People often ask me: ‘Why are Soviet apartments so ugly?’
These of course are ignorant people with no finer sensibilities. Soviet apartments are rich in free forms of artistic expression which defy conventional aesthetics. It is only to the untutored eye that they appear as hideous blots on a mud blown landscape.

A little insight: Soviet architects, [...]

October. There really couldn’t be a more appropriate time to visit a town as red as Novgorod.
Here in the main square, ‘October Man’ himself stands taller than any tree.

V.I. also features on the council offices. From his vantage point over the main entrance, he is able to monitor the orthodoxy of worker’s lunch breaks.

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A huge Real Estate billboard greeted me as I pulled into Novgorod. It promises the all-Russian dream to a young couple - their very own pre-fab concrete Soviet home.

Yes, perhaps the girl in this advertisement does look a little naive - if not the recent recipient of a lobotomy. Nevertheless, I still contacted [...]

For the next few weeks I am visiting Novgorod Veliky, which is why I’ve been off-blog lately. 
 
The Great Wall Of Novgorod. It appears to keep out capitalists.
An on-line guide I came across said of Novgorod, ‘allow about two hours’. But they lied.
Novgorod is a time warp wonderland. It’s a place where young workers still dream of making home [...]

It was in 1936 that Trotsky founded the Fourth International.
The International Bolsheviks met secretly at a summit in Geneva. The secret was, it turned out later, that they actually met in Paris, since by this time the long arm of Stalin’s terror could reach anywhere.
One of the Fourth International’s aims was to defend workers against [...]

These beautiful panoramas by Olaf Matthes were taken in 2003 with an old Soviet camera designed in the 1950s.

If you move along to Olaf’s gallery you can see many more in glorious superwide Sovietvision.The camera used here is the FT-2 panoramic camera, named after its inventor Feodor Tokarev.
Tokarev was, amongst other things, an arms [...]

The apartment museums in St Petersburg are like time capsules. History comes out of the walls and you absorb it effortlessly just by walking through the rooms or gazing at an old photograph on top of a piano.

Such a museum is the Elizarov apartment in St Petersburg, preserved exactly as it was in the 1920s. [...]

With the Mid-East peace talks in need of some original ideas, I thought of Matthias Rust. Matthias was the 19 year old West German who flew a light plane through the Iron Curtain in May, 1987, and audaciously taxied into Red Square. He said the flight represented an imaginary bridge to peace.

Matthias ‘Peace Prize’ was [...]

In an earlier post, I commented on Moscow’s missing landmark, Vera Mukhina’s famous statue, ‘The Worker And The Collective Farm Girl’.
It still isn’t back on its plinth, but all is not yet lost. Apparently the arms were spotted in Moscow recently, on top of a builder’s van. Over at Snowsquare Moscow there’s an undignified [...]

Vera Mukhina’s famous statue - The Worker and The Collective Farm Girl - has gone missing from its rightful place outside Moscow’s VDNK.
Officially, the ultimate icon of the Soviet Union is being restored. But no-one is going to see it again anytime soon. Meanwhile, Moscow without this landmark is like Paris without the Eiffel Tower. [...]