Russian Boy Madly Cycling, 1977

On my Flickr account where I keep images of cycling from various public domain sources I also have been uploading digitized photos from when I was in Russia, in Leningrad mostly, in the 1970s.

I only seem to have a few that involve bicycles, and all are of children on bikes.


Taken when I was living in then-Leningrad in spring, 1977

This little boy probably wasn't happy that I was taking his picture, so perhaps that explains his rush. This generation of urban Russians probably included many who didn't learn how to ride a bicycle - Russia is a much smaller market for purchase of bicycles than the U.S., even today - something like 4 million bicycles sold in 2012 versus close to 19 million in the U.S. (including kids' bikes). While at first glance it looks like a reasonable little bike, it is actually rather sad - I don't think those can be inflatable tires but are rather solid rubber (or something) so it would be a fairly rough ride. Everything about it looks under-built. On the plus side, it cannot have been particularly heavy, which is the downfall of most modern kids' cheap bikes - overbuilt of cheap heavy metal so that a kid's bike weighs as much as an adult's bike


For Lenin's birthday, Soviets would do a public spring cleaning on one weekend in April

This photo, also taken in 1977, shows two children with what appears to be better bicycles - small wheels but with inflatable tires, at least. (The second one is towards the middle and facing away from the camera.) So perhaps for some "upper middle class Soviet urban folks" (or whatever one would describe them as) of that period, having a bicycle for one's (usually only) child was not unusual.