Harvard Library's Slavic Blog

Zavod “Diafoto“ :

• Reki i ozera SSSR : seriia 585,
• Sel’skoe khoziaistvo SSSR : seriia 98

The Davis Center Collection at Fung Library is pleased to announce the digitization of two rare glass slide collections dating from the Stalin era. Series 98. Agriculture of the U.S.S.R. (1940) consists of 43 sequentially numbered images showing agricultural practices across the Soviet Union. Series 585. Rivers and Lakes of the U.S.S.R., also from the 1940’s, contains 55 images depicting various bodies of water and the uses to which they are put by Soviet citizens. Some of the images are black-and-white; others are tinted or hand-colored. The Diafoto factory, in Moscow, was famous for the captioned educational slides which it manufactured from the 1930’s through the 1950’s — but few of these “diapositives,” as they were called, have survived to this day. This is believed to be the only collection of Diafoto slides owned by a library in the United States.

The digital images are now publicly accessible via HOLLIS+ and HOLLIS Images. The original slides are held by the Davis Center Collection and have undergone preservation at the Weissman Center.

(Information for this post was contributed by Svetlana Rukhelman, Davis Center Collection)