Soviet Moscow -sovetskaa Moskva- 60-e- -full In... ^hot^

Visually, Stalin was disappearing. In October 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum and buried behind the tomb. The name Stalingrad was erased from maps (becoming Volgograd). In Moscow, statues of Stalin were taken down in the dead of night, leaving empty pedestals in parks. However, this was not democracy. It was a managed thaw: Khrushchev replaced one dictatorship with a more mercurial, erratic one.

The 60s were relatively abundant. Queues were shorter than in the 40s or 70s. Dairy products (kefir, tvorog) were cheap. But deficits began: by 1967, meat and butter required waiting in lines. The “Gastronom” (delicatessen) on Gorky Street sold caviar and smoked salmon, but ordinary workers often relied on collective farms markets. Soviet Moscow -Sovetskaa Moskva- 60-e- -Full In...

Indulge your ears. From open windows, you no longer hear only patriotic marches. Now, it’s the jazz of guitar, the underground poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko , and the forbidden rhythm of Western rock bootlegged onto X-ray film — “music on bones.” The Café Aragvi on Gorky Street serves kharcho and satsivi to poets and cosmonauts. GUM department store, with its glass-roofed arcades, is a theatre of scarcity and desire. The line for Gorbushka (black market records) is as long as the line for pelmeni at lunch. Visually, Stalin was disappearing

For a collector searching for a set of this era, obtaining a pristine 1961 set is often the starting point. It represents the birth of modern Soviet currency. In Moscow, statues of Stalin were taken down