Old postcards Russia

The Soviet postcards of Russia in this section cover a very wide map: from Kaliningrad and Svetlogorsk on the Baltic to Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and Magadan in the Far East, and from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk down to Sochi, Anapa and Derbent. The largest city groups are Moscow, Leningrad and Yaroslavl, followed by Gorky, Kaliningrad, Pskov and Suzdal.

The Leningrad sets from 1970 and 1984 are worth comparing. Both include the Admiralty and the monument to Peter the Great, but the rest differs: the 1970 set shows the Rostral Columns, the General Staff arch, the Winter Palace, the Narva Gate, the Summer Garden railings and the Griboyedov Canal, while the 1984 set has Nevsky Prospect, a panorama of the Anichkov Bridge, the Lion fence, the Central Naval Museum and the Pribaltiyskaya hotel.

Gorky is represented by a 1989 set: the puppet theatre, the Chkalov monument and the Oka hotel. Other strands are the old towns of the Golden Ring and their neighbours (Yaroslavl, Suzdal, Uglich, Rostov Veliky, Kostroma, Vladimir) and the resorts: Sochi, Anapa and Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, Pyatigorsk, Essentuki and Kislovodsk in the Caucasian Mineral Waters. A typical resort card is the Eugénie Cotton sanatorium in Anapa, 1973.

The Russian section holds only scans of Soviet originals, with no modern retro-style reproductions, and new cities and sets join it whenever another part of the archive has been scanned.