Society & Daily Life
Housing, education, medicine, work, fashion and leisure.
The Soviet dry law: the anti-alcohol campaign of 1985
A campaign that gave men two and a half extra years of life, cut down the vineyards of Crimea and blew a hole in the state budget. A rare case of a reform that saved millions of people and still went down in history as a failure.
The 1980 Moscow Olympics: the party half the world skipped
The first Games ever held in a socialist country, the largest boycott in Olympic history, and a bear cub that made a stadium of one hundred thousand people cry. What actually happened in Moscow in the summer of 1980.
Khrushchyovki: how the country got separate flats
In the late 1950s the USSR began mass standardized housing — millions of families moved from communal flats into separate apartments for the first time.
The Red Machine: how the USSR taught the world to play hockey
The country first saw ice hockey in 1946. Eight years later it crushed the game's founders 7 to 2, and twenty years after that it made Canada tremble until the final 34 seconds. The story of the most beautiful team machine in sports history, and the price its parts paid.
The dacha: six hundred square meters that fed a country
A tsar's gift that became a national religion. How tiny plots attached to factories grew into the food security system of an entire country, and why the word dacha entered the world's dictionaries untranslated.
VDNKh: the showcase of a country that never was
An exhibition city with a palace for every republic, golden wheat sheaves and fountains, where the country displayed itself as it wished to be. The story of the "Soviet Versailles": from a parade of kolkhoz victories to the shashlik market of the nineties and back.
The Moscow Metro: palaces underground
A subway conceived as a showcase of socialism: marble, bronze, chandeliers and mosaics forty meters down. How the world's most beautiful metro was built, why ancient fossils hide in its walls, and what happened on its platforms during the war.
Intourist: the abroad they were shown
The only office through which a foreigner could enter the USSR, hotels that barred the locals, and a guide behind whose smile stood the Lubyanka. How a country behind the Iron Curtain sold itself to the world, and what it hid while doing so.
Artek: the country of childhood at Bear Mountain
Four canvas tents and eighty children in 1925. A million and a half children over a century, the longest camp session in history lasting an entire war, and an American girl who came to stop a cold one. The story of the Soviet Union's most famous camp.
The Young Pioneers: the red scarf and a Soviet childhood
Almost all Soviet children passed through the Pioneer organization. The red scarf, the motto "Always ready!", the "Artek" camp — and two sides to the story: warm memories and ideology.
The subbotnik: how a country cleaned up for free and almost willingly
Fifteen workers repairing locomotives for free at night, a log on the leader's shoulder, and a whole country with rakes every spring. The story of a ritual that began as a sincere impulse and ended as a compulsory day off with a broom.
The Komsomol: forty million people in one organization
The rung between the red scarf and the party card, climbed by nearly all Soviet youth. Construction sites on swamps and virgin steppe, a badge that opened careers, and a finale in which Komsomol activists became the country's first capitalists.
The kommunalka: life behind a shared door
Five doorbells on one door, a cleaning schedule on the wall and a morning line for the bathroom. How apartments confiscated from the "former people" became the country's main housing for half a century — and a school of life for three generations.