Figure 1.-- We note Soviet magazines in the 1950s still commonly showed boys and girls wearing long stockings. We have a Soviet popular magazine dated 1956. It shows a boy about 9 or 10 years old. He is not wearing school clothes. The photograph was edited by the magazine formatting employee and designed to be part of a montage of Soviet life in late spring or early summer, 1956, when schools were letting out and the children were being released for their vacations at home. Click on the image for a fuller dissusion of this photograph.

We note Soviet magazines in the 1950s still commonly showed boys and girls wearing long stockings. We have a Soviet popular magazine dated 1956. It shows a boy about 9 or 10 years old. He is not wearing school clothes. The photograph was edited by the magazine formatting employee and designed to be part of a montage of Soviet life in late spring or early summer, 1956, when schools were letting out and the children were being released for their vacations at home. The location is not named, but the setting of the montage images is obviously urban--probably Moscow.

A HBC reader writes, "As is clear from the context of the montage images, Soviet boys, at least in Moscow, wore mostly military-style uniforms to class in 1956--belted suits of light brown with long trousers and peaked caps. But at home when they were relaxing, they preferred to dress more casually and comfortably and often looked like this boy. Notice that he wears a white shirt buttoned at the neck, dark short pants, long brown ribbed stockings (apparently worn for warmth on chilly days), and lace-up high-top leather shoes. The stockings, which fit very trimly and form-fittingly, were probably knitted of cotton or a cotton-synthetic mixture for the added elasticity. Note the close-cropped hair, a style that gives the lad an almost shaved-head appearance. This hair style was typical and seems to have been customary because of hygiene and the quasi-military ideology and discipline of the Soviet school system in the 1950s. The boy is not wearing a red neckerchief, but, otherwise, he is dressed very much like a Young Pioneer. The young Pioneers usually wore short pants and white shirts--sometimes with long stockings and sometimes with knee socks."