Two blogs you really have to look at

The first one is a brilliantly erratic Poemas del río Wang. Multilingual, colorful, aimless, meditative and absolute must read.

The second one is in Russian, but in most cases all you need to read is the year in the post title. Visual History (a.k.a. "Photo archives to the people!") is a collection of old photographs. Mostly, but not exclusively, Russian, including the famous photos by Prokudin-Gorsky and equally brilliant images made in USSR by journalists of the "Life" magazine Howard Sochurek and Carl Mydans. Absolute must see.

Here are some links to articles in Visual History:

• Nizhny Novgorod in 1958 (by Sochurek)
• Travel of an Americal along Volga in 1958 (by Sochurek)
• Sports parade in Moscow in 1945
• My hometown, Samara, in 1958 (Sochurek again)
• Post-war Byelorussia (1950s)
• Moscow in 1959 (by Mydans)
• Pskov around 1960
• Rostov: modern and Prokudin-Gorsky's photos
• Travel from Moscow to Rostov in 1964 (by Jacques Dupâquier)
• Soviet cars on the Expo 1958 in Brussels

P.S.: while writing, I found also this collection of photographs: Kansas City with a Russian accent.

Photos from early Soviet years

Recently, I stumbled upon a web-site on the art of photography, some pages of which were devoted to the classic photographers. The web-site features a large collection of shots made by these photographers in 1920s, 1930s and later. Lots of magnificent pictures and scenes from daily life. Here are some of those photographers and their web-pages (the text is in Russian, but never mind, the collections are title like "1924-1929", so you won't get lost):

• Alexander Rodchenko, the author of that famous portrait of Lilya Brik at the top of this post. Rodchenko was a good friend of Lilya and Osip Briks and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
• Maxim Dmitriev, one of the earliest enthusiasts of photography
• Boris Ignatovich
• Yevgeny Khaldey
• Ivan Shagin
• Arkady Shaykhet

I found this web-site when I was looking for photos of the Russian/Soviet silent movie stars. While searching, I found another web-site called "Silent Cinema Actors". The author has also made separate web-sites for the "brightest" stars of that era, like Vera Kholodnaya.

Soviet tanks T-34 and BT-7M: Photo albums

These two albums include techical data (in Russian), photos from tests, photos of the tanks and their internal construction:

T-34 (19Mb PDF)

BT-7M (22Mb PDF)