I didn’t think you’d find too many examples of Soviet designed Christmas cards, being a former communist state after all, but this gallery of about 60 cards shows otherwise.
Christmas behind the iron curtain: Soviet greeting cards
Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 24 December, 2009 to the design and art subset
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Poster ads from the iron curtain era of design
Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 12 November, 2009 to the design and art subset
A great collection of Soviet era advertising posters.
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Photos from the abandoned Russian “Buran” space program
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 28 October, 2009 to the photography subset
Photos from the Soviet/Russian “Buran” space program, that was abandoned in the mid-1990s. An unfortunate outcome given the amount of time, effort, and money that must have been invested in it.
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You don’t know how lucky you are to be back in the USSR
Posted by John Lampard on Tuesday, 27 October, 2009 to the photography subset
French photographer Marc Riboud’s collection of photos of day-to-day life in the former Soviet Union.
Links to more Soviet-era photo sets are at the foot of the page.
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Today we learn to play chess, tomorrow we take the world
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 30 September, 2009 to the comment subset
Was mastering the game of chess all part of a plan for Soviet world domination conceived after the Russian revolution?
Chess has long been popular in Russia – Czar Ivan IV is thought to have died while playing a match in 1584. After the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, it became a national pastime. Soon after [...]
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The perimetre method of global thermonuclear war
Posted by John Lampard on Monday, 28 September, 2009 to the comment subset
The fascinatingly morbid Soviet doomsday machine, or ultimate weapon, which was designed to ensure there would be a Soviet response to a US nuclear attack even if government and military leaders had already been killed or incapacitated.
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear [...]
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Stories from the Soviet Union’s “black space program”
Posted by John Lampard on Tuesday, 28 April, 2009 to the comment subset
We may never know if there is any truth to rumours of an unofficial (or black) Soviet space exploration program, which was far more experimental – and as a result, far more dangerous – than the missions they publised, but Italian bothers Achille and Gian Judica-Cordiglia feel they have some compelling evidence.
There are those [...]
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To boldly go where only artists imaginations had once taken us
Posted by John Lampard on Friday, 20 March, 2009 to the design and art subset
Life is complete. I saw the new Star Trek movie trailer on the big screen (as opposed to my monitor) for the first time this week.
And a scene of what looks like the USS Enterprise under construction seemed reminiscent of some of the images in this collection of artwork depicting the possible future of [...]
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“The Hot Line”; for use in the event of a Cold War
Posted by John Lampard on Tuesday, 2 September, 2008 to the comment subset
A matter that has become topical again in recent weeks…
A short history of the so-called “hot line”, a communications system that linked the leaders of the erstwhile USSR and the US, set up in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, to reduce the possibility of an “accidental” nuclear war between the two superpowers.
The hot [...]
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Aleksei Leonov’s space suit and Soviet space age secrecy
Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 5 June, 2008 to the comment subset
The early exploits of the Soviet space program were often shrouded in secrecy, and unlike US space missions which were virtually a media circus, only the merest of details of a space flight were ever revealed.
After stumbling upon this snippet about Russian Aleksei Leonov, the first person to ever walk in space, I can see [...]
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