Vintage Photos Show What Moscow Looked Like in the 1950s

Well that was fascinating to see, and there were many more photos than I expected (especially so given that they're in color).

If anyone would like to look at much older photographs of Russia that go back some 40 or so years earlier to the Russian Empire before World War I, the 1917 Revolution and communism, then it's worth looking at the remarkable (and marvelous) color—yes real color—photographs of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky

The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs and they've been excellently scanned at a high resolution that's not far from the Nyquist limit, which means they're about as good a reproduction as is possible. Click here to view them: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/

The funny thing is that in the 1950s, the Soviets definitely worked to project images of modernity, and people were shot for trying to smuggle such images out. These days, if you only look at the images concretely, without making use of political abstractions to understand the deep Stalinist repression those people were living under, it seems nostalgic.

Am I looking at Russian propaganda? Why or why not?