11 pics showing that the USSR was a true milk empire

1944. Riga (now Latvia). A woman treats Red Army soldiers to a jug of milk.

1966. A Yakutian girl pours kumis (mare's milk) into a tub.

1984. Milk bottling at a dairy plant in Barnaul (Altai, Southern Siberia).

1972. A grocery in southern Moscow.

1966. A line of customers in a dairy shop in Kazan (800 km east of Moscow)

1984. A girl drinks milk at a kindergarten attached to the Lenino stud farm (now Belarus).

1974. Employees of the milk processing factory in Mogadishu, Somalia. The local plant was built by Soviet engineers.

1959. Milkmaids examine a new milking machine at the Alexinsky collective farm in the Smolensk region (400 km west of Moscow).

1976. A milkmaid from Kazakhstan offers a bowl of kumis to a combine driver.

1986. Nina Chervyachenko, chief cheese-maker of the Maryino collective farm in the Kursk region (500 south of Moscow)