Tag: Thaw

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Central department store, Riga. (Postcard, 1962.)

Soviet tourism was not only about ideology. Especially after the war, during the so-called Khrushchev “thaw”, traveling began to loosen up, and one could now have a proper beach holiday, take sightseeing tours without Lenin places – and even go shopping. It would have been too much to promote such frivolous amusements in Moscow or Leningrad, but in the Baltic states shopping was OK. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been occupied by the Soviet Union during the war, and in the 1960s they still had many exotic features that the Russian part of the union lacked, like street cafés. They also carried wider selection of goods in the shops, and that’s why trips to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius turned into shopping tourism. Here is a postcard of the central department store of Riga. The image stresses the modern side of the city, with the neon lights and all, and there is also a sign for a restaurant.
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Welcome to the Soviet Union. (Brochure, 1963.)

It seems that the Soviet Union was a combination of Edward Hopper’s paintings and Aki Kaurismäki’s films, at least based on the cover image of the booklet here. This Intourist brochure was published in Finland in the early 1960s, when tourism from Finland to the Soviet Union was increasing. At this time, during the so called thaw era, the Soviet Union was represented to foreigners as an up-to-date but also serious country, which had all the advantages that the western world had, as the setting of the photograph and especially the red high-heeled shoes of the sitting woman propose, but without the frivolous traits of capitalist culture.
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