There is a pile of Soviet and Russian postcards hidden in a box in my flat waiting to be posted. One day my nephew will be a very happy young man when I ever send them off and he learns to love brutalist Soviet architecture — and train stations.
There is the one of the then shiny, new parliament building in Chisinau, Moldova, gold and silver, a popular color in the 1990s, and one of Stefan the Great, standing as usual, his hand raised, as men in black stand round reading the papers on those stands.
And somewhere there is the hotel Uzbekistan, a huge building that curves at you with Mr. Tamerlane on a horse in front along with the nice wooden square in front that was decimated last year.
Somewhere I have the ‘E’ from the sign for the hotel, which I will post with the card when I get round to it.
An older set in Moscow shows the bushy trees that ran up and down both sides of Tverskaya Ulitsa.
When touring I always found that if you couldn’t find a map and had left your Baedeker for the Upper Irtysh at home, you were always best heading for the first/only hotel in town and looking for a desk with a glass window facing upward.
Below the glass there would be a box of cigarettes, a few treats for sale, and if you were in a progressive hotel, a pack of condoms, with a busty lady on the front for inspiration, and a postcard pack of the city.
Inside, there would be, and probably still is, a selection of the city’s finest sites, wrapped in a three-in-one fold out card, along with what must have been the building where the man in charge of printing the postcards lived — him and 30,000 others.
The sky was always a bright blue in the postcards and the city’s citizens — and there were never many of them out — had all donned flowery ‘70s dress and/or brown trousers.
If you wanted to know who was in charge, there was the postcard of the local government, sans Lenin or not, and the train station was a must.
If I had been a revolutionary postcard photographer, I would have had my own “Where’s Wally” popping up all over the country, one moment eating an ice cream, wearing brown trousers, yellow tie in Vladimir, the next large sunglasses on as he stares out from the post office in Arkhangelsk.
You can find lots of people selling all of these Soviet cards and more on various classified web sites, but when you ask for Samara circa 1974, they are not very forthcoming.
There is probably still a hotel there with some on sale. The public library building is well worth the set.
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