Eric Lusito took these images and more for his book After the Wall - Traces of the Soviet Empire.

[After the Wall via Nerdcore]

Mig-21, Mongolia
Area 120, Mongolia. Military building constructed 1982. The slogan reads: Glory to Communist Party of Soviet Union.
Area 3D, Kazakhstan. Built in in 1956 as a ground station to track Sputnik, the first manned satellite.
During the Soviet era, many military personnel, support staff and their families were stationed in and around Choibalsan, Mongolia.
Base situated close to the northern edge of the Gobi desert, Mongolia.
The oath of allegiance of the Soviet soldier, Germany.
‘To our Motherand'. Soviet Navy base, Latvia.
‘Victory starts here!'. Sports hall, Latvia.

Aircraft designer KA Kalinin designed the K-7, a massive and extremely expensive prototype plane that briefly carried passengers during 1933. However, the plane crashed in November 1933, causing the project to be scrapped before more prototypes could be built. These images imagine a battle-ready version of a plane similar to Kalinin's K-7, with enough firepower to take down another non-existent vehicle: the Nazi flying saucer.

Russian Flying Fortresses [English Russia via Metafilter]

Not that all that equipment you're seeing in the top photo is for communication with the outside world, of course. The shelter in Ligatne, Latvia, has separate rooms for the KGB, and they include direct phone lines to Moscow but also rows and rows of gray electronic devices that allow you to listen in on conversations taking place anywhere in the shelter. So even once you were entombed in the ground, hiding from an uninhabitable world, you still would have been under the thumb of the surveillance state at all times.

Somehow that single vase with its drooping flowers is the saddest thing of all.

My favorite part: the huge, monstrous facility only had enough food and supplies to last three months, meaning after months of claustrophobic repression, you still would have had to venture out into an atomic wasteland. Images by AP.

Now long gone, Ivanov was the star of the Institute in the early part of the 20th century —- he made his name cross-breeding zebras with donkeys, antelopes with cows, rabbits with guinea pigs, and so on. By the 1920's it was in his head to try humans and monkeys. He drummed up Soviet and private funding and repeatedly tried to inseminate Chimpanzees with human sperm before he reversed the process and tried to impregnate at least one human female. The Institute became his base of operations before he was caught up in a Stalinist purge and exiled to Kazakhstan, where he died in the 1932.

Today several hundred monkeys live on in dilapidated cages at the Institute, and some have escaped into the surrounding forests, where townspeople routinely spot them. Ivanov's attempts at breeding a hybrid primate race are all said to have failed, though, and genetic differences between chimps (our closest genetic relatives) and humans make it unlikely that humanzees are even possible. Still, evidence suggests that our human ancestors were getting busy with chimps even after our two lineages first split. And there's always Oliver.

Photo: LA Times

Source: LA Times

Our tour of the interwebs in search of Страху нет yielded the band Mumiy Troll, who have been playing music in Russia since 1981. We couldn't find hide nor hair of this song on the site, though. You can hear their entire new album played on their website if you're patient enough to endure their brain-melting powers of rock. Maybe this will spawn a whole slew of scifi music videos that tell an epic story. We can only hope! After all, we're tired of listening to Styx's Kilroy Was Here over and over again.

Here you can see the house being constructed in the late 1920s, and below what the front looked like when completed. It was one of the only private residences built in Soviet Era Moscow, and Melnikov tweaked Soviet authorities by engraving his name over the front entrance, highlighting the fact that it was a private residence that wasn't collectively owned by the "people". Though widely acknowledged to be a perfect example of Soviet avant-garde, the Melnikov House has fallen into ruins. Its windows were blasted out during World War II, forcing the family to relocate to its basement.
After Melnikov died in 1972, the ceiling had been leaking for a while and the floors had rotted out. Luckily, it seems that the building will at last become a museum, and reopen to the public after being spruced up. There's an article in the NY Times today about a Russian philanthropist who is providing some of the money for the Melnikov House restoration. Images from the World Monuments Fund in Britain.

Melnikov House [via The Twentieth Century Society]

Famous Names: Andrei Tartovsky (Director, Co-writer).

Crunchy Goodness: 4

Re-makes: Steven Soderbergh's 2002 re-make was surprisingly good ... but died at the box office, as people don't want to see George Clooney confront the existential problems of the universe.

Most Painfully Dated Moment: Actually, the whole movie is pretty damn Soviet.

Life Lesson: Talk things over with your loved ones before you have to do it as part of a telepathically-induced hallucination.

Review of Solaris at the Sci-Fi Movie Page