The Lost Archive of Major Martin J. Manhoff
In 2016, Douglas Smith found a pile of cardboard boxes in an empty house outside Seattle. The house was being cleared out in preparation for sale and the boxes were about to go into a dumpster. Inside the boxes Smith found a collection of slide photographs and 16mm films. Holding the slides up to the light, he realized he had stumbled upon a remarkable find—thousands of photographs taken throughout the Soviet Union in the twilight years of Stalin’s reign, and nearly all of them in brilliant color.
The photographs and movie footage had been taken by Major Martin J. Manhoff, a military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the 1950s. Working with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Smith published a small sample of the Manhoff Archive, which became an international sensation. Now, the best of Manhoff’s photographs and films can be seen here for the first time.
Douglas Smith
An award-winning historian and translator, Douglas Smith is the author of seven books on Russia. His works have been published in over a dozen languages. In the 1980s, he was a Russian-speaking guide on the U.S. State Department’s exhibition “Information USA” that traveled throughout the USSR. He has worked as a Soviet affairs analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and served as an interpreter for late President Reagan.
Major Martin J. Manhoff
Martin J. Manhoff was born in Seattle in 1917. He studied art at the University of Washington, where he met Jeannette (“Jan”) Kozicki, his future wife. Manhoff fought in Europe during World War II and was sent to Moscow in 1952 to serve as an assistant army attaché. During his two years in the Soviet Union, he traveled widely and recorded his experiences on film. Together with three other Americans, Manhoff was expelled from the USSR as a spy in 1954 and returned to Washington State. He and Jan opened a home furnishings store in Bellevue. Manhoff died in 2005. Jan, nine years later. It seems he never showed anyone his photographic collection, which lay untouched in the couple’s home for over half a century.
The Manhoff Collection at the University of Washington
Douglas Smith donated the Manhoff Archive to the University of Washington Library’s Special Collections in 2019. The archive is open and available to researchers.