Dating to 1963, this film was created by the International Film Bureau and Syracuse University as a Russian language teaching tool. Depicted within it are, mainly, the sightseeing spots of Moscow – the Kremlin and its churches, Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon, daily life scenes, and a couple of minutes of Saint Petersburg footage, all accompanied by well-enunciated, but not always accurate, narration, aimed at the intermediate-level Russian language learners.
Scenes include:
0:37 “Egons Tomsons” is, almost undoubtedly, a self-renamed emigré of a Baltic descent. Early Soviet Union (up to the mid-30ies, as long as emigration was allowed) allowed people to change their name completely, including to the Western names, so an Ivan Petrovich Sidorov could become Jean-Laurent Pagny or James T(h)omson. However, as can be seen in this example – not all of them had the mastery of foreign languages or good luck to transliterate their desired “target” names correctly. This person had to add “s” to the end of their newly-acquired first and family names, as customary in Latvia, and the immigration officer in the US probably wrote it down with Latvian “s””es, instead of without them, as was intended when the name was changed– that is “Egon Tomson”. One can see pages and pages of those “official declaration of a name change” in the Soviet newspapers.
0:51 Shots of the Red Square, Spasskaya tower of the Kremlin, the Mausoleum.
1:03 Shots of the Great Palace of Kremlin, “Ivan the Great” belltower from outside the Kremlin, across the river
1:13 Cathedrals of the Archangel and of the Annunciation, inside the Kremlin
1:42 Tsar Cannon and at 1:51 Tsar Bell
2:20 Saint Basil’s cathedral (called Pokrovsky cathedral in this movie) pan-scan towards the Mausoleum and Kremlin
2:39 to 2:54 crowd staring at the camera, at the Red Square
3:10 Shot from above upon – on the left side of the picture, the colonnade of the Moscow Hotel, on the right side – National Hotel and restaurant
3:33 Shot of the trafic, from above, with the colonnade of the Moscow Hotel,
4:28 Volga GAZ M21
4:36 shots in traffic just next to the Krymsky bridge
4:49 A shot of the pedestrian traffic light with signals “stop” and “walk”. Shown here, because, having appeared in 1958 they were still a novelty in 1963 when this film was made.
4:49 to 5:16 shots in traffic
5:16 – shops
5:39 to 5:55 Contrary to the audio, this is not a shop – it is a lottery sales point – “You can win any of these, if you buy a lottery ticket” advertisement can be seen.
6:08 to 7:01 GUM department store
7:01 to 7:13 shots of people
7:23 Komsomolskaya subway station of the Koltsevaya line
7:45 shots outside and inside the subway train
7:56 to 9:52 shots of construction, road works ; men and women working.
8:06 to 8:15 Woman-worker operating a Kovrov Excavator plant LK-0,5 Lazar Kaganovitch 1936-model power shovel
9:55 to 11:06 Refueling a truck, then a car at at fuel station,
10:22 to 10:32 Promet type 318 (1947-1952) fuel pump, with the type 324 innards (as the type 318 only had a manual pump, 324 (1952-1957) was the first type equipped with a powered pumping device)
11:07 Krymsky Bridge again
11:29 to 12:07 Shots of Nevsky Prospect. More ZiS-155 and ZiS-154 busses and trolleybusses
12:07 Queing for the bus.
12:08 People crossing the Anichkov bridge
12:48 to 13:16 Fountains at Peterhof
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
