This is 12th in a series of posts sharing the photos my grandfather took in 1969 on a business trip to Moscow. For full context, read the start of part 1.
This post includes photos of Lermontov and street vendors around central Moscow.
I don’t know how many pictures I’ll get
I labeled it “From Russia with Love”, but it’s really from Russia with an assessment of how the photography is going. It reads more like a text or an email than a postcard. I wonder if the KGB thought it had a coded message?
From my grandfather to my grandmother during his trip to Moscow with the IEC.
Context
In 2011 and 2012 I shared 130 photos of Moscow that my grandfather took in 1969, when USSR was very difficult to enter and photographs were strictly forbidden in most places. They were color Kodachrome slides that I saved from my grandmother’s flooded basement and digitized on a special-purpose scanner. I shared them on Flickr, and connected with a group of Muscovites who enjoyed seeing old photos of their city. They helped me understand what I was seeing.
In 2016 I dropped them onto two paginated posts on this blog, simply hosting the Flickr images. Recently I discovered than many of the hosted controls I used (Google Maps, Twitter, Tableau) were broken on my site. So I’ve been systematically removing them from old post.
This batch of Moscow photos proved the most problematic and time consuming. I’ve broken them up into 12 separate pages. The first 11 have 2016 timestamps and appear in the flow of my blog back then. Only this one, the 12th, shows up in 2025.
Lermontov Square
Lermontov Square. Looking past the statue in the next photo at Moscovites on park benches.
In Lermontov Square.
User comments:
– What a nice photo? And look at that DOF! Actually, this is or was very common to see people in parks reading.
– How? And what is the name of the park?
– I noticed that the next sequentially numbered slide was the Red Gate Tower, so I searched around in Panaramio (Google Maps with Images turned on). I do not know the name of the park but it also has a sculpture of Mikhail Lermontov. It is the triangle trapped between roads across from the building.
– Wonderful! A lovely detail: Something she bought, wrapped in paper, in a net bag.
Across the square from the statue of Mikhail Lermontov near Red Gate Tower in Lermontov Square. It’s dedicated to day laborers. The sculpture is “Seasonal”.
User comments:
– The placard is legible in the full-size of this photo on Panoramio:
СКУЛЬПТУРА “СЕЗОННИК” 1929
СКУЛЬПТОР И. ШАДРSculpture “Seasonal [Worker]” 1929
Sculptor I. Shadr
– This English-language site (link dead in 2025) on “Unusual Moscow Monuments” (which might be handy for future photo indentification) has a link to a Russian-language page with more info.
Street vendors
Thanks to Flickr users Karlen. and severinus for helping to pinpoint the location. The woman is selling kvass, a man in a military uniform is entering a hunting supply store.
User comments:
– Kvas was 3 kopeiki for a big glass. These barrells were on every corner. It tastes so good: cold kvas on a sunny summer day. 🙂 The sign on the corner shop says Охотник (Hunter). Architectures like this building are from Stalin times.
– Luckily for us, Охотник is still at the corner of Kalanchevskaya Street and Kalanchevskaya Alley. Google doesn’t have a street view, but a Panaramio user has serendipitously uploaded a photo from just a few hundred yards away, looking back towards this corner. Охотник has a new green sign/awning, but it looks like the blue house number 4 is still above it. (Given the look of the guy holding the door open, I started googling assuming that Охотник was a hotel, and there is indeed a Hotel Охотник in Moscow, but it only opened in 2008. The Охотник here is actually a hunting/fishing shop selling firearms and the like.)
– The guy in a uniform entering hunting shop is a police (Militia) officer.
– yeah, the guy entering the hunting store is a cop. In my time (1980s), kvas was 10 kopek per jug (like the one on this picture), 3 kopek per small glass. Mors was 20 kopek per jug, 5 kopek per small glass. The movie posters show “Meetings at Sunrise” (Встречи на рассвете) and “Doctor’s Abst Experiment” (Эксперимент доктора Абста). Both movies came out in 1968. The sign to the left of the movie posters says “Dining Hall”. “Охотник” is definitely a store (not a hotel) because the sign on its door says “store” and states work hours.
– A small clarification about the movie posters. OlestC has correctly identified the titles, but not the time of release. In the USSR one year would normally pass between the end of production and the theatrical release. Though made in 1968, both movies were released in June 1969: “Dr. Abst’s Experiment” on June 1, “Meetings at Sunrise” on June 16. So this is definitely mid-June 1969.
– What a brilliant “slice of life” photograph.
– Каланчёвский тупик — небольшая улица в центре Москвы в Красносельском районе от Каланчёвской улицы.
– The poster with movie announcements says it’s 13, 14, 15 of June
– This house was built in 1880. Point is nearest Kazansky railway station.
In the back is currently (2025) the Department of Housing and Public Utilities (per Google translate).
User comments:
– Beautiful slides!
– I believe it’s not the GUM store, looks quite different. No idea though on exact location – Anton
– (a link to the location on the yandex map service)
– frukti = fruit
Now (2011) named Red Gate Station, the subway station just left of frame was called Mikhail Lermontov Station from 1962 to 1986.
These shacks are gone, but a new row has replaced them up ahead next to the park. As if to make some socialist-capitalist point, a branch of the Subway sandwich chain is in one of the new shacks. Also, a massive bank ad has replaced the Soviet propaganda up to the left.
User comments:
– O those propaganda boards 😉 and songs we sang to Lenin 😉 when were in schools. And, now, I see some teachers want their students sing songs to Obama. Never in my life could I imagine that it’d be here.
– I beleive so. Our schools had big boards with Communist slogans 😉 And, not just schools, everywhere. In schools we had current Secretary’s portraits, Lenin, Marx. I would really hate to see it happenning here. No cults, please. The end of a cult is never the good one.
Further reading
- Moscow 1969 Part 1, context and Red Square
- Moscow 1969 Part 2, Pioneer Palace and Novdevichy
- Moscow 1969 Part 3, Rossiya Hotel and Hotel Moscow
- Moscow 1969 Part 4, Bolshoi Theatre and Theatre Square
- Moscow 1969 Part 5, subways and buses
- Moscow 1969 Part 6, space museum
- Moscow 1969 Part 7, VDNKh and Archangelskoe
- Moscow 1969 Part 8, Kremlin
- Moscow 1969 Part 9, Moscow River
- Moscow 1969 Part 10, Kotelnicheskaya and MGU
- Moscow 1969 Part 11, Dubna and Moscow buildings
- Sweden’s Atomic energy, 1960s photos and pamphlets
- And, until I cancel my Flickr account, here’s a link to photos by my grandfather from other cities around the world.