The Crystal Life of Sewage

The hidden underground worlds of Moscow sewage system always fascinated us. We had it here or here in HDR or even here they were contesting rafting right inside those realms

But this set of today’s is concentrated on one topic - the sewage itself is a moving conglomerate of the organic remains of different kind, consisting of the different color stalagmites or roots of the on-surface trees finding their way thru the concrete walls.

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Fall Out for Real

There are a lot of fans of “Fallout” game across the world. In Russia this electronic entertainment piece is widely recognized too. Sometimes the anticipation to game goes so strong that devoted people are trying to transfer the gameplay to real life, stating that some Russian abandoned locations are a perfect fit for an image of “New California” after it was bombed by nuclear missiles.

Brothers of steel, rangers, peaceful citizens, raiders and many others are those who you can meet if to visit one of those locations. “Game is so attractive when it’s played for real that sometimes you even forget that this is the game”, says one of the participants. “Especially if you try to keep the quality of the costumes and everything as much high and close to the game as possible”, he adds.

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The Piece of a Shuttle

There is a piece of what was before a glorious Russian shuttle “Buran”, staying in front of one of the Moscow hospitals. It hasn’t been placed there as a monument or something. People who know its history tell that once when the Soviet Union collapsed they sold much of high-technology costly hardware for just some pennies to people who didn’t even know what to do with all this.

For example, this head module of Buran shuttle in some mysterious way appeared in ownership of the hospital. They couldn’t find a better use for it to make a pressure chamber. Then they found out that they have not enough funds to make such chamber, so, they decided, the best use of this piece of space relic is to sell it for scrap metal.

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Abandoned Prince’s House

Today we have a series of very nice piece of architecture staying abandoned for quite a lot already. It is from Abkhazia region, the place that was under Russian rule long before communists came to power. It’s located on the Black Sea and was so beloved by old Russian upper class that they called it “Russian Riviera”. This place has probably the most picturesque abandons from ex Soviet places. We had once the old abandoned railway station from there, if you don’t remember take look here it was very nice looking series too. Today some shots of the abandoned Prince’s House, built almost two centuries ago by special Royal order.

That’s how it looked when prince got it.

It was not very long the prince could enjoy it, the communists took over and nationalized most of the luxury property in Russia. During Soviet Era the house was turned in elite summer residence for Moscow higher up men.

That’s how the placed look when it was conversed to the Hotel “Seagull” by the personal order of J. Stalin

So let’s see what’s left there today.

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Dead Towns of Kola

Kola peninsula is a cape in North-Western Russia. This region borders Norway and Finland and has direct access to the Northern Ocean. Because of it’s prevailing strategic position it was valued much by Russian army and hundreds of army bases were placed on the peninsula.
During 1990s Russian army got tremendous budget cut off and had to cut its costs. One of the way to save for the army was to give up some bases and concentrate bases from bordering locations to one. So it was done and many of the army bases were abandoned. Then the other way to reduce costs was to pay less to the personnel, so during 1990s many Russian soldiers and officers had to give up Army service cause they couldn’t sustain normal living from it. Especially at the Northern territories where it was impossible to keep natural living sources like gardens or domestic animals. People naturally fled from North. The apartments prices were falling down at just lightning speed rates, going to as low as $2000 for a 4 room flat, and then it all finished up with hundreds of residential multi-stored houses stayed abandoned with no occupancy.
Army has built a lot of small cities during the Soviet period around its military objects. Those were left first. Now tens of such towns stay all across Kola Peninsula not visited, not inhabited.
Here are just some photos from the empty streets of Kola Peninsula Ex-Army Town.

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Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.

But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.

So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.

Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.

Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.

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Abandoned Missile Launch Site

This is an Abandoned Missile Launch Site. What it differs from other of such kind is that it has launched really big rockets that traveled to orbit, and what else - it was not destroyed like all the other sites left by Soviet army but is left untouched in the desert of Kazakhstan for anyone to visit.

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Tallest Abandoned Structure

That’s the tallest abandoned Russian structure and those guys have paid a visit there one frozen winter morning. It’s a shorter than Empire State Building, but not too much.

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