Old postcards In the Magadan Region

These Soviet postcards of the Magadan Region, from a 1986 set, reach far beyond the city of Magadan: the series also includes Anadyr, Provideniya Bay, Bilibino and Cape Dezhnev. The reason is administrative — when the region was formed in 1953, Chukotka was placed under it, so a regional set of the time stretched from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Bering Strait.

Magadan itself is shown through Lenin Street and Marx Prospekt. The settlement was founded in 1929 to open up the Kolyma area and became a town in 1939; its historic centre was built in the 1950s to designs by Leningrad architects. From there the cards follow the Kolyma Highway into the taiga: a dredge, “In the Kolyma taiga” and Jack London Lake in the upper Kolyma, a mountain lake about 10 km long at 803 m above sea level.

In Chukotka the cards go to the very edge of the continent. Cape Dezhnev is the easternmost mainland point of Eurasia, and its card also shows the nuclear icebreaker Leonid Brezhnev. Near Bilibino, four units of the Bilibino nuclear power station came on line in 1974–1976. There is also the Chukchi-Eskimo ensemble Ergyron (Chukchi for “Dawn”), the Lorino hot springs and a festival seeing off the winter.

A single 1987 card, “Magadan Region. The Sea of Okhotsk shore”, brings the journey back to where it began.

More sights
Views of Crimea · Petrodvorets · Nikita Botanical Garden · Dombay

Related
Magadan

← All sights on Soviet postcards