
08 Aug 2019, 00:26
Incredible photos Yeqon. Thanks for sharing them.

08 Aug 2019, 05:40
Looking at the photos is strange, although it must be different in person. Growing up, it fascinated me that a whole city was empty, and a big part of it was because I saw a lot of similar ruins of Soviet civilization growing up in 90s Russia - a car junkyard, abandoned or unfinished buildings, old books and propaganda. But gradually it's all been fading.
After capital repairs, the 1962 khrushchevka I live in doesn't really feel soviet, and neither is there any community among residents, who are now either poor, upper middle class or migrants, and now too different to talk to each other beyond a hello in the stairwell. Even with the train I take to work, the platforms have been torn down and replaced with new ones in a track expansion, except the one I get off at, ironically enough called Serp i Molot (hammer and sickle) after the adjacent steel mill, also torn down to build condos. And the office I work at, at the Red October chocolate factory, converted to a loft, is a parody of itself, with the buildings named after the function they once held.
Probably the best analogy I can think of for how I feel is the former military base near my wife's village. When I went there, there was not a stone left standing, as the villagers pulled the whole thing apart to use in their homes and gardens. However, you could still see where they lived by the footprints of where the foundations used to be, the shrubs where the edges of their properties were and largely bitter mock strawberry still growing where they had their patches. I have the same feelings regarding these photos, where I don't really associate them with a whole city abandoned, but rather with something fading and disassociating from memory.
The Russian government's retconning of Soviet monuments to project its own aspirational messages in foreign policy, economic development and technology/space exploration probably doesn't help much either, as you've probably seen at the renovated VDNKh and in the "Stalinist" metro stations. On the other hand, it's probably better than in Ukraine, in that the government was able to keep building on what came before, to the point of displacing it, as opposed to failing to do anything substantial and then trying to destroy all memory of what came before to try to establish its identity that way.