My Grandpa had a camera and wasn’t afraid to use it from the very first days of the Soviet Union

I was born to a Jewish family from Leningrad in 1981. My grandpa on my mother’s side, Arkady, died two years before I was born. He was an avid photographer, and a great many pictures you’ll find in this article were taken by him. He was also a few other things: a soldier (well, kind of), a university lecturer in economics at the Mining Institute, a writer (financial stuff), and of course, a pretty strict but devoted father and husband.

He left us many hundreds of pictures. A few years ago, I finally scanned them, spent hours fixing the damage in Photoshop.