enthusiasm :)
By the age of 6, I was required to carry a standard paper lantern on the November 7th celebration of the Great October* Socialist Revolution, with my parents fully aware that presence and absence lists were maintained by the teachers, who would forward them to the school cadre bureaucrats keeping dossiers on the kids, who could alert the secret police to take a closer look at the repeat offenders, and who would definitely play a big role in allowing you later to enter high school or not.
My grandpa was subject to hearings and threats because his son (my uncle) had bad marks in the compulsory Russian language lessons and the spooks were convinced that he was bad at it on purpose, by being secretly taught animosity against the Soviet Union at home.
I wonder if you ever experienced this sort of paranoia and coercion from your government. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, this was the norm even during the late 1980s.
* Yeah, the October/November mismatch fits, because in 1917, then-Russia was following the Julian calendar and only later switched to Gregorian. Hence the difference of 18 days which was reflected in the timing of that parade.
One thing worth pointing out: Moscow was very different from the rest of the country. It had better housing and infrastructure, the shops were stocked far better than elsewhere in the country, it had more grandiose architecture and richer cultural life and so on.
In many is ways it was the country's showcase city.
Not exactly. While it is true that Moscow had (has) more than any other city in the union - capitals of the republics had more that russian province, for example.
You'd rather live in Dushanbe (where I was born) rather then in russian city of the same population.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.h...
By the 1990s it was a forgotten cause: countries weren't willing to give up a few points of efficiency facing the fierce competition and the cold war was over.
(2) Russia was particularly extreme at that time because, under Communism, Russia was transforming from a mostly agrarian country with spots of advanced thinking (Russian Futurists, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) to an industrial powerhouse that could challenge the United States. Ironically if there was anything about the Stalin years it was that Russia was highly successful at capital accumulation and around that time many "non-aligned" and less developed countries like India were hoping the USSR could help them do the same.
Karl Marx was mainly interested in the advanced industrial "core" but Lenin was more interested in "peripheral" countries that were exploited by the "core". The USSR was more about winning the international competition than it was about advancing the working class and the military threat from Germany, US and other countries meant the USSR had to develop as rapidly as possible so it reproduced an imperialist system internally with a division of labor that advanced industry around Moscow and a few other centers at the expense of the countryside, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization
If you're interested in the spatial division of the world you really need to read
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-System-I-Immanuel-Waller...
and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.
The thing to understand about the USSR is that Moscow was a flagship city of a continental-scale empire obsessed with projecting an image of power and technological progress. It had grand construction projects, cultural events, subway, good schools, paved streets. Sort of like Pyongyang, if North Korea was a global superpower. The thing that sucked about Moscow wasn't that it looked drab, it was that you could get disappeared to a gulag or outright murdered for political speech or merely pissing off a government official, and that the government managed almost every aspect of your life (including where you work and live). Forget foreign travel, you even had restrictions on domestic travel. People born in rural areas couldn't move to Moscow unless they had political connections of some sort.
Life was far more miserable in the rest of the USSR, including all the republics and satellite states that Moscow approached as sources of cheap resources and labor to prop up the capital. Famine and all.
> MEAT. FISH.
That's some Edward Bernays-level trickery right there. /s