Old postcards TV tower Soviet Union

This 1988 set of Soviet postcards brings together the television towers of major cities of the Soviet Union: Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Leningrad, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Tashkent and Alma-Ata. They were built over three decades, from the Leningrad tower (1956–1962) to the one in Riga, erected in 1979–1986, and their structures differ markedly.

The Kyiv tower (1968–1973) is a steel lattice structure and the world’s first all-welded TV tower. The towers in Yerevan (1974–1977) and Tbilisi (1972) were designed by the same group of engineers at the Ukrainian Institute of Steel Structures who worked on Kyiv. Tallinn’s tower, a reinforced-concrete shaft topped by a metal mast, opened on 11 July 1980 for the Olympic sailing regatta, and the Vilnius tower went up over almost the same years, 1974–1980. Riga’s 368.5-metre tower stands on three legs on an island in the Daugava.

In Central Asia, the 375-metre Tashkent tower went on air in January 1985, while the Alma-Ata tower was built in 1975–1983 on a mountainside about 1,000 metres above sea level. With one year and one subject throughout, the cities are easy to compare card by card.