Snapshots in time: Soviet era Leningrad in 1957

Last week I posted some Images from Soviet era Moscow which I’d found as part of a collection of medium format slides I’d purchased. This week, I have a follow up post which shows a similar set of slides from the same collection but in this case the post features images from Soviet era Leningrad, or St Petersburg to give it its modern name.

The slides are of the same glass cemented construction as the Moscow slides which meant I couldn’t clean the actual negatives, but even with the odd imperfections caused by dirt sandwiched within the glass, the underlying quality of the pictures shine through. The only slight regret from my point of view is that they feature mostly tourist attractions of Leningrad rather than some more mundane, street scenes showing the people and their normal daily lives. For me, from an historical perspective, that would be much more interesting.

Images from Soviet era Leningrad

Still, the pictures are well taken, and there are some images which feature soviet citizens. The picture entitled, ‘The Chewing gum boy’ for example, shows a group of young soviet citizens who were presumably buying chewing gum from the boy in the foreground of the picture – I guess chewing gum was perhaps not available in normal shops?

As is normal for medium format images, the resolution and clarity of the pictures is really good, especially considering they were taken about 60 years ago in 1957.