This is not the first year that the story of a curious photograph allegedly taken by an American photographer in the USSR has been circulating on social networks. We checked whether Internet users correctly represented the people depicted on it.
In the picture we see two women in simple clothes and headscarves. One of them is holding an object that looks like a cigarette in her hand. As reported in publications, this photo is one of hundreds taken in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s by American Thomas Hammond, a Russian scholar and professor of history at the University of Virginia. If you believe the viral text, Hammond, with the help of Nobel laureate in physics Pyotr Kapitsa, entered the territory of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), and the lens of his camera was not a mushroom seller, as it seemed to the American, but two prominent specialists in the field of thermodynamics - Helga Adamovna von Trauschenberg and Maria Aristidovna Sumarokova-Elston. Both of them allegedly had noble origins, but remained in the country after the revolution, and they dressed up in such strange clothes because it was on Sunday, after the traditional mushroom picking trip initiated by Kapitsa.
Year after year, this story circulates on entertainment sites (“Peekaboo") and social networks ("Livejournal", "VKontakte", Telegram, Twitter). In July 2023, another publication with this text in Facebook received more than 3800 reposts. In 2021, a story about noblewomen physicists from MIPT was published in the popular science magazine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “Svitoglyad"
Really, Thomas Taylor Hammond (this transcription of his last name is more correct) is an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, who lectured on Soviet history and foreign policy for more than 40 years and traveled throughout the USSR during the Cold War. From these trips, not only notes remained, but also a huge number of color slides - Hammond was a gifted photographer. In the mid-2010s, the University of Virginia posted collection into open access on its website, after which a large number appeared on Russian-language resources selections with footage from Soviet life captured by the researcher. Nowadays, the entire accessible collection from the professor’s archive is also available on the foundation’s website Wikimedia. There we actually see a familiar photograph with two women, but it is placed in category "Unidentified locations in Russia." As stated in the caption, this is one of those photographs for which there was no description, which is why the place, time and subjects of the photograph are unknown. “Verified” was unable to find any other information in open sources about Hammond’s visit to MIPT, or about his acquaintance with Pyotr Kapitsa. All this casts doubt on the authenticity of the story itself about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken.
Let us turn to those details that can be learned from the viral text.
Kapitsa, indeed, since 1956 was in charge Department of Physics and Low Temperature Engineering at MIPT, an institute to the emergence of which he himself once had a hand, first as a faculty of Moscow State University. So he could theoretically meet Hammond and take him to the territory of the institute in Dolgoprudny near Moscow.
Helga Adamovna von Trauschenberg, supposedly standing on the left in the photo, is called in the text a representative of an impoverished Saxon family, “one of the pioneers of non-uniform thermodynamics” and “Landau’s closest associate,” who “a couple of years before this photo was pulled out of Turukhansk exile by Kapitsa.” However, there is no trace of this kind; it is not mentioned in open sources. Representatives of the clan moved to the Russian Empire (or rather, in the vicinity of Yamburg mentioned in the viral text) Rausch von Traubenberg, some of whose descendants (for example, the artist Konstantin) left their mark on Russian culture. However, history does not know a famous bearer of this surname with the name Helga. Moreover, non-uniform thermodynamics as a branch of physics does not exist, there is only nonequilibrium (also called thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes).
Noble family of Sumarokov-Elston in Russia existed, and in 1885 to representatives of the family moved on title of the Yusupov princes. The most famous representative of the family, “the same one,” as stated in the text, Felix Yusupov (the organizer of the murder of Rasputin), emigrated to Europe after the revolution. Apparently, the rest of his family did the same, since Soviet history did not preserve the names of the new Sumarokov-Elstons. There was no man named Aristide (the father of the woman in the photo) in this family even before the revolution. There is no textbook on the electrodynamics of continuous media supposedly authored by his daughter, and a homogeneous medium is concept from a completely different branch of physics.
The oldest discovered "Verified" case of the publication of a story about two unusual noblewomen is dated October 15, 2018, when the text appeared on the collective blog d3, formerly known as dirty.ru. In a postscript, the author under the nickname Aureus wrote in small letters: “Don’t take it too seriously. Your humble servant is in a good mood today,” and gave link to another post from the same day, where he passed off Stalin in a photograph as an unknown pensioner stealing brushes from car wipers.
Thus, all the facts indicate that the story of the “mushroom traders” is nothing more than a hoax based on a real photograph of unknown women. The author of the original source himself admitted this.
Cover photo: social networks
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