Documentary Photography and Photojournalism in Russia (1920s-1960-70s)

This is quite an interesting site. They collected scans from magazines issued from 1920s to approximately 1960s-70s. It was a period of glamourizing the reality, of positivism in pictures, what was later called social realism, but was actually a period of naive romanticized photos. The pictures still looks very itneresting, touching and make me actually nostalgic :)
http://trendsetter.ru/plus/ - those are scans from the magazine L'URSS (actually it was published in the USSR for foreign friends so to say. Their were issues in French, English and German
To help you with the navigation, since everything is either in Russian or French
From top to bottom:
1. 'hero of social labor' (work) - this title was awarded to those who worked better then the rest of the crew or team or something of the kind. Those people managed to produce more milk, build more houses than the rest of their co-workers, or they were the best in mining the ore, etc (don't press the circle on the right, instead press the line with the digits 11#1949 and you'll the pics) when a photographer was to shoot a hero definately he would do the same as Edward Curtis had done while photographing Native Americans. Russian photographers always had nice hats, clean clothes and other necessary equipment to make their subjects look the way a real social hero was supposed to look.
2. 'COnsumer Goods Industry in the USSR'
3. 'Recovery from the WWII'
4. "Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 -1930)" - this man was an epoch himself. He was a poet, a writer a politician to some extent. A person of the new era. People adored him for his ideas, extravagancy and courage. He was very often photographed, painters would devote their works to him, poets would write about him. He was surprisingly very popular with the government. He was one of those few who would be let to go abroad with lectures on the social changes in Russia. Yet, his death was a surprise and shock. It's still not crystal clear what happened. Most of teh historians believe that he was killed by KGB, since he got disappointed with the government. Another version was that he found out something he was not supposed to know and became an undesirable witness.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/vladimir_mayakovsky under the bio info you'll find some links to his poems (in case you are interested) - not a bad translation. by the way
5. 'Kolkhozes in USSR (Uzbekistan)'. This Asian part of the USSR was always famous for it's farms, cotton, fruit and kettle. No wonder that there were plenty of pictures taken on the site.
6. Industrialization of teh NOrth. It's well known that SIberia and the far North is a very cold and 'user-unfriendly' region. Yet, nobody believed lit was impossible to bring industry and development there. It was a huge and difficult job and the pictures definately don't reveal the tragedy of the whole situation, yet people were proud of what they did to the North and they still are.
What is interesting that in 30s photograpehrs and neewspapers looked really fresh, diffrent, compositionally extravagant and attractive, and after the 40s pictures became absolutely identical. It reveals not only the demand of the epoch but also the idea that most of the great photographers, who had got education in pre-revolution Russia had been either repressed or had died because of the age. Photographic experiments were taken out of Russian journalism for quite a long period.