GORGEOUS PHOTOS OF DILAPIDATED RELICS OF THE SOVIET ERA

via CNN:

The Bartini Beriev VVA-14 (above) is one of the most bizarre airplanes ever made. It could take off vertically and land on the water, and it was designed to