Figure 1.--This Soviet-era portrait was taken in 1940. The boy is inidentified, but looks to be about 8-9 years old. The photographer is also unidentified, but appears to be part of a collection he was compiling on life in the Sovioet Union. The portrait was entitled, "Malchik v chulkah" ("The boy in stockings"). Click on the image for a fuller discussion.

We note Soviet-era boys in the 1940s wearing long stockings. This was mostly boys in the cities where short pants were common for boys. In the countryside we see boys mostly wearing long pants. In many cases they wear ragged clothing which was not the case in the cities. We arely see short psnts or fashionable clothing in the countryside. We assume this also means that they were not wearing long stockings. We have a very good idea of how boys in the countryside were dressed because of all the images taken by the invading German Wehrmacht (1941). Many city boys wore short pants even during the winter which of course can be quite cold in much of the Soviet Union. Thus the long stockings were commonly worn during the colder months. We also see boys wearing knee socks, but long stockings seem more common during the winter, especially for the younger boys. We are not sure how common this was. As our archive is fairly small, it is difficult to assess prevalence, but quite a few of the period photographs we have do show cjildren, both boysand girls, wearing long stockings. The boys involved are mostly pre-teens, the girls wearing long stockings include teenagers.