America Through A Soviet Lens

A visitor to the 1959 Soviet expo in New York. An information battle was among the most pervasive elements of the Cold War.

Homelessness captured on the streets of New York in 1981.
While visits from American photojournalists to the Soviet Union tended to be tightly controlled, Soviet photographers were largely free to roam U.S. streets.
 

The results, as seen in the photo archive of Soviet (now Russian) news agency TASS, provide a fascinating insight into how America was portrayed to the Soviet public.
 
 

An antiwar protester in Santa Cruz, California, in 1988.

This 1985 image of a man picking through a trash can in New York is one of many pictures in the archive focusing on American poverty.
 

The Communist Party of the U.S.A. was also a favorite subject of TASS photographers. Here, the group holds a congress in 1966.
 

A birthday party for American communist and civil-rights activist James Jackson in New York in 1975.
 
 
 
 

Soviet schoolgirl and “goodwill ambassador” Katya Lycheva slurps some soft drink alongside a seemingly overeager "Ronald McDonald" in 1986.
 

Lycheva shows pictures of Russian landmarks to American schoolkids. Her U.S. tour followed the highly publicized visit of American schoolgirl Samantha Smith to the Soviet Union in 1983. Smith died in a plane crash in 1985, and Lycheva disappeared from public life. An attempt by Russian journalists to locate her in 2016 came up with nothing.
 
 

A pumpkin fair in 1988. The photo was captioned "US agro-industrial complex."

This busker in San Francisco caught the eye of a TASS photographer in 1975.

A rental Santa in New York in 1990.

“Friendship models” in Kansas City wearing politicized outfits ahead of a meeting between Soviet and U.S. leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1988.
 

A man apparently willingly leafing through a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Washington in 1978. Brezhnev's fondness for producing long, dreary "memoirs" were the butt of numerous jokes in the Soviet Union.

A shopkeeper on St. Thomas Island, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, in 1967. 

U.S. soldiers training in 1987.

A stretch limo called the "American Dream" in New York in 1985. Jay Ohrberg, the maker of the car, created many of cinema’s iconic vehicles, including the DeLorean from Back To The Future and the winged Batmobile. This limo was later stretched a further 12 meters and had a helicopter pad added. After falling into disrepair, the limo is now "being restored here in the U.S.," Ohrberg told RFE/RL by e-mail.


 

A rancher in his truck pauses for a portrait.

Participants in a 1983 peace rally stop to smell the roses in Washington.

Pelmennaya (dumpling) cafe in Brighton Beach in New York. Beginning in the 1970s, Brighton Beach became so popular with Jewish emigres from Ukraine and Russia that it gained the nickname "little Odessa."

A busker in downtown New York in 1989.

The unveiling of a Soviet sculpture, called Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares, in the United Nations Garden in New York in 1960. The sculptor behind the work also created the iconic The Motherland Calls monument. 

Crowds waving American and Soviet flags during Gorbachev's visit to the White House in 1987.

A young woman with Russian dolls in New York in 1990. The Soviet Union collapsed one year later.