A Russian army recruit's scrap book

January 22, 2010 1:08 PM

Selections from a handmade military discharge scrap book and comic made by a USSR army recruit, 1984-1986.
posted by Rumple (5 comments total)

This is great. I wish there were translations of the captions in the book.

The post mentioned that this was a common thing - do you know of any more that are online? It led me to this article (questia, paywalled, but at least we get a tease) which is about youth scrapbooking samizdat in the USSR more generally, but not much further.
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 2:30 PM on January 22, 2010

Neat!
posted by brundlefly at 4:25 PM on January 22, 2010

Excellent, thanks!

> I wish there were translations of the captions in the book.

They're not all that interesting; this one, for example, says "Little joys and big annoyances."
posted by languagehat at 5:32 PM on January 22, 2010

This is the link to the Russian language Livejournal source: there may be more information there - certainly there is one or two more pictures. Otherwise I don't know anything about this -- the source suggests these scrapbooks were common, but all I know is I found it to be a charming glimpse into everyday ephemera of a life very different than my own.
posted by Rumple at 6:43 PM on January 22, 2010

Actually the whole realussr site is really interesting. E.g. things the USSR copied from Western engineering.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 3:22 PM on January 23, 2010