slavaroid

Icon of Socialist Modernism in Kiev, the Salute hotel was designed by Ukrainian architect Abraham Miletsky (also known for his dramatic, odd Crematorium in the Park of Memory) and built on the right bank of the Dnepr river between 1982 and 1984.

Named after – and looking alike – a series of Soviet space stations, the building should have been several floors higher (hence the massive base) but bureaucratic issues led to a shortening.
A spiral ramp runs all along inside the cylindrical reinforced concrete shape, connecting the 89 rooms.

Zapadna Kapija Beograda, the Western City Gate of Novi Beograd, was designed by renowned Serbian architect Mihajlo Mitrović in Brutalist style.

The béton brut building was erected in 1980 in Bloc 33 of the new planned municipality as a modern gate to the city for people arriving from Belgrade airport.

The two towers of the raw concrete skyscraper are connected on the highest floors by a two storey-corridor leading to a revolving restaurant on the top – which has never been rotating and is not in use anymore.

The higher side is a 30 floors-residential building; the lower used to host the headquarters of Genex (hence the nickname), a state-owned enterprise dealing with trades between Yugoslavia and the USSR.
While the first one is still in use, the latter stays empty and abandoned.

Built in 1909 near Schierke, a small mountain village in the idyllic Harz National Park, the once luxurious hotel Villa Waldpark became after 1945 a recreation resort for the members of FDGB, the Free German Trade Union Federation of GDR.

Named after German political activist Hermann Duncker in the Sixties, the Erholungsheim was operational until 1990, when it ceased to exist together with the Deutsche Demokratische Republik itself.
Since then, the place has been left to rot and decay.

No restoration project is at the moment planned.

Iron Man’s hometown, the Georgian city of Gori still hosts one of the last surviving statues of Iosif Stalin.

Inside a polished, freshly green-painted vaulted lounge at the main train station, a marble figure of the austere moustached Soviet leader stands out among the passengers waiting for their ride.

National symbol of de facto Republic of Artsakh, the monument was sculpted in 1967 by Soviet Armenian artist Sargis Baghdasaryan.

Carved out of reddish volcanic tufa and at one with nature, these enormous elderly in their folk clothes – hence the nickname “tatik-papik”, grandpa and grandma – are to represent the centenarians people of the mountains and the heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh.