What this year meant for Russian history, what people looked like and what was happening on the cities’ streets in the first year of World War II in the USSR.
Stalin’s regime was at its peak: industrialization was in full swing, new megafactories were constantly appearing and peasants were working hard on collective farms. At the same time, a big purge that started in the late 1930s was in force and people kept finding themselves in prisons and labor camps.
But on June 22, 1941, the whole Soviet history was literally split into before and after, with World War II reaching the Eastern Front and threatening both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Former kids and students lined up to become volunteers at the frontline, girls took rifles in their arms and went to the factories to produce weapons. Citizens were evacuated, while their homes were destroyed…
1. Pioneers on the eve of the war
2. Soviet eco habits: pioneers collecting scrap metal for recycling
3. “Tomorrow began the war...”
4. A kindergarten of a ‘Red Proletarian’ factory
5. School kids attending Labor Day demonstrations in May
6. Future pilots
7. A female tractor driver working in a village
8. Tourists trekking in the Caucasian mountains
9. Russian pilots setting off to fight for their native fields
10. The first days of Nazi occupation in the town of Nevel, Pskov Region, western Russia
11. Pyotr Tchaikovsky museum’s artifacts after the Nazis “visit”
12. Soldiers waiting in Leningrad’s trenches before the attack
13. Moscow during WWII: An aerostat right next to the Bolshoi Theater
14. Mayakovskaya station of Moscow metro as a bomb shelter in 1941
15. A woman preparing missiles for the Red Army
16. Missile defense unit scouting on a Moscow rooftop
17. Famous Soviet writers Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexander Fadeyev on the frontlines
18. A street in Moscow during the war
19. Off to defend Moscow!
20. Soldiers marching on the Northern Front
21. A downed Nazi aircraft in central Moscow
22. A square in Moscow during the war
23. Girls assembling the PPSh-41, a Soviet submachine gun designed by Georgy Shpagin, which saw intensive use during WWII
24. Girls camouflaging an aircraft
25. Leningrad, Winter palace. Peasants evacuating cattle from the frontlines
26. Swan Lake being performed in the evacuated Bolshoi Theater
27. Soldiers on horseback outside Moscow
28. Despite the war, November 7, 1941, marked the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a parade on the Red Square
29. Muscovites donating things to the army
30. ‘Aero sleds’ outside Moscow
31. Leningrad, Nevsky Prospekt. A destroyed building after a Nazi air raid
32. Schoolgirls practising extinguishing incendiary bombs
33. A soldier poses with a downed Nazi plane
34. New Jerusalem Monastery not far from Moscow after it was seriously damaged by the Nazis
35. Military dogs in action in the Arctic
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