Renowned American photographer Peter Turnley is famous for catching moments in human life. The street photography he took while in the USSR during the late 1980s-early 1990s is a great chronicle of the outgoing Soviet era.
1. Soviets line up on the Red Square
2. A Moscow taxi
3. Soldiers sitting on park bench with a child
4. A Lenin portrait on the Bolshoi Theater
(The text says: “LONG LIVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION!”)
5. Lenin banners hanging on the State Historical Museum and traffic on Mokhovaya Street
6. Pedestrians
7. Following Soviet tradition, a wedding party walks on the Red Square in Moscow to have photos taken
8. A generation gap on a bench: old ladies and a young couple
9. Russian youth hanging out
10. Schoolgirls eating lunch
11. Mothers with their babies
12. Muscovites applying for emigration outside an embassy
13. A Russian Orthodox wedding
14. Young woman smoking on a train
15. Westernization of Russia: A line to enter the first McDonald’s
16. A Moscow hair salon
17. A homeless man sitting by a makeshift tent city near the Red Square
18. A Moscow food market
19. At a butcher’s
20. A man pulling children on a sled
21. A Siberian woman at the front gate of her house
22. Women buying milk
23. A line to a food store
24. Soviet-style souvenirs on Arbat street in Moscow
25. A man selling Communist paraphernalia on a Moscow street
26. World War II veterans attending the V-Day celebrations
27. Fallen monuments of former Soviet leaders
28. A patient receiving a breath analyzing examination in a Soviet sanatorium
29. The coup attempt in 1991
30. Mikhail Gorbachev sitting at his desk shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union
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