Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin – near Chișinău – Moldova

Posted on 15/11/2025 by Michael

Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin

Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin – near Chișinău – Moldova

This is the outside companion piece to the Petru Costin Gallery in Ialoveni. It is home to those artefacts (including a small plane and a couple of helicopters) that were either designed to be placed in the open air or are too big to be inside the gallery.

There’s a description of many of the items – so you can know who is actually represented and also at times an indication of where they came from, when and why they were removed. However, there’s no information on how they ended up in a field on the side of a valley in central Moldova.

There’s only one image of JV Stalin and that has been heavily vandalised. This initial attack would have taken place in the early 1960s (I would imagine) but it remained otherwise intact for the next 30 years during the period of Revisionist control of the first worker’s state. Where? It’s not known.

Not surprisingly there are many statues/busts of VI Lenin but amongst the collection there are also one or two surprises. There’s a head and shoulders of both a young and an older Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. There’s a bust of Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, who I would have thought would have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union as he represented a Russian as well as a Soviet achievement. Also, not a surprise, is the presence of a number of images of FE Dzerzhinsky (‘Iron Felix’), the first head of the Cheka.

YM Sverdlov, barely lived for two years after the October Revolution as he succumbed to the ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic in 1919 (a matter that rarely gets mentioned in histories of the Revolution but which must have had an impact on both sides in the Civil War/War of Intervention. There are a couple of busts of SM Kirov, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Leningrad who was assassinated in 1934. Military leaders are also represented, including VI Chapayev and MV Frunze, who both played a crucial role in the war to protect the Revolution during the Civil War against the White, reactionary forces.

There’s a couple of busts of Karl Marx but Frederick Engels isn’t represented. There are also a couple of statues of MI Kalinin, the Soviet President for just under 20 years – one of which doesn’t quite look right. The large, headless red torso is almost certainly that of JV Stalin – it has his classic stance. The whole statue must have been immense but there’s no more information about where it might have stood. It’s only speculation (based only on its size) that it might be what remains of the statue that stood at the entrance to the Volga-Don Canal, a little south of Stalingrad, which was replaced by a statue of VI Lenin.

There were also some statues – and pieces of statues – which wouldn’t have been controversial but had just, presumably, become ‘unloved’, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This statue park is similar to the Park of the Fallen/Muzeon Art Park in Moscow, the Museum of Socialist Art – Sofia and Memento Park close to Budapest.

Location;

2J94+54 Scoreni

That doesn’t look like an address but if you put it into a map search it will get you there.

How to get there;

This is a very unfriendly public transport location. The museum is about 5 km north-west of the town of Suruceni and the museum itself is along a dirt road just under a kilometre from the main road. It goes downhill (steeply) which means it comes up hill even more steeply. Consider the option of talking to Natalia at the Petru Costin Gallery in Ialoveni. It might turn out a bit more expensive but it will get you there much easier.

GPS;

47.01796 N

28.60530 E

Lubyanka Building, Moscow

Posted on 07/05/2024 by Michael

The original building

More on the USSR

Lubyanka Building

Lubyanka (Russian: Лубянка, ) is the popular name for the building which contains the headquarters of the Border Guard Service, (an agency of the FSB) and its affiliated prison, on Lubyanka Square in the Meshchansky District of Moscow, Russia. It is a large Neo-Baroque building with a façade of yellow brick designed by Alexander V. Ivanov in 1897 and augmented by Aleksey Shchusev from 1940 to 1947. It was previously the national headquarters of the KGB.

The Lubyanka was originally built in 1898 as the headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company (Rossiya Insurance Company). It is noted for its parquet floors and pale green walls. Belying its massiveness, the edifice avoids an impression of heroic scale: isolated Palladian and Baroque details, such as the minute pediments over the corner bays and the central loggia, are lost in an endlessly repeating palace façade where three bands of cornices emphasize the horizontal lines. A clock is centred in the uppermost band of the façade.

