The Empresses’ Secret Cabinet of Erotic Curiosities

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia was so infamous for her sexual freedom that when she died from a stroke at the age of 67, there was even a rumour claiming she actually died while copulating with a horse. I learnt about Catherine the Great at school, about how she modernised Russia, pioneered women’s education, enlisted Voltaire…

Dive into the Underwater Museum of the Black Sea

Free entry and no queues, this sounds like the ideal museum. However, this unique underwater museum is not an easy place to visit. Located 100m off the shore of Cape Tarkhankut in Crimea, visitors require at least a basic level of diving skills to take a trip. Known as the “Alley of Leaders”, this original…

There’s Something about Russia

I remember when I first saw one of Frank Herfort’s photographs and thought it looked like a movie still from some iconic film that I’d somehow never seen. He has spent the better part of the last decade capturing the everyday oddities of Russia and its public spaces in all their peculiar glory. He’s one of those…

Markets of the former Soviet Union

My name is Gianluca Pardelli and this is my photographic odyssey to document the extraordinary atmosphere of the post-soviet market stalls and the astonishing ethic diversity of the people operating them. Markets in the former Soviet Union are, indeed, a fascinating mix of different cultural flavours. It’s hard to give them a geographical or ethnic label,…

Lost to the Iron Curtain: The Avant Garde Artist the World Forgot

Paris may have been the artistic hub of Europe’s cultural life and modern ideas at the beginning of the 20th century, but a majority of its greatest thinkers and artists actually came from abroad, from places such as Spain, the US and even further away, like Russia and its surrounding countries. Across the Black Sea around…

This Ghost Town looks so Real it Fooled Half the Internet

“A small German town with a tricky name, which I immediately forgot. Somewhere in Eastern Germany. People have not lived here for a long time, and only occasionally tourists come to walk through the deserted, dilapidated streets.” In these photographs by Russian photographer Dmitry Chistoprudov, it looks like World War II ended just yesterday. And he almost…

The Village where Residents have to Dig their way out of their Homes

It sounds like a nightmare; being buried alive while you sleep, but for a small forgotten village in Northern Russia, this is reality the residents can wake up to on any given morning. Located on the edge of the arctic circle, Shoyna (Шо́йна) is considered the world’s northernmost “desert” town because it’s surrounded by sand…

Crumbling Communist Murals the Soviets Left Behind

In the early nineties, well after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, did you know there were still over 300,000 Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany? In 1991, there were still 4,200 Russian tanks, 690 aircrafts, 180 rocket systems and over 200,000 civil employees and relatives of officers, among them about 900,000 children. Until the final withdrawal…

River Rockets of the Soviet Space Age

It looks like a prop from Star Wars doesn’t it? Trust the Soviets to have the coolest abandoned stuff lying around. During the cold war period and into the 1980s, this rusting behemoth was once part of a fleet of vessels which rose out of the water at high speed and were considered the heroes of the Russian riverways.…

That Time Soviet School Children Bugged the US Ambassador’s Office

Did you hear the one about the Soviet school children who presented a US Ambassador with a wooden plaque of the Seal of the United States as a gesture of friendship in 1945? It hung in his Moscow office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device. True story. Man, that’s cold! Get it? Anyway, after…