The few photos chosen for the article are not very representative of the country. Even the "lesser-known" places that the article mentions were kept fancy: Riga was only occupied by the USSR from 1945 on, so it preserved much of its pre-Soviet glory and Soviet people considered a visit a treat, and Samarkand was deliberately made into a museum-city.

The bulk of the USSR was much less developed. That photo of the miserable Дворец культуры (municipal culture center) is what most of provincial Russia looked like into the new millennium. That photo of the shop with relatively few goods available could have been taken in the twenty-first century in numerous provincial towns.