A fountain used to stand in front of the building, at the centre of Lubyanka Square. Following the Bolshevik Revolution the structure was taken over by the government in 1918 for use as the headquarters of the the Cheka. The prison is on the top floor, but since there are no windows on that floor, most prisoners, and therefore popular conception, thought they were being detained in its basement.

Lubyanka in 1961

In 1940, Aleksey Shchusev was commissioned to enlarge the building. By 1947, his new design had doubled Lubyanka’s size horizontally, with the original structure taking up the left half of the façade (as viewed from the street). He added another storey and extended the structure by incorporating backstreet buildings. Shchusev’s design accentuated Neo-Renaissance detailing, but only the right part of the façade was constructed under his direction in the 1940s, due to the war and other hindrances.

Lubyanka – 01

In 1958, the fountain at the centre of Lubyanka Square was replaced by a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (‘Iron Felix’), founder of the Cheka. This statue now stands, on its original plinth, in the Muzeon Art Park (Park of the Fallen).

The building’s asymmetric façade survived intact until 1983, when the original structure was reconstructed to match the new build, at the urging of Communist Party General Secretary and former KGB Director Yuri Andropov, in accordance with Shchusev’s plans.

Lubyanka during renovation in 1983

Although the Soviet secret police changed its name many times, their headquarters remained in this building. Secret police chiefs from Lavrenty Beria to Andropov used the same office on the third floor, which looked down on the statue of Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Lubyanka – 02

After the dissolution of the KGB in 1991, the Lubyanka became the headquarters of the Border Guard Service of Russia, as well as the Lubyanka prison, and is one directorate of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). A museum of the KGB (now called Историко-демонстрационный зал ФСБ России, Historical Demonstration hall of the Russian FSB) was opened to the public (but you have to get special permission to enter).

Text from Wikipedia.

Location;

2 Bolshaya Lubyanka Street.

GPS;

55.759204° N

37.62874° E

More on the USSR

Moscow Metro – Kievskaya – Line 5

Posted on 10/04/2023 by Michael

Kievskaya – Line 5

More on the USSR

Moscow Metro – a Socialist Realist Art Gallery

Moscow Metro – Kievskaya – Line 5

Kievskaya – Line 5 – 43

Kiyevskaya (Ки́евская) is a Moscow Metro station in the Dorogomilovo District, Western Administrative Okrug, Moscow. It is on the Koltsevaya Line, between Park Kultury and Krasnopresnenskaya stations. It is named after the nearby Kiyevsky Rail Terminal. The design for the station was chosen in an open competition held in Ukraine; the entry submitted by the team of E. I. Katonin, V. K. Skugarev, and G. E. Golubev placed first among 73 others and it became the final design. Kievskaya features low, square pylons faced with white marble and surmounted by large mosaics by A.V. Myzin celebrating Russo-Ukrainian unity. Both the mosaics and the arches between the pylons are edged with elaborate gold-coloured trim. At the end of the platform is a portrait of Vladimir Lenin.

Kievskaya – Line 5 – 17

(Have a look at the composite picture below. It shows the pre- and post ‘de-Stalinisation’ – and the removal of Comrade Stalin from behind VI Lenin..

Kievskaya – Line 5

And another panel which was completely changed – rather than a crude erasure.)

Kievskaya – Line 5 – 02

The entrance to the station, which is shared with both of the other two Kievskaya stations, is built into the Kiev railway station. With the completion of the segment of track between Belorusskaya and Park Kultury in 1954 the Koltsevaya Line became fully operational with trains running continuously around the loop for the first time.

Kievskaya – Line 5 – 16

One of the station’s entrances is topped by a reproduction of an Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrance by Hector Guimard, given by the Régie autonome des transports parisiens in 2006 in exchange for an artwork by Russian artist Ivan Lubennikov installed at Madeleine station in Paris.