American Photographer visits 1960s Romania in the Most Communist Photo Story Ever

A booming economy, an abundance of food and fresh produce overflowing from baskets, a seemingly happy and healthy working population, beautifully manicured scenery and immaculate cities– well, heck, who wouldn’t have wanted to go live in communist Romania by the looks of these photos? In 1964, American LIFE magazine photographer Carl Mydans dropped in for a visit to what…

Dive into the Underwater Museum of the Black Sea

Free entry and no queues, this sounds like the ideal museum. However, this unique underwater museum is not an easy place to visit. Located 100m off the shore of Cape Tarkhankut in Crimea, visitors require at least a basic level of diving skills to take a trip. Known as the “Alley of Leaders”, this original…

How to Crash a Party at the Communist HQ in Paris

In my ongoing effort to prove that us Parisians aren’t forever sitting around red-chequered table cloths wearing berets and drinking red wine in our leisure time, here’s just about the strangest thing you can do in Paris this weekend: Dress up like a Soviet Cosmonaut and crash a party at the Communist Headquarters in Paris. First of all,…

Crumbling Communist Murals the Soviets Left Behind

In the early nineties, well after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, did you know there were still over 300,000 Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany? In 1991, there were still 4,200 Russian tanks, 690 aircrafts, 180 rocket systems and over 200,000 civil employees and relatives of officers, among them about 900,000 children. Until the final withdrawal…

Style Queens of 1960s Saigon

I was going through a giant archive of old photographs (yes another one), mostly taken by Westerners over in Vietnam during the war, when I started to develop a very unexpected style crush. Who knew Mod fashion made it to 1960s Vietnam? As it turns out, until the early 1970s, before the fall of Saigon, street fashion in South Vietnam adopted elements of…

River Rockets of the Soviet Space Age

It looks like a prop from Star Wars doesn’t it? Trust the Soviets to have the coolest abandoned stuff lying around. During the cold war period and into the 1980s, this rusting behemoth was once part of a fleet of vessels which rose out of the water at high speed and were considered the heroes of the Russian riverways.…

Communist Dollhouses: Stasi Chic in Miniature

Cold War-era furnishings, kitschy wallpaper and fine examples of mid-century architecture from the German Democratic Republic, there’s a huge collection of “Soviet chic” German dollhouses on Flickr, hailing from the short-lived era when East Germany was under communist rule, for all your nostalgic Stasi needs… Browse the full collection here.

A 1950s Cartoon with just a hint of Cold War Propaganda

‘Destination Earth’ is a 1956 promotional cartoon created by John Sutherland that depicts a civilisation of Martians that come to Earth (the United States). They discover that they are actually inferior and less advanced than the American earthlings, who benefit from an endless supply of petroleum that enriches their everyday lives in a free market…