Roadside Relics of the USSR

We’re back on the road through the former Soviet Union. This time our guide is French photographer Jason Guilbeau whose pointing out objects along the roadside, like tractors stuck atop poles, a pavement that turns into a jet’s trail, a tank on a plinth and more reminders of Soviet vehicular prowess rendered in raw concrete.

 

Like those Soviet bus stops, these relics of the former empire  show us what was passed, serving as a kind of communist heritage trail, small tributes to pogroms, killing fields, NKVD targets and tractor production.

They give some kind of visual identity to places uniformly dull and flat; visual propaganda for a regime obsessed with erasing the past and promising the perfect future in areas not worthy of a big statue of Stalin or Lenin.

And these memento mori are by roads. The Russian word for a long straight road stretching into the distance is Prospekt. The message is clear: the journey is better than the arriving. In the totalitarian regime, your mind not your body is imprisoned. No need to imagine. Just keep driving and enjoy the view.

Pictures are from Justin’s book Soviet Signs and Street Relics.