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

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

rferl.org

203 pointsCider998666 comments

  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.

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.

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

Edit: Ust-byur is within 300mi of Denisova Cave!

Millions of slaves died building stalins monumental architecture. It wasn't until kruschev that they started building mass housing.

"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

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.

Further, gifts to government officials are the property of the government.

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.

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

[flagged]

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 (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... 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.

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.

Ah ok. Sorry, I misread your comment then :)

Sorry if you did not read the comments here. Lots of folks were pushing back on the probably AI generated footnotes and story are in the original link. I was simply sharing the source material which I think has much better background on the photos and diary.

Your link did not trouble me, your language did. At the time reading, most of the comments here were nuked and grey so I went strait to the pictures and ignored the article text.

You broke the site guidelines here by posting aggressively. Please don't do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

And the ads on the link posted to HN - very inappropriate subjects and pop up video ads. Grrr

Please email the mods! They can change the link :)

Thanks - we've switched the top link to that from https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-era-soviet-union-pic....

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As discussed on 03-jun-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36174792 221 comments

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.

So a Potemkin capital, as it were?

No, cause it wasn't a fake facade. Moscow was (and is) petter on most parameters than the rest of the country.

(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.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

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-Waller...

and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.

"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.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Moscow still receives much more monetary attention than any other city in Russia.

Moscow plus Leningrad plus Vladivostok. The rest fought for the crumbs.

>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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I read or was told that 60% of the Russian economy flows through Moscow in one way or another.

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

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.

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

Both. But mostly the war.

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...

I would suggest that the male deaths will have been concentrated in a smaller age range than the female ones.

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.

From the two pictures I hadn't inferred that it was specifically a preponderance, hence naïveté of my original conclusion

You saw it in the US during the two world wars. Women got more rights and there was some interesting propaganda encouraging women to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter

Fun fact: The version Normal Rockwell painted shows Rosie stepping on a copy of Mein Kampf. Good times!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RosieTheRiveter.jpg

The poorer the country, the more women work in traditionally male fields. In Bolivia and in Peru, I was surprised to see many women working in construction and driving taxis.

It wasn't just hard manual work. IIRC, for decades the majority of doctors were women.

They still are! According to the WHO [0], in 2020 just under 71% of doctors in Russia were women.

[0] https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hlthres_137-of-ph...

Why yes, Vlad, you need to drink less. And of course, lay off the Cubans. But if you're headed to the front, knock yourself out!

Seriously though, we can likely expect that statistic to increase due to the number of dead Russian men who have been meat-ground in the war. Poor bastards.

On that note, DON'T TEACH YOUR CHILDREN NATIONALIST IDEAS. Resist statism.

The 'isms pass. The 'ist dies. Art remains. - Vladimir Nabokov

There is exactly one photo with three women pouring something onto small holes? Only other work shown has women going to clear/sweep and cleaning is traditionally female work.

That's a funny take these days, that women are too dainty to do "men's work". Should they be kept barefoot in the kitchen? Or just allowed in women's jobs?

This has nothing to do with gender equality. You don’t see any apparatchik wives on the pictures.

The Soviets were one of the few countries where Women were employed on the front lines during the war. They were tank drivers, anti aircraft gunners, pilots, snipers.

A famous unit of all women pilots known as the 'Night Witches' made a name for themselves during the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches

The war, and also Stalin.

You can get more labor out of people if you assume children take 0 time and cost $0.

"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 ?

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.

Military parades with actual soldiers in USA are organized by local groups rather then the government? Like commooooon.

I wasn’t talking about military parades.

Every seen a pride parade?

I'm not sure what kind of special torture you'd employ to make people display that kind of enthusiasm :)

Ugh, how I hate this sort of relativization coming from people who never experienced an actual authoritarian system.

By the age of 6, I was required to carry a standard paper lantern on the November 7th celebration of the Great October* Socialist Revolution, with my parents fully aware that presence and absence lists were maintained by the teachers, who would forward them to the school cadre bureaucrats keeping dossiers on the kids, who could alert the secret police to take a closer look at the repeat offenders, and who would definitely play a big role in allowing you later to enter high school or not.

My grandpa was subject to hearings and threats because his son (my uncle) had bad marks in the compulsory Russian language lessons and the spooks were convinced that he was bad at it on purpose, by being secretly taught animosity against the Soviet Union at home.

I wonder if you ever experienced this sort of paranoia and coercion from your government. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, this was the norm even during the late 1980s.

* Yeah, the October/November mismatch fits, because in 1917, then-Russia was following the Julian calendar and only later switched to Gregorian. Hence the difference of 18 days which was reflected in the timing of that parade.

I think pretty much everyone here knows about the October/November thing if only because of The Hunt for Red October.

Thanks for posting. The other term for it "what aboutism" (which given your background you are probably well aware of, but others here might not be).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Countering these arguments is exhausting.

Hello, sorry i didn't reply sooner, i searched the original article for quotes and additional context but the website seems to have been updated and i cannot find it, making my original comment useless now.

I didn't mean to question or minimize the pressure and domination put on everyday people by authoritarian systems. My comment was meant to question the website's implications that this could all be deduced by the content of the photographs.

For the Parade comment specifically, i dislike the idea that the Soviet Union's ideology and tactics and motives can be deduced by the appearance of the parade, all thanks to Manhoff instead of decades of witness accounts, geopolitics and historian work.

I generally care more about how opinions are formed than what those opinions are. I also hate the anti-intellectual assumptions that what is bad looks bad, what looks bad is bad, and conversely that what looks good is good. You find this any time people talk about how nice killers were. My point was that if you wait for things to look bad before you question them, you will never question anything. But this last paragraph is just rambling and has nothing to do with your well written reply.

Just visit any (sparse) Dutch events, like King’s day, you’ll see what it means when people self-organize.

> store №20

> MEAT. FISH.

That's some Edward Bernays-level trickery right there. /s

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.

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