Soviet Architecture

Some Moscow residents once claimed the bizarre, contorted mass of metal on top of the building was used to manipulate minds.

The avant-garde design was able to bypass strict Soviet regulations on architecture.

An early-20th-century "dacha" village of quaint cottages curiously located in a modern part of Moscow.

A cylinder monument with a spectacular vista commemorates a friendship that some say never existed.

An abandoned Soviet-era mining town in the mountains of South Kazakhstan.

This Soviet-era "closed town" was a top secret uranium producer often left off of maps.

This truly palatial work of Communist-era architecture now sits crumbling on a Croatian beach.

A striking Soviet memorial commemorates the liberation of Belarus from the Nazis.

This space age health spa looks like a supervillain's lair.

Ruins of a former government building destroyed during the Georgian-Abkhaz war in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union.

This spaceship sculpture in the middle of the Slovakian capital looks like it just crash-landed.

This sprawling concrete suburb of Kraków was designed by the Soviet Union as the model proletarian city.

This newly renovated Soviet-era outdoor exhibition center is bigger than the principality of Monaco.

The ghost town left by the worst nuclear disaster of all time is being taken over by nature and urban explorers.