USSR 1961 archive footage
Archival footage shot by Otto Wolf, a Swiss filmmaker, while visiting Europe in 1961. It contains stock footage of various places around the USSR.There are two different routes in this footage.
Route 1. From Smolensk to Moscow on Minsk Highway (M1 Belarus). All the villages shown are in Smolensk oblast.
00:14 - a GAZ-51 truck with old license plate painted on its body (used until 1959).
00:22 - a copy of the sculpture Lenin and Stalin in Gorki (1937, by Ukrainian sculptors Belostotskiy, Pivovarov, Fridman). There were THOUSANDS of them in the USSR, but almost all had been demolished by 1962 when Stalin started to also be criticized in the Soviet Union.
00:30 - a Great Patriotic War mass grave and memorial somewhere near the bank of the Dnieper river.
01:02 - a GAZ-51 truck with new license plate (index СМП - Smolenskaya oblast).
01:07 - a sculpture of a miner.
01:14 - view from Minsk Highway on Shakhta-4 village (now inside Safonovo locality). There were a lot of brown coal mines in the region, which worked intensely till the commissioning of gas pipelines on Siberia in 1970-80s, when they became unprofitable.
02:03 - a transport arch at the entrance to the Gzhatsk district. The town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 after his death (the district is his homeland).
02:54 - A 1000 kilometer mark in the street: it is a distance from Brest (on the USSR border with Poland) to Moscow. It was probably placed near the military town of Krasnoznamensk. The indirect confirmation is a column of military transport on Minsk Highway at 03:01.
Route 2. From Moscow to Novgorod on the Leningrad Highway (M10 Russia).
03:04 - street sign indicating distances: Solnechnogorsk - 45 km, Klin - 67 km, Leningrad - 700 km. This sign was at the border along the Moscow Ring Road in Khimki.
03:08 - Nikolskaya church (built in 1879) in Solnechnogorsk ('Sunny mountain town') in Moskovskaya oblast. Then the villages of Tverskaya oblast.
03:23 - War mass grave near Smolino village (146 km M-10).
03:33 - Emmauss village war memorial (152 km M-10). Villages of Tverskaya and Novgorodskaya oblast.
04:27 - Proletariy village (30 km from Novgorod-Velikiy). At the time it was on Leningrad Highway. Today M10 is 7 km east of it.
05:57 - Probably a gulf of Lake of Ilmen in the suburbs of Novgorod.
Please, comment if you recognize more subjects.
If you want to buy this footage to use it in your production, please visit:
If you want to buy segments of this footage to use it in your production, please visit:
If you want to watch this video without watermark and advertising, please visit:
If you want to scan and restore your own 8mm, super 8, 9.5mm, and 16mm films with the same technology that created this video, please visit: