Various things in Russia, depicted in photographs (no 56k)

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-12-29 12:53pm

Here be a thread that would show various things in Russia and Former Soviet Union - the capital Moscow, the swampy Petersburg, the remote Siberian city of Omsk, where I live, and other places - all that I took pictures of. I like to take photographs sculpture, industrial objects, architecture, and daily life. The latter would often be illuminating and interesting, or at least I hope so

Therefore, those will be the main themes of this thread. It could also be used as a guide for sightseeing, especially what concerns Omsk. Though it's hard to imagine a foreign tourist to get so deep into the Motherland

Commentaries will be offered with each post, telling about the photo subject. Photos can be used as wallpapers by whoever likes them.

Series #1. Shattered Dreams

Location of the object, clickable. Will lead to Google Maps satellite:

In the quartals of Old Kirovsk - an old, industrial part of the city which used to be a village called Kulomzino, based around the railway line and the railway bridge over the river Irtysh, you can find this little memorial. There is no date for the sculpture and no inscriptions on it's postament. It looks worn-out (probably after several new paintings). The boy lacks a hand - quite likely the work of vandals. It just screams of the early Soviet era, when it was probably built. Then it slowly aged through the years and was weathered, like the dream of equality and justice for all. It feels calm and sad. When the weather was right, I took my NIKON D50 and made this photo series.

I frequently visit the small park which is right near the bus stop - there's the Kirovsk military commisariat for army draftees and a tax collector's office several hundred meters away.

If you ever come to Omsk and ask me to be your guide, we'd probably start our tour around the industrial Old Kirovsk from this very place.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-12-29 12:58pm

Aw. Wrong forum... kick that to AMP please

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-12-29 02:23pm

Omsk Oil Refinery

Location:

Building the massive oil refinery in Omsk became viable in the early 50s. The plans were acted upon - in 1955, the first refining complex AVT-1 started working. Maluntsev, the first director of the Omsk Oil Refinery was and still is revered in Omsk, there are streets and a culture hall named in his honor.

The factory proceeded to sprawl and modernize through the 60s, 70s and 80s, ultimately becoming an oil refining giant, one of the largest oil refineries in Asia and the biggest in the USSR. Here's the history. By mid-70s the factory's output reached 24 million tons, and it became the largest oil refinery in the country. In 1978 and 1980, the factory managed to top over 28 million tons of oil. By the year 1997, the factory processed 800 million tons of crude. It's average output is 19,5 million ton per year.

First the factory developed the fuel cracking, but in the 60s already it developed a broad amount of oil products: fuels, oils, grease, and other chemicals. This helped the complex to become the largest in Russia. In 1984 aromatic carbons unit was put in line, using the most modern technologies of the famous UOP Company.

A huge part of the city, the Neftyaniki (oilers') was devoted to housing the factory workers. The massive factory can only be partly seen on the satellite map - it's lands take probably around 1-2% percent of the city area. People used to joke various jokes about the ONPZ - it's oil towers with fires upon them were related to small children (me and my mother for example) as "city fires, which should burn, else the city die" - given the vitality of ONPZ, the tale wasn't that far from truth.

In the latest years, the factory has been in property of the megacorp SIBNEFT, which transferred it's main office to Petersburg. This led to Omsk losing 5 billion roubles in taxes from the ONPZ, officially. Quite probably a half of the budget was lost due to this transfer.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2007-12-29 02:32pm

Ooh, nice target for SAC.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-12-29 08:15pm

Very nice photography Stas. Love the statue, very symbolic of the whole '90ies transition.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2007-12-29 09:43pm

Stas Bush wrote:Aw. Wrong forum... kick that to AMP please

Certainly, and, great stuff.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-01-04 02:12pm

Series #2. Angels of the Space Obelisk (Moscow)

Location of the object, clickable. Will lead to Google Maps satellite:

White Angel of Space:

The Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics - Monument to the Conquerors of Space:

Not only a museum but also a memorial. A huge metal trampoline tipped with a rocket aiming towards the sky. The height of the monument - 350 feet, weight - 250 tons. Most of the information about it you can get from the link to Wikipedia, including the history of construction and a general view of the memorial

Visiting the VDNH, close to which the monument is situated, I caught a rare moment - a bride in her white dress was sitting right next to the massive obelisk. It was symbolic and beautiful, to me at least.

Here's the same moment in black and white:

Approximate translation of the insciription: "And the reward for our efforts was that, having triumphed over oppression and darkness, we have forged wings of fire for our land and our century!"

The Cosmonauts - first Angels of Space:

You can see people behind Gagarin holding various little Sputniks in their hands

The Obelisk Plates:

At first the material selected for the stella was dim glass, but Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, the Soviet space constructor genius, proposed to use titan instead - a metal almost immune to aging. Titan panels 1,5mm thick cover the monument in a complex pattern and conceal the carrying carcass. The tip of the obelisk used unique engineering solutions, it's off-angle is 77 degrees.

Imperial Overlord · Post by **Imperial Overlord** » 2008-01-04 02:36pm

Sweet.

Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba · Post by **Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba** » 2008-01-04 02:47pm

It looks like the cosmonauts are in cahoots with the Brotherhood of NOD.

Also, that's so cool.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-01-04 03:24pm

Series #3. The Great Tower (Moscow)

Location of the object, clickable. Will lead to Google Maps satellite:

Falling into Moscow Sky:

Ostankino Tower, as blunt as you could be:

The Spire of the Tower:

The Ostankino Television Tower - tallest tower in Europe and the second highest tower in the world, the 540-meter concrete giant is visible very well from many points in Moscow. It's mass - 51 400 ton, the spire has a limit of 12 meter off-set due to wind resistance, relative to base. The main observational platform, which allows you to see all Moscow, is located at 337m, in the "7th Sky" (Sedmoye Nebo) restaurant. 4 passenger and 5 cargo lifts are operating inside the tower. It has survived several fires in the recent years.

The quest for gigantic TW towers was pretty much a given, considering the Soviet love of giant building competitions with other countries on one hand, and the pretty real urban sprawl of the Moscow megapolis - the tower at 500 meters barely covered the 120 km radius of the Moscow region - on the other. The leading Soviet and Western engineers at the time proposed a traditional foundation, and the calculations required a depth of 40 meters... this put forward serious problems before anyone planning such a tower.

It's architect Nikolai Nikitin (15.12.1907 - 03.03.1973):

Nicked "the ferrocrete romantic", he was recalled as a man who was only interested by ferrocrete and metals as precious, all-powerful sculpture material - and little else (at the end of his life he wrote a wonderful book with a telling name: "Some considerations on building ferrocrete constructions"

in fact those are sort of a life memoirs and contain lots of stuff about architectural art). A brilliant designer of building and sculpture carrying carcasses, he later told that he devised the project idea of the gigantic tower when the he was looking at the TV Tower in Stuttgart from a cafe, just for his own fun - and several month later, the Soviet government announced a competition for architects for the giant tower - Nikitin easily won it, since his project was the most compact and required less material costs than, say, a huge and angled metal tower.

The solution was putting thick metallic threads into a hollow ferroconcrete cylinder, which this tower essentially is. The 380m high cylinder was stressed by 149 vertical 38mm steel threads, put along the inner surface of the tower:

The total stress was 10,8 thousand tons. Such a system gave the tower extreme rigidity and stability, as well as stopping any possible cracks and erosion in the ferroconcrete. A 120-meter high steel spire crowned the tower. No deep foundations were required - the pride of Nikitin, he said that the tower could rest its own mass of 30,000 tons on a small ferroconcrete plate: "A human being, given his proportions, has a worse stability on his feet, and yet he stands and even walks!" The tower has 10 small concrete "legs" 60 meters apart each.

The massive building took 4 years to construct (1963-1967): over 40 project institutes took part in it's construction, dozens of factories. The detailed history of construction can be read here, at the TV Tower History.

Of course, the ferroconcrete tower was much higher than the ancient Tower of Babel - but God didn't come down to smite the unrighteous, neither in 1960s, nor later during the construction of the CN Tower, which employed a similar thread-stress system and was higher than the Ostankino. I guess God was too worn out to stop those towers...

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2008-01-04 11:29pm

Did you take these pictures yourself? Man, AWESOME! I love the tower and that motherfuckin' obelisk is frickin' sweet! The panels on that obelisk and it's sheer angles...man, wow.

Makes me want to go to Russia. Soviet Russia.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-01-06 10:32am

Series #4. The People of Omsk

Wanderer of the concrete labyrinth:

An elderly man, one of those hardest hit by the expansion of poverty in the last dozen years, walks around with his staff and a bag of bread. It's winter. It was minus 30 just few days before I made these shots.

