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The selling point of Yakov Protazanov's 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars isn't its plot, but its elaborate Constructivist sets and costuming that were highly experimental for the 1920s and predated the futurist aesthetic of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. More »
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The Soviet Union may be a thing of the past, but it still inhabits many an alternate future. A group of artists entered their futuristic visions for a Soviet Republic in "CCCP-2061," which envisions a USSR that has colonized Mars. More »
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Ever wondered what happened to the corpses of Hitler, Eva Braun, and Goebbels? Russia has just released the official story of what happened after the KGB grabbed the corpses in Berlin. More »
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many Soviet bases and monuments were left to crumble, never repurposed or reused. These memorials to the USSR stretch across Eastern Europe and Asia, a more global view of a modern nation's ruins. More »
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During an early voyage of the experimental Kalinin K-7, the aircraft crashed, killing fourteen passengers and forcing Stalin to scrap the project. But an artist has reimagined an alternate history where the Soviet flying fortress takes on Nazi flying saucers. More »
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Imagine spending months locked in this Latvian bomb shelter. The banner reads "Without Communciations, There Is No Authority. Without Authority, There Is No Victory!" The shelter, now a museum, has a nuclear-blast-absorbing wall and a huge facility for filtering radiation. More »
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It's comforting to know that during the height of Reagan's Cold War in the 1980s, the Soviet Union was making movies that were just as cheesy as the ones you could see in the United States. When you see this clip of the scary, growling radioactive giant turtle from Мутанты (which means Mutant), you'll be forced to concede that the Soviet Union would not ever have lost the cheesy flick arms race. Especially if the cheesy movie war had been fought with giant monster movies. Alas, I don't speak Russian so I can't understand the dialog. But that didn't get in the way of my appreciation at all. I had a genuine moment of cross-cultural understanding. [English Russia] (Thanks, DieR!) More »
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In a war-torn, forgotten remnant of the Soviet Union a battered laboratory stands, housing the remnants of twisted experiments. Some of the surviving tenants — part of an attempt by the insane veterinary doctor Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov to breed a slave race of ape/human hybrids — have escaped into the surrounding forest, their whereabouts unknown. We're not making this up; this is happening right now at the crumbling Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, a small nation-state on the Black Sea. More »
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Russian translation circuits: inoperable. We may not know what this band from the motherland is singing about in this science fiction-themed music video, but we do know that a band of crazy space pirates are invading a fleet of women clad in silver jumpsuits. Everybody parades around and sings the chorus of the song while their ship rolls back and forth. Oh, and their ship looks like the interior was designed by whoever did the interior of the old TARDIS from Doctor Who. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=354010&view=rss&microfeed=true The long-awaited Russian scifi film Inhabited Island will screen in Berlin this week. This $40 million dollar epic is one of the most expensive films to come out of the Motherland. It's based on the 1971 Soviet novel called Prisoners of Power, written by the Strugatsky brothers, and follows amateur astronaut Maxim Kammerer after he lands on a planet based satirically on the U.S.S.R. The planet is peppered with mind-control towers that the government has disguised as a missile defense system. The newcomer destroys this network, but might have doomed its people and himself in the process. You can read an online version of the out of print (in English, anyhow) novel here. [Variety] More »
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The strangely beautiful Melnikov House was built in Moscow in 1929, and is an early-twentieth-century futurist blend of peasant construction and ultra-modern weirdness. Maverick architect Konstantin Melnikov built his home using rough bricks typically found in Russian peasant villages, but he also gave it a novel shape - two interlocking cylinders riddled with hexagonal windows that make the whole structure look oddly like two curled punchcards. More pictures after the break. More »
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Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. More »
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