6 ms·

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

203 points by Cider9986 5mo ago

bediger4000 5mo ago
[flagged]
aix1 5mo ago
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.
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  So a Potemkin capital, as it were?
  - tokai 5mo ago
    No, cause it wasn't a fake facade. Moscow was (and is) petter on most parameters than the rest of the country.
  - PaulHoule 5mo ago
    (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 https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.html?id=r6guAAAAMAAJ 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 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-Wallerstein/dp/0520267575 https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-System-I-Immanuel-Waller... and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.
  - Insimwytim 5mo ago
    "Potemkin village" - a fake propaganda narrative, created by Saxony's embassy clerk Helbig. He conveniently told that story in Hamburg, a decade later after the trip (which he wasn't a part of). Charles-Joseph de Ligne (who has been part of said journey) regarded such tales as preposterous.
- sherr 5mo ago
  Nothing has changed in that regard. Moscow still receives much more monetary attention than any other city in Russia.
- nephihaha 5mo ago
  Moscow plus Leningrad plus Vladivostok. The rest fought for the crumbs.
  - konart 5mo ago
    >The rest 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.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  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?
  - ido 5mo ago
    Not just the USSR, Warsaw Pact countries in general (e.g. Prague was disproportionally well funded in Czechoslovakia in comparison to other cities - even accounting for its size and population) and probably authoritarian countries in general tend towards it. Of course in general the biggest cities/capital cities tend to be richer than smaller/less important cities but the comment was about the magnitude of the phenomenon in the USSR.
  - bediger4000 5mo ago
    In the USA, we tend to hear a lot about "urban/rural divides". There's always a lot of calls to narrow or erase that divide. The efforts are usually directed towards increasing rural access (to anything, broadband, healthcare, schooling, etc), rather than making improvements for both urban and rural problems.
  - anovikov 5mo ago
    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.
- shrubble 5mo ago
  I read or was told that 60% of the Russian economy flows through Moscow in one way or another.
obezyian 5mo ago
> store №20 > MEAT. FISH. That's some Edward Bernays-level trickery right there. /s
- decimalenough 5mo ago
  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.
serious_angel 5mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Jgoauh 5mo ago
"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 ?
- balalalalalala 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- wl 5mo ago
  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.
  - balalalalalala 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Military parades with actual soldiers in USA are organized by local groups rather then the government? Like commooooon.
balalalalalala 5mo ago
[flagged]
adolph 5mo ago
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.
- balalalalalala 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- zerobees 5mo ago
  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. Around 6-8 million people starved in the USSR in the 1930s (most of them in Ukraine). Another million starved around 1947.
  - adolph 5mo ago
    Yes, there is something about the photos totally reminds me of recent photos from Pyongyang. True atrocities like the Holodomor aside, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the bright capital sucking rural resources and capricious political crime enforcement isn't much different from the previous czarist regime. The way the political messaging is so much louder than any private activity (like advertising) says a lot about how weak and insecure the government thought itself. While the article focuses on Moscow, the online collection is worth checking out. I'm especially interested in the "ancient burial markers near the village of Ust-byur" which seems to be Khakassia in plains that resemble West Texas. https://manhoffarchive.org/on-the-road https://manhoffarchive.org/on-the-road Edit: Ust-byur is within 300mi of Denisova Cave!
usrnm 5mo ago
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.
- branon 5mo ago
  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
  - konart 5mo ago
    Both. But mostly the war.
    - Alive-in-2025 5mo ago
      I was expecting to find out that lots of men killed in the war led to many more women working after the war, and that's what could be interpreted/guessed from these pictures. But looking at wikipedia, it's complicated. A lot of different estimates of deaths. I think a lot more men died in ww2 in the Soviet military, from Wikipedia, about 20 million men (see total war deaths by age group table) and 6 million women. The official counts of the dead were supposed to have underreported deaths by a lot. Looking at different estimates in wiki, about 10 million military dead and almost 20 million civilian dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
      - rjsw 5mo ago
        I would suggest that the male deaths will have been concentrated in a smaller age range than the female ones.
  - flextheruler 5mo ago
    If not for the war or other legitimate reasons I'd assume a preponderance of one demographic doing a specific job as likely a bad thing. I'm surprised it'd be wishful thinking.
infecto 5mo ago
Lots of contention here 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. https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html
- MisterTea 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - RaSoJo 5mo ago
    I reckon OP means quotes like these: Manhoff captures the scarcity of consumer goods, the omnipresent surveillance, and the ever-present fear of being monitored by the Soviet security apparatus. A lot of socialist commentators push back on such portrayals, dismissing them as capitalist propaganda. Michael Parenti was one such. He argued that life in the USSR was in stark contrast to what the world were made to believe by the US State Machinery/Hollywood. Here is a longish talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU (It is an interesting listen, even if you do not believe in the ideal.) Then there is Angela Merkle's "almost comfortable" statement: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east-germany-was-almost-comfortable-at-times-merkel-says-idUSKBN1XI285/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east... A point she expands in her memoir about growing up in East Germany. There were bad things. There were good things. Considering the basket case that Russia has become, maybe the USSR wasn't so bad after all.
    - infecto 5mo ago
      I have no bone to pick on either side but there were a number of comments here about the footnotes to the pictures so I went to look up the source material and could not find good references to those footnotes so wanted to point out they the images are stolen and the text that comes with it is probably made up.
dctoedt 5mo ago
More information about the origins of the collection and the photographer (a U.S. Army officer, assistant military attaché): https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro
0xDEAFBEAD 5mo ago
"According to Smith, after Manhoff’s wife died he was asked to check the home of a former official for valuable memorabilia." I wonder how much valuable memorabilia is just getting thrown away because no one thought to check for it. Here's your nudge to ask your older relatives about their memorabilia, and record conversations with them while they are still alive. If you want to put the info online somewhere to increase the chance that it's useful to someone someday, you could try a free genealogy website like familysearch.org or wikitree.com
- parl_match 5mo ago
  To be fair, most people aren't a diplomat to Russia. So it's good to check but maybe this was a much more advanced case.
  - throwaway85825 5mo ago
    Further, gifts to government officials are the property of the government.
anovikov 5mo ago
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.

203 points by Cider9986 5mo ago

[flagged]

aix1 5mo ago

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.

IAmBroom 5mo ago
So a Potemkin capital, as it were?
- tokai 5mo ago
  No, cause it wasn't a fake facade. Moscow was (and is) petter on most parameters than the rest of the country.
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  (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 https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.html?id=r6guAAAAMAAJ 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 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-Wallerstein/dp/0520267575 https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-System-I-Immanuel-Waller... and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.
- Insimwytim 5mo ago
  "Potemkin village" - a fake propaganda narrative, created by Saxony's embassy clerk Helbig. He conveniently told that story in Hamburg, a decade later after the trip (which he wasn't a part of). Charles-Joseph de Ligne (who has been part of said journey) regarded such tales as preposterous.
sherr 5mo ago
Nothing has changed in that regard. Moscow still receives much more monetary attention than any other city in Russia.
nephihaha 5mo ago
Moscow plus Leningrad plus Vladivostok. The rest fought for the crumbs.
- konart 5mo ago
  >The rest 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.
SoftTalker 5mo ago
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?
- ido 5mo ago
  Not just the USSR, Warsaw Pact countries in general (e.g. Prague was disproportionally well funded in Czechoslovakia in comparison to other cities - even accounting for its size and population) and probably authoritarian countries in general tend towards it. Of course in general the biggest cities/capital cities tend to be richer than smaller/less important cities but the comment was about the magnitude of the phenomenon in the USSR.
- bediger4000 5mo ago
  In the USA, we tend to hear a lot about "urban/rural divides". There's always a lot of calls to narrow or erase that divide. The efforts are usually directed towards increasing rural access (to anything, broadband, healthcare, schooling, etc), rather than making improvements for both urban and rural problems.
- anovikov 5mo ago
  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.
shrubble 5mo ago
I read or was told that 60% of the Russian economy flows through Moscow in one way or another.

obezyian 5mo ago

> store №20 > MEAT. FISH. That's some Edward Bernays-level trickery right there. /s

decimalenough 5mo ago
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.

serious_angel 5mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Jgoauh 5mo ago

"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 ?

balalalalalala 5mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
wl 5mo ago
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.
- balalalalalala 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- watwut 5mo ago
  Military parades with actual soldiers in USA are organized by local groups rather then the government? Like commooooon.

balalalalalala 5mo ago

[flagged]

adolph 5mo ago

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.

balalalalalala 5mo ago
[flagged]
zerobees 5mo ago
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. Around 6-8 million people starved in the USSR in the 1930s (most of them in Ukraine). Another million starved around 1947.
- adolph 5mo ago
  Yes, there is something about the photos totally reminds me of recent photos from Pyongyang. True atrocities like the Holodomor aside, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the bright capital sucking rural resources and capricious political crime enforcement isn't much different from the previous czarist regime. The way the political messaging is so much louder than any private activity (like advertising) says a lot about how weak and insecure the government thought itself. While the article focuses on Moscow, the online collection is worth checking out. I'm especially interested in the "ancient burial markers near the village of Ust-byur" which seems to be Khakassia in plains that resemble West Texas. https://manhoffarchive.org/on-the-road https://manhoffarchive.org/on-the-road Edit: Ust-byur is within 300mi of Denisova Cave!

usrnm 5mo ago

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.

branon 5mo ago
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
- konart 5mo ago
  Both. But mostly the war.
  - Alive-in-2025 5mo ago
    I was expecting to find out that lots of men killed in the war led to many more women working after the war, and that's what could be interpreted/guessed from these pictures. But looking at wikipedia, it's complicated. A lot of different estimates of deaths. I think a lot more men died in ww2 in the Soviet military, from Wikipedia, about 20 million men (see total war deaths by age group table) and 6 million women. The official counts of the dead were supposed to have underreported deaths by a lot. Looking at different estimates in wiki, about 10 million military dead and almost 20 million civilian dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
    - rjsw 5mo ago
      I would suggest that the male deaths will have been concentrated in a smaller age range than the female ones.
- flextheruler 5mo ago
  If not for the war or other legitimate reasons I'd assume a preponderance of one demographic doing a specific job as likely a bad thing. I'm surprised it'd be wishful thinking.

infecto 5mo ago

Lots of contention here 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. https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html

MisterTea 5mo ago
[flagged]
- RaSoJo 5mo ago
  I reckon OP means quotes like these: Manhoff captures the scarcity of consumer goods, the omnipresent surveillance, and the ever-present fear of being monitored by the Soviet security apparatus. A lot of socialist commentators push back on such portrayals, dismissing them as capitalist propaganda. Michael Parenti was one such. He argued that life in the USSR was in stark contrast to what the world were made to believe by the US State Machinery/Hollywood. Here is a longish talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU (It is an interesting listen, even if you do not believe in the ideal.) Then there is Angela Merkle's "almost comfortable" statement: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east-germany-was-almost-comfortable-at-times-merkel-says-idUSKBN1XI285/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east... A point she expands in her memoir about growing up in East Germany. There were bad things. There were good things. Considering the basket case that Russia has become, maybe the USSR wasn't so bad after all.
  - infecto 5mo ago
    I have no bone to pick on either side but there were a number of comments here about the footnotes to the pictures so I went to look up the source material and could not find good references to those footnotes so wanted to point out they the images are stolen and the text that comes with it is probably made up.

dctoedt 5mo ago

More information about the origins of the collection and the photographer (a U.S. Army officer, assistant military attaché): https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro

0xDEAFBEAD 5mo ago

"According to Smith, after Manhoff’s wife died he was asked to check the home of a former official for valuable memorabilia." I wonder how much valuable memorabilia is just getting thrown away because no one thought to check for it. Here's your nudge to ask your older relatives about their memorabilia, and record conversations with them while they are still alive. If you want to put the info online somewhere to increase the chance that it's useful to someone someday, you could try a free genealogy website like familysearch.org or wikitree.com

parl_match 5mo ago
To be fair, most people aren't a diplomat to Russia. So it's good to check but maybe this was a much more advanced case.
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  Further, gifts to government officials are the property of the government.

anovikov 5mo ago

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.