Москва

During the summer of 1966 I traveled around the world with a high school friend. We were 18. We had several weeks in the USSR and traveled 6,152 miles on Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow to Nakhodka near Vladivostok on the east coast before taking a ship to Japan. I recently had my old Kodachrome slides converted into digital and cleaned the photos up with Photoshop. I have no recall of what camera I used then, but it was basic and had very low resolution. This photo and some to follow are now 54 years old. This one of Moscow's Red Square shows Saint Basil's Cathedral in the distance.

Tags:   Moscow Russia USSR Red Square Kremlin Saint Basil's Cathedral 1966 travel slides conversion Kodachrome

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This photograph was taken during a trip on the Trans-Siberian railway in Siberia near Irkutsk in the former USSR August 1966. The original photo from a Kodachrome slide was restored in Photoshop after a digital conversion. I found the scene interesting with the elderly woman in the foreground and the younger women in the background. A bitterly cold place in the winter. The window shutters on the house of the left were commonly seen in Siberia. The roads look a little rough.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway

Транссибирская магистраль

Tags:   USSR Russia Trans Siberian Railway 1966 Kodachrome trip tour railway remote rural магистраль Транссибирская магистраль

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Moscow, USSR 1966 ( Москва)

The pigeons enjoyed having their photo taken and there is a "thought cloud" behind him.

Karl Heinrich Marx 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883 was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socio-economic systems and that those would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organized proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation. (Wikipedia)

Tags:   Karl Marx Moscow statue Russia stone pigeons communism marxism Москва

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Vladimir in Khabarovsk, USSR August 1966. We had a one day stop here in 1966 on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

This is the Coat of Arms for the former USSR.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Emblem_of_the_Soviet_Union

Listen to this great Beatles classic:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS5_EQgbuLc


"Been away so long I barely knew the place
Gee, it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia's always on my my my my my my my my my mind
Oh, come on
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boys
Back in the USSR"

Lennon/McCartney

Tags:   Lenin Vladimir Lenin USSR Russia Kabarovsk statue building 1966 trip train

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A view inside Moscow's famous shopping centre on Red Square in 1966 at the time of a USSR tour when I was 17 and traveled around the world one summer with a friend. This was one from an old Kodachrome slide.

The most famous shopping centre in Russia GUM is the large store facing Red Square in the Kitai-gorod area – itself traditionally a trading center of Moscow. As of 2020, the building functions as a shopping mall. Before the 1920s the location was known as the Upper Trading Rows.

As of 2020, GUM carries over 100 different brands, and has cafes and restaurants inside the mall.

Catherine II of Russia commissioned Giacomo Quarenghi, a Neoclassical architect from Italy, to design a huge trade center along the east side of Red Square. However, that building was lost to the 1812 Fire of Moscow and replaced by trading rows designed by Joseph Bove. In turn, the current structure replaced Bove's.

By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the building contained some 1,200 stores. After the Revolution, the GUM was nationalized. During the NEP period (1921–28), however, GUM as a State Department Store operated as a model retail enterprise for consumers throughout Russia regardless of class, gender, and ethnicity. GUM's stores were used to further Bolshevik goals of rebuilding private enterprise along socialist lines and "democratizing consumption for workers and peasants nationwide". In the end, GUM's efforts to build communism through consumerism were unsuccessful and arguably "only succeeded in alienating consumers from state stores and instituting a culture of complaint and entitlement".

GUM continued to be used as a department store until Joseph Stalin converted it into office space in 1928 for the committee in charge of his first Five Year Plan. After the suicide of Stalin's wife Nadezhda in 1932, the GUM was used briefly to display her body.

After reopening as a department store in 1953, the GUM became one of the few stores in the Soviet Union that did not have shortages of consumer goods, and the queues of shoppers were long, often extending entirely across Red Square.

At the end of the Soviet era, GUM was partially, then fully privatized, and it had a number of owners before it ended up being owned by the supermarket company Perekryostok. In May 2005, a 50.25% interest was sold to Bosco di Ciliegi, a Russian luxury goods distributor and boutique operator. As a private shopping mall, it was renamed in such a fashion that it could maintain its old abbreviation and thus still be called GUM. However, the first word Gosudarstvennyi ("state") has been replaced with Glavnyi ("main"), so that GUM is now an abbreviation for "Main Universal Store".

Tags:   Moscow USSR Russia GUM shopping centre stores 1966

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