Buzludzha, Bulgaria
The hunger for change devoured the Soviet republics after the collapse of the USSR . Smear campaigns against the communist regime and the understandable posttraumatic stress who suffered their almost 300 million inhabitants during the 90s managed to create a frontal rejection of their heritage . Or, at the very least, a blindness, also fueled by the vision of the future that for these 15 territories happened to resemble Western economies in substance and form. Meanwhile, one of the biggest economic messes in living memory left entire cities, emptied administrative buildings, reconverted factories or reused disused infrastructure.
The fall of an empire It may sound like yet another repetition of history. But, How many civilizations reached the size and wealth of the Soviet Union? From Lithuania to Japan, 70 years of command economy undermined the purpose of industrializing and urbanizing some of the most virgin landscapes on earth . With it, the aesthetic criteria imposed from Moscow spread throughout the block, but they also had to take care of the artistic sensitivities of its more than 200 ethnic groups, languages, religions... Not to mention the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
The impossibility of adapting to the crude market economy and almost a generation were necessary for nostalgic and discoverers of these dystopian landscapes began to highlight the artistic value inherited. The photographer Frédéric Chaubin defined it as "disorienting remnants of cultures", "savage monuments floating in space and time" or, more specifically, "ruins of the future", that he compiled in his book CCCP - Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed , edited by Taschen.
Many still today deny their communist past , many others struggle to decouple art from politics and conserve the heritage that it left on a sixth of the earth's surface. But many others, and increasingly, they look at that brutalist style that the Soviet Union almost made its own . "I see more and more interest in brutalist architecture," he says. Virginia McLeod , editor of Atlas of Brutalist Architecture of Phaidon. And it is something latent in social networks, where the hashtag #brutalism accumulates more than half a million images.
If we start with the brutalism , account brutalistbeton is one of the best picks up the impact of concrete on the institutional and residential buildings of the former Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.
offers a fascinating review of most of the old capitals of these countries, from the Baltics to Central Asia, and pays great attention to the style known as Socialist Modernism. It is one of the most striking expressions of the plurality of Soviet art, which began to appear with the death of Stalin, in the mid-1950s, but which would blossom during Brezhnev's mandate. The Institute of Art and Urban Research strives to highlight the artistic value of these works.
What can be seen with a wider margin under the label SOCMOD: socialist modernism.
Christopher Herwig , on several road trips through the end of the soviet bloc , he was able to capture one of the most curious expressions of this style: bus stop whose design, due to its insignificance, was granted to incipient architects, who squeezed their creativity in order to reach greater heights. In his second volume, he takes up the same project underground: the best stations of one of the most sculptural metro systems on the planet.
Both at bus stops and subway stations One figure stands out, that of the mosaics, which countries like Ukraine are beginning to eliminate to get rid of any reminiscence of the already distant Soviet domain. In other cases, it is time and vandalism that erode them. Profiles such as those of Elbori or Rukhina create a valuable catalog of the most outstanding and hidden mosaics . Not to mention the interiors of the Moscow metro.
Many of these mosaics represent a combination of traditional scenes of Soviet life , as well as the most traditional customs of each of its territories. And, in that sense, the collection that we can see on Instagram is not only architectural, but also its charismatic design and posters (in accounts such as SovietPosters or SovietVisuals).
Although it is CalvertJournal who goes a step further to explain, through images, what is the reality of these countries, with a still very latent mark of their joint past . This magazine collects in its account the most talented photographers, who are capable of representing the sorrows and virtues of everyday life.
With that same precept, and despite the country's disintegration and the different course its republics have taken, there are many who still appreciate a common identity in their customs and aesthetics . Accounts like Postsovenok are able to summarize the contrasting images that are experienced throughout the concrete universe of the former USSR.
Uniform and gray neighborhoods whose monstrous extension derives in melancholic and even tragic tones, but not at all devoid of humor. Finding the beauty, the life and the eccentricities of its inhabitants, is the specialty of My Leningrad, which reviews the mix of rural customs with megalopolis scenes.
So far, the particulars, The eccentricities of the "ruins of the future" that Chaubin recorded . But there are those who, on the contrary, were able to erect an emblem in the mammoth, in the monotonous. For this they go to their " microraioni " (bedroom neighborhoods) and their true generators of "human" life: the courtyards between buildings - "dvor" in Russian.
Among them, the most famous is surely Arseny Kotov , known as Northern Friend. Accounts like Tvoi Dvor and Gloom 99 show us.
For better or worse, given the state of some of these neighborhoods, the accounts end up flirting with urbex fashion (visit abandoned cities). Although the post-Soviet world in general ends up being a paradise for this aesthetic, its particular El Dorado is in the ruins of Chernobyl (Alina Filatova is one of their 'expert' explorers) and the abandoned tunnels of the militarized Ukraine.
It would be unfair to limit the heritage of the Soviet Union to the girs and the monotonous. There are many accounts that prove the contrary and that show the fantasy of many of its monuments, both within the Soviet borders (Monumentalism) and outside them - where especially relevant is the compilation of historical memory of the project Spomenikdatabase, throughout the former Yugoslavia.
As a whole, it is about portraying the strength of little-known pictures in the most common tourist routes, immersing oneself in the confusion caused by the heritage of one of the last great "civilizations" and come to understand the character that still makes the old block a parallel world . Neither European nor Asian. Neither urban nor rural. Neither collapsed nor emerging . Neither past nor future. A series of contradictions and inconsistencies that no one portrays better than The Inversion of Colours.