You have to realise that in the Soviet era the concept of 'picturesque' was very much in the eye of the beholder!
This excellent postcard came as a stiffener for a shipment of stamps from a dealer in Estonia. It joins my burgeoning collection of 'Boring Postcards' (there is a publication of the same name over here in the UK).
It shows the V.I.Lenin Oil Shale Processing Combine, a feature of the (now Estonian) city of Kohtla-Jarve. Wikipedia notes that "the city is highly industrial, and is both a processor of oil shales and is a large producer of various petroleum products." Makes you want to visit right now, doesn't it? But for those of us who cannot, there remains this:
The rubric on the reverse is in both alphabets; the date is 1975.
I hadn't considered that such images might be useful to hobbyists! Mind you, there is not a lot of colour variation in the present image, so those whose railroads bypass oil shale processing factories should not need too many tins of paint...
At least it doesn't show any of those square-jawed, muscular sanitised soldiers, workers and peasants of the Stalinist era looking into a bright socialist future( and that is just the women !).
My wife and I went on a cruise of the Black Sea just when the Crimea business kicked off and we were diverted to the Russian city of Novorosirsk where there was a great siege in the "Great Patriotic War". There is a memorial there to the "Glorious Dead" all square-jawed etc,martial music, regimental flags and the rest - no mention of the pain,distress,mourning and waste of it all. We were accompanied on the cruise by a quite senior retired British Royal Marine Officer and his take on the memorial cannot be repeated here !
In a somewhat related fashion: I recall the cartoonist/underground comic book artist R. Crumb (Mr. Natural, Zap Comics...) explain that he asked a photographer to visit various locations and photograph them, especially power line configurations and other industrial entities in neighborhoods because there was no way he could draw such examples of technology from memory, putting them into his comics.
Bruce
amsd, Estonian has always been written in Latin characters, and this was not changed during Soviet rule.
As for the subject of this card, it was quite a normal thing for the Eastern bloc states to present themselves as modern, industrialised countries that had overcome the damages caused by WW II, and such pictures were part and parcel of this.
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