A female trolleybus driver:

A female trolleybus driver is putting the conducting rods back onto the wires with ropes near a trolley turn-around stop (where wires allow the bus to change direction). Just a minute - and she returns to the drivers cabin, for several more trips around the winter city.

A woman walking:

It's summertime, and a woman walks along the road, just leaving a bookstore it seems.

A homeless person wanders in the summer streets:

He's old, and there's not much hope for a return to normal life for him. I don't know whom he was, although I chatted with him for several minutes. Might be a former convict, released from prison, unable to find a job and left to wander the streets - or just one of the pauperized beggars - his fate is sad nonetheless.

The police and medics drag out a bridge jumper from the river:

Your humble servant once occasionally observed a suicidal jump from a bridge into the river Irtysh. The person who did this was totally drunk and he made a bet with his pal (a likewise drunkard) that he will jump. He waited for hours with television and police arriving at the place, but then actually jumped. It took the boats half an hour to drag him out - he was resisting help actively. Finally he was put ashore, and when his clothes dried out in the sun, the police took him into custody.

Two lovers stand on the riverbank:

Somewhere along the recently reconstructed riverbank, which architectural design crudely imitates the banks of Neva in St-Petersburg, I spotted those two.

Three old comrades:

Three old comrades discuss something in a circle on the communist rally on October revolution day.

A veteran scuttler:

He resides in a ship repair and scuttle industrial zone which I visited freqeuntly. A wounded veteran of the Afghanistan War - note the large belly scar - he guards the zone and often works with the scuttlers (and drinks with them, too). Strong and friendly person, he lives in this remote industrial zone and generally doesn't pay much attention to the outside world; he's living in his own one. He has many tales to tell - of war and seafaring, of ships and guns - but most of the time he just sits in his booth with his two assistant guards and drinks either tea, or vodka if it's a holiday.

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2008-01-06 11:38am

Man, I can really tell that you love your photography. From your photos, I can tell that while Russia is a place of much hardship, in spite of all the troubles, it is also a very beautiful country. Is that why you do what you do?

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-01-06 01:50pm

Yeah, sort of. I'm fond of my country and it's people. In many ways Russian buildings, russian machinery and russian people share similar traits - they're not exactly the nicest, maybe not the most well-groomed, but they're very hardy and resilent - something that our natural environment forces on us - design must be functional and preferrably cheap, nevermind the looks.

Series #5. An Ode to Concrete Panel Buildings - the Khrushovka and the Brezhnew 9-14

Precast concrete buildings, or "panel houses" (panel'nye doma) as they're known in Russia, have been mass-started in the age of Khrushev. In the 1960s, those panel houses were built only 5-storeys high, since it was the maximum number of storeys allowed without an elevator by medical standards.

However, in the 70s and 80s the "khrushevka" was discarded and new typical projects were made - of 9, 11, 12 and 14 storey concrete buildings. The most common of those were the 9-storey "ocean liner houses" (series 600 and it's offshoots), nicked for long and uniform rows of windows resembling the decks of an ocean liner. A bit less common - "towers" - 1-entrance 14-storey buildings. Those buildings could house (and therefore heat and shelter) more people. The common planned flats were 1, 2 and 3 rooms. They might not have the best looks, but they're very resilent and cheap to construct, allowing millions of Soviet citizens to receive much better housing. They also allow for centralized heating, food supply and education, which is important in such harsh climatic conditions as Russia's. A common Soviet "brezhnewka" is fitted with a fast lift and a garbage chute. The panels as you can see below are covered with little white plates - those are meant to protect the concrete surface from deterioration. During the Soviet era, they were produced massively and we used to grab handfuls of them at construction sites and play something similar to "marbles".

Today buying a flat in a "brezhnewka" is the dream for a generic young specialist or a well-paid worker in Russia - what most would say is the base of "middle class" - prices start out from 1 million roubles for a 1-room flat in provincial cities. The 9-storey panel house project remains popular and constitutes the bulk of new housing in construction in Omsk.

Wonky patterns and color rythms:

Prefab projects didn't go completely undecorated - buildings which stand on the exterior part of a quartal usually have some sort of color patterns, decorative tiling or even murals. In one quartal all 5-storey prefabs have different decorative patterns on their balconies:

Murals on the sides of three concrete houses, a triptych:

They are on three separate houses' sides, and depict scenes from traditional Russian fairy tales; similar murals depicting breakthroughs in science, space exploration, and industrial production could be found elsewhere in the city.

Those murals were found on the street of a Hero:

S.G. Fugenfirov, born 1917, died in the Great Patriotic War, 1942, defending the country in the Omsk division #308.

Another set of murals was found on a school building:

Locations:

Welcome to a walk around my neighborhood!

The left bank of Omsk is a child of the late 60s early 70s, a swampy river delta transformed into a massive living space through the feat of human engineering and labour, one of the few such experiments in the world. It's completely built with concrete prefabs of the Brezhnew era.

Note how dozens of shops, schools, kids' clubs and kidergartens are hidden amidst uniform 9-storey prefabs. The whole district is very orderly planned and uniform, it was envisioned as a "worker's living place" where people could educate their kids and have all needed infrastructure at hand per the general city plan.

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2008-01-06 02:04pm

Those prefab buildings make me wretch. Robert Moses would be proud.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-04-23 12:30am

Series #6. Me and Ania go to an abandoned concrete installation

The huge abandoned object was found to be too huge to be adequately grasped by our handy camera, so we went for a simple photoshoot instead.

Location of the place not disclosed

The Grim Squeaker · Post by **The Grim Squeaker** » 2008-04-23 02:46am

Wonderful stuff, loved all of it, although the concrete buildings weren't exactly my style. (Still, to each country it's own design, and at least it's economical. The decorated parts of the prefabs are nice).

FSTargetDrone · Post by **FSTargetDrone** » 2008-04-23 02:59pm

Great pics.

Stas Bush wrote:Series #6. Me and Ania go to an abandoned concrete installation

The huge abandoned object was found to be too huge to be adequately grasped by our handy camera, so we went for a simple photoshoot instead

Sorry, bit confused here, what is this place? Can you tell us what kind of installation it is? A concrete-manufacturing installation, or..?

I'm going to go way out on a limb and assume that the rusted box with the scary-looking black bolt was electrified, but beyond that, I can't tell what the place is for.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-04-23 10:55pm

Sorry, bit confused here, what is this place?

It's a huge concrete ring around 20m in diameter. There's also an underground gas depot nearby. Constructed in 1998, abandoned (probabaly when the financial crisis hit). It's real function is hard to discern. Some sort of military hardpoint? Artificial lake? Gas/oil hardened reservoir to be fit into it? Dunno.

Post by **Simplicius** » 2008-04-24 12:12am

Some of these photos are really quite good. And I like to see other places anyway, particularly when the odds of ever getting there myself are just about nil.

I couldn't tell even by looking at the higher resolution image, but is that tryptich of the fairy tales done as a mosaic, or is it painted over basic white tiles?

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2008-04-24 12:20am

Mosaic. As for other places, I have a lot to show, but going over my old photobank is a time-consuming task

Feil · Post by **Feil** » 2008-04-24 12:23am

Some really great photos, Stas. I think my favorite was the homeless person in summer - but the second photo from the "concrete installation" is also very cool. It looks like it should be the cover of a movie poster or something. Keep posting

FSTargetDrone · Post by **FSTargetDrone** » 2008-04-24 02:59am

Stas Bush wrote:It's a huge concrete ring around 20m in diameter. There's also an underground gas depot nearby. Constructed in 1998, abandoned (probabaly when the financial crisis hit). It's real function is hard to discern. Some sort of military hardpoint? Artificial lake? Gas/oil hardened reservoir to be fit into it? Dunno.

Fascinating...

Anyway, great info and pics about the tower's structure in particular. That was really interesting.

Feil wrote:Some really great photos, Stas. I think my favorite was the homeless person in summer - but the second photo from the "concrete installation" is also very cool. It looks like it should be the cover of a movie poster or something. Keep posting

Or an album cover. Say, for something like a Pink Floyd album.

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2008-04-24 06:41am

Excellent.

I still can't get over the Obelisk. Man, Russia is a wonderful country and I can see why you love it so

PeZook · Post by **PeZook** » 2008-04-24 06:49am

We've plenty of those concrete "blocs" (that's what we call'em) here as well, although they are popularly regarded as lousy places to live,and districts they are concentrated in are usually rife with crime. A Soviet legacy

Though blaming the buildings for that would be really inappropriate - they did provide housing for literally millions of people, it's just that the concept for post-transformation upkeep failed spectacularly and they have been left to dilapidate slowly.

Awesome photo shoot, Stas. And...you've probably been told that before, but Ania is totally hot

EDIT: By the way, my elementary school was located in a building that was almost exactly like the one Stas posted. This is a standardized project as well, right?