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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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 photo was taken in 1966. It is from a Kodachrome slide taken during my trip to the USSR.
Saint Basil's Cathedral
The Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed (Russian: Собо́р Васи́лия Блаже́нного, tr. Sobór Vasíliya Blazhénnogo), commonly known as Saint Basil's Cathedral, is an Orthodox church in Red Square of Moscow, and is one of the most popular cultural symbols of Russia. The building, now a museum, is officially known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, or Pokrovsky Cathedral. It was built from 1555 to 1561 on orders from Ivan the Terrible and commemorates the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan. It was the city's tallest building until the completion of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in 1600.
The original building, known as Trinity Church and later Trinity Cathedral, contained eight chapels arranged around a ninth, central chapel dedicated to the Intercession; a tenth chapel was erected in 1588 over the grave of the venerated local saint Vasily (Basil). In the 16th and 17th centuries, the church, perceived (as with all churches in Byzantine Christianity) as the earthly symbol of the Heavenly City, was popularly known as the "Jerusalem" and served as an allegory of the Jerusalem Temple in the annual Palm Sunday parade attended by the Patriarch of Moscow and the Tsar.
The cathedral has nine domes (each one corresponding to a different church) and is shaped like the flame of a bonfire rising into the sky, a design that has no parallel in Russian architecture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, in his book Russian Architecture and the West, states that "it is like no other Russian building. Nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine tradition from the fifth to the fifteenth century ... a strangeness that astonishes by its unexpectedness, complexity and dazzling interleaving of the manifold details of its design." The cathedral foreshadowed the climax of Russian national architecture in the 17th century.
As part of the program of state atheism, the church was confiscated from the Russian Orthodox community as part of the Soviet Union's antireligious campaigns and has operated as a division of the State Historical Museum since 1928. It was completely secularized in 1929, and remains a federal property of the Russian Federation. The church has been part of the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, weekly Orthodox Christian services with prayer to St. Basil have been restored since 1997.
Tags: Moscow Russia USSR 1966 church Red Square travel trip tourist Orthodox Kremlin red square chapels domes Russian
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I had the privilege of visiting this city of beautiful parks and gardens in 1966 before the Ukraine gained its independence from the former USSR in 1991. The world weeps for Ukraine and stands beside it. I fear this square and city will all be tragically destroyed by Russian bombardment from an invasion that has no justification.
This is The Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument located at Sophia Square, with views of St. Sophia's Cathedral and St. Michael's Golden-domed Monastery.
The Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument (Ukrainian: Пам'ятник Богданові Хмельницькому) is a monument in Kyiv dedicated to Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the first Hetman of Zaporizhian Host. It was built in 1888 - it is one of the oldest sculptural monuments, a dominating feature of Sophia Square and one of the city's symbols.
The monument is located almost in the middle of the Sophia Square (formerly the main city's square) on the axis that unites both belltowers of the Sophia Cathedral and the St. Michael's Monastery.
Here on 23 December 1648 residents of Kyiv met Khmelnytsky leading his Cossacks' regiments by entering the city through the Golden Gates soon after the victory over Polish Army at the battle of Pyliavtsi.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohdan_Khmelnytsky_Monument,_Kyiv
Tags: Kyiv Kiev Ukraine Russia invasion travel USSR statue buildings church orhtodox 1966 tour cathedral monastery Sophia Square Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument Cassack Sophia Cathedral
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