SOVIET GHOSTS: The Soviet Union Abandoned:

'Some may look at the decay in these buildings as simply reflecting the destruction of the Soviet Bloc and the moral bankruptcy of a flawed ideological system. I perceive them as museums, the buildings and extant objects as beautiful exhibits. They are memorials to the ordinary people who once lived and worked there, but whose existence, whose stories are ephemeral; and at risk of being extinguished forever, if they are not somehow recorded.' Like a ghost hunt, this photographer has indeed recorded faded memories of the former Soviet Union his first trip to the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine, in October 2012, the town that served the powerplant at Chernobyl. His second trip was to Bulgaria to see the abandoned Communist Monument up the beautiful Mount Buzludzha. It is as if life just stood still - with not a human in sight we see inside the dilapidated swimming pool at Pripyat Sports Centre, the strewn books at the Young Pioneer Camp Russia, with access to the dilapidated Teufelsberg Spy Station, East Germany, the Cosmonaut Memorial, Russia, with an old space suit, a satellite communication centre in Russia, the inside of an Antonov aircraft in Bulgaria, a dusty pool table and peeling walls of a sanatorium in Russia with discarded pill bottles, stirrup chairs and other contraptions for the poor inmates, filthy curtains half torn down and blood stained beds. Here is life and work behind the Iron Curtain and inside the Wünsdorf Soviet headquarters East Germany in imagery which becomes surreal and almost suffocating in its post-society, post-human post-life. There are military spaces which once directed such supreme power in the Cold War "now left in an alternative post-apocalyptic vacuum, weeping with the irony that mocks them." Yet there are glimmers of architectural genius with spiral staircases, beautiful wrought ironwork, mosaics, stained glass windows, gigantic proportions and above-cloud vistas, plus of course the prisons and functional aspects of the Soviet-built Communist structures. Breathtaking in its artistry is the monument of the Bulgarian Soviet Friendship hewn in stone with four identical military figures in a cubist style towering over a city. Sights we would never otherwise see, mostly in full page colour photos which Rebecca Litchfield has personally visited as she describes the forgotten historic locations and the ideologies that built them. Approx. 10" square and 200 pages.
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