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The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

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Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#71

Post by throwaway85825 »

adolph wrote: post #14

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 dec…

Millions of slaves died building stalins monumental architecture. It wasn't until kruschev that they started building mass housing.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#72

Post by shrubble »

aix1 wrote: post #3

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 co…

I read or was told that 60% of the Russian economy flows through Moscow in one way or another.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#73

Post by anovikov »

SoftTalker wrote: post #32
aix1 wrote: post #3

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 co…

So, the same as any big urban center anywhere has better infrastructure and cultural life compared to villages and rural areas? Or was it particularly pronounced in the USSR?

It's very different, varies country by country. In UK everything is concentrated in London, in France most is concentrated in Paris but to a lower degree, there is no pronounced hyper-center of everything in Spain - Madrid is top #1 but Barcelona is close 2nd and there is a lot of business and a lot of stuff going on in Santander, Valencia, Alicante, and so on. In Italy Rome and Milan are about equal. In Germany there is totally nothing resembling a dominating city at all. In US it's mostly coasts vs flyover states, hyper-centers do exist by they specialise by industry - everything about tech is in the Valley, everything about pharma is in Philadelphia, and so on - but in Russia, Moscow is a hyper-center of everything, of every industry.

If you are in software startup field and not in the Valley you don't know what you are doing.

If you are in Russia and not in Moscow, you don't know what you are doing - regardless of what exactly are you trying to do.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#74

Post by anovikov »

The most striking thing about it, is that no matter how sorry do most of those people look, a good half of them represent Soviet 1% ers. And virtually all of them, top 20%. Vast majority of population wore homemade clothes, lived in villages with no documents (literally having no right to have an ID issued, which was necessary for all things except working in their kolkhos they were attached to), and could be jailed simply for leaving their village without a written order, at will.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#75

Post by contingencies »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #68
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just hard manual work. IIRC, for decades the majority of doctors were women.

They still are! According to the WHO [0], in 2020 just under 71% of doctors in Russia were women. [0] https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hlthres_137-of-ph...

Why yes, Vlad, you need to drink less. And of course, lay off the Cubans. But if you're headed to the front, knock yourself out!

Seriously though, we can likely expect that statistic to increase due to the number of dead Russian men who have been meat-ground in the war. Poor bastards.

On that note, DON'T TEACH YOUR CHILDREN NATIONALIST IDEAS. Resist statism.

The 'isms pass. The 'ist dies. Art remains. - Vladimir Nabokov

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#76

Post by wiseowise »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #59
usrnm wrote: post #18

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.

That's a funny take these days, that women are too dainty to do "men's work". Should they be kept barefoot in the kitchen? Or just allowed in women's jobs?

This has nothing to do with gender equality. You don’t see any apparatchik wives on the pictures.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#77

Post by wiseowise »

Jgoauh wrote: post #12

"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 c…

Just visit any (sparse) Dutch events, like King’s day, you’ll see what it means when people self-organize.

Re: The Manhoff Archives: Color photos of Stalin-era USSR taken by a US diplomat

#78

Post by Jgoauh »

inglor_cz wrote: post #27
Jgoauh wrote: post #12

"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 c…

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 dossi…

Hello, sorry i didn't reply sooner, i searched the original article for quotes and additional context but the website seems to have been updated and i cannot find it, making my original comment useless now.

I didn't mean to question or minimize the pressure and domination put on everyday people by authoritarian systems. My comment was meant to question the website's implications that this could all be deduced by the content of the photographs.

For the Parade comment specifically, i dislike the idea that the Soviet Union's ideology and tactics and motives can be deduced by the appearance of the parade, all thanks to Manhoff instead of decades of witness accounts, geopolitics and historian work.

I generally care more about how opinions are formed than what those opinions are. I also hate the anti-intellectual assumptions that what is bad looks bad, what looks bad is bad, and conversely that what looks good is good. You find this any time people talk about how nice killers were. My point was that if you wait for things to look bad before you question them, you will never question anything. But this last paragraph is just rambling and has nothing to do with your well written reply.

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