Snapshots in time: Soviet era Moscow

I recently acquired a collection of medium format colour slides which had been taken by someone who travelled or visited on holiday several different European countries in the late 1950s and took their camera along with them to record the trips. There are pictures from Copenhagen, Dubrovnik, Split and several other cities, but the ones I’m featuring in this post show images from Soviet era Moscow.

The slides are slightly out of the ordinary in that they are not mounted in plastic or card slide mounts, but are cemented between two sheets of glass which appears to be quite difficult to separate. In theory, this should protect the film from dirt and fungus, but it hasn’t been completely effective since most of the images have dust marks on. Fortunately, the front and back glass cleaned up well with a lint free cloth and glass cleaning solution which I bought from Amazon for this purpose.

The images on the slides, with a couple of exceptions, are of good quality, well exposed and quite well composed and show a variety of locations around Moscow from the late 1950s.

Images from Soviet Era Moscow

So the gallery below shows all the pictures which were in the collection which featured Moscow, with captions taken from the original slide markings.

A couple of the slides mentioned ‘The Exhibition’ which gives the impression that the photographer travelled to Moscow for an exhibition. After a bit of research on google images I found this picture which matches the building shown in one of the pictures below. For me, this confirms that the reason for the trip was to visit the All-Union art Exhibition in Moscow and confirms the date as sometime between Nov 1957 and May 1958 – 60 years ago.

There are also several pictures of the University of Moscow, and views from the university looking out over Moscow, so it’s also possible the photographer was a student, possibly a student of art and studying at the university.