This past month, Duke University Libraries unveiled a new digital collection documenting daily life in the early Soviet Union. Titled, “Americans in the Land of Lenin,” the photographic archive contains 750 images drawn from the personal papers of two Americans who found themselves in the USSR during the two decades that followed October 1917.
Robert L. [...]

Although the majority of my posts on Soviet aviation culture have focused on visual and literary productions such as posters, films, poems, and short stories, arguably the best known and most popular composition (at least for Russians) is “Ever Higher” (”Все выше”) — an aviation-inspired tune that appeared several years before the young Bolshevik [...]

A note appearing this afternoon on the SEELANGS listserv alerts subscribers to a new website dedicated to Soviet material culture.
The site, called Made in the USSR: Treasures from the Soviet Atlantis, contains over 500 images and photos of items produced in the Soviet Union.
It’s a rather eclectic collection that includes everything from journals and posters [...]

[This is the second of a four-part series of posts concerning "The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America." For background information on this series, click here. For Part One, here. Cross-posted from The Russian Front.]
From under the rubble
Although the years that immediately followed the demise of the Soviet system were accompanied [...]

As is true of other historical subjects which focus on the material products of human ingenuity, the history of aviation is nearly always written with an eye toward achievements understood to have defined (or best represented) a particular period or era. No art historian, for example, would consider a survey of Western art complete without [...]

Just kidding. April Fools!
Still, according to a story appearing this morning via the Associated Press, the seventy-year-old mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance may soon be put to rest thanks to “new perspectives” provided by a recently discovered diary. The article reports that The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which for years has [...]

It really is amazing what you can find on the Internet. While trolling YouTube a couple of days ago in search of aviation videos for a project on the history of flight culture, I discovered that someone has posted a documentary clip of the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky. The largest plane in the world when it [...]