The Wandering Scot

An occasional travel journal.

Browsing Posts tagged USSR

Samara: Stalin Bunker

I am in Samara, where I have successfully infiltrated the Stalin Bunker. The bunker was build in great secrecy and in great haste in 1941, when Moscow was in danger and Kuibyshev (aka Samara) was the fallback Soviet capital.  But Moscow survived and Stalin chose to stay in the city even during its most dangerous […]

Magitogorsk
I’m in fabled Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s Steeltown USSR. The steelplant is truly vast, running for miles along the Asian bank of the Ural River. Some parts are old and decrepit looking, others appear sparkling and ultra-modern. Today the plant is covered with a pall of smoke and steam, as hot smokestack gases hit the icy air.

Moscow: Bunker 42

Bunker 42 is an authentic Soviet era nuclear bunker in Moscow, now open as a museum. It is extremely cool. The main tunnels provided 7000 sq meters of space, 65 meters under Moscow’s Taganskaya Hill. You enter through a fake building on the surface, which provides four meters of protective concrete around the bunker entrance. […]

Moscow: Stalin Bunker

The word “bunker” evokes images of a grim concrete shelter; dark, dank and ugly. Well maybe for most people, but not if you’re the Red Tsar. Moscow’s Stalin Bunker is positively palatial, with faux marble columns, a large domed conference room, and a paneled private office. Between 1933 and 1939 the Soviets built a sprawling […]

The Museum of the USSR

The Museum of the USSR is a new and quirky museum at Moscow’s VDNKh exposition center. It’s really a “Museum of Everyday Life” in the USSR, with several large rooms full of everyday Soviet kitsch. Old fashioned electronics, teddy bears, Soviet motivational posters, etc, etc.  It’s all reasonably amusing.   But the star of the […]

Novorossiysk: Brezhnev

I’ve bagged Lenins by the dozen.  And even a couple of Stalins. But a Brezhnev?  In the wild?  Now there’s a real rarity.  But there he was, striding casually down the street in downtown Novorossiysk.  So I nabbed him. This isn’t the doddering, geriatric Brezhnev of the 1980s.  This is the rising apparatchik, posed with […]