Figure 1.--Here we see two unidentified Russian boys wearing tunic outfits in 1925. The olderchild could be a girl, but we think a boy is more likely because of the dhort pnts. We think the boy's first name is written on the back, but canot read it. The photograph appears to be a studio portrait. We have no idea who owned the studio. We suspect that they were sewn by a stylish mother rather than produced in a garment factory.

Our Russian archive is limited and we do not hasve a lot of information on the 1920s. Of course with the rise of Communism, vurtually everything changed. Weare not even sure about wht happened go photographic studios. Some may have become state-owned, bu some may have remained in orivate hands as a reesult of Lenin's New Economic Policy. The economy declined. Many people could not hsve afforded studio portaits and even fewer people had cameras and could afford to take family snapshots. As a result we have found few photographs from the 1920s in comparison to other European countries, inmcluding much smller countries. And we we do not see these tunic outfits nearly as commonly after World War I during the Soviet era, at least in the cities where most portraits were taken. This is interesting because the Russian Revolution was ideologically done in the mame of the country' workers and peasants. You would think that peasant fashions would become popular embleamatic of the Revolution. Worker fashions did, but not peasant fashion. Marx was primarily concerned with workers. In fact, Marx and even Lenin believerd that the Revolution would break out in industrial nations, not backward agricultural Russia. But it did come in Russia. And from the beginning, the more politically oriented workers (proleterit) had a privlidged status. In fact Stalin would not only finance the industrialization of the Soviet Union on the backs of the peasantry, but he would seize their land and murder about 5 million peasants (including the best farmers in the Soviet Union (Kulaks) in the process. So it is understandable that the tunic was not as we might say today politically correct. So these tunics appeared to have been discouraged. At least the tunic as a Rissdian garmrent clearly dclined in the country-side, but did not immediately disappear. We see a few examples in the photographic record. They were not very common, but they do exist. As far as we can tell, the tunic continued to be a boy's garment.

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Created: 2:42 PM 7/18/2021
Last updated: 2:43 PM 7/18/2021