*The better-looking photos in this post are taken by my kid.

I usually try to give my travel posts clever (in my opinion) or rhyming titles, but no rhyme comes to mind to name this report about my trip to Minneapolis.

Five months out of the year Minneapolis is an exciting, great-looking, interesting city 500 miles to the North of Kansas City. During the other seven months it closely resembles the Fortress of Solitude – a snow-covered and icy hellhole where people are using an elaborate tunnel-like system to move between the buildings without getting a frostbite. It also houses the first sign of Apocalypse – The Mall of America.

If you are driving to Minneapolis, the longest part of your route passes through Iowa – Khrushchev’s favorite state. Iowa is famous for its old people and various, not always pleasant, smells along the highway. Iowa’s population is so old that just by driving through we temporarily dropped the average age in the state to 68. To fight the smell problem Iowans installed gigantic fans in random places.

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I was going to write about 1-candidate elections with 99.9% voter turnout and other Soviet-era election shenanigans but instead you are getting some propaganda posters from various years.

“Representative-servant of the people”. At the top: “To achieve further development and growth of collective farms”

“Vote for further growth of our cities and villages”

“Collective farmers, vote for further growth of collective farms!”

“Young Soviet people are voting for the happy youth!”

“For Motherland! For Stalin! For Peace! For Communism!”

“Everyone, Vote in the elections for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR!”

“I am old, and I suggest you pick a candidate as you would pick a son-in-law for your only daughter!”

“Vote for the tribe Soviet, don’t let a shaman or a rich person in!”

“Proletariat Troop, vote for the Soviets!”

“Serving People!”

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Over the years this blog covered the Victory Day (or VE Day as it’s known here) more than once. This year I will just publish a compilation of links to my previous posts.

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If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know that it mainly consists of retro items. Whether it’s my memories of living Behind the Iron Curtain or numerous collections of the Old Photos, there is no shortage of nostalgia on these pages. Strangely, American retro is equally interesting to me, even though, for the obvious reasons, I can’t be nostalgic about the American past.

When I was researching my post about Bert Berkley I was frequently distracted by the ads in Kansas City magazines from the 1970’s. Ads about new real estate, long-gone stores and restaurants, services that became obsolete years ago, banks that are now forgotten, new cars that are now rotting in the junk yards. Some of you may remember these things, old restaurants, banks, hotels and car dealerships; others may recall being excited about the new modern services such as ATM machines and pagers. For many who weren’t alive at that time, the ads may seem naive, prices shockingly low, services overly personal and generous. For me it’s a trip to the past, not my past, but nevertheless exciting, and an ability to see it from the vantage point of 2010 – what survived and what didn’t, what made it to the future and what is now erased from the memory and the city map. I went back to the Library, checked out some magazines from 1974-77 and copied a few ads that I liked. The quality of the images is not that great but old magazines are not easy to photograph in the dim light.

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AP released the photos of the Russian rocket Soyuz TMA-14 being prepared for the launch on March 25th (click the photo for more).

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (coincidentally called “Soyuz-Apollo” in Russian) launched in 1975. Years before the International Space Station Americans and Russians shook hands in space.

I don’t have much recollection of the flight, I was 5 years old, but Soyuz-Apollo became a familiar phrase in Russian and the mission insignia still was around years later.

Trivia:”Soyuz” means “Union” in Russian, as in the Soviet Union.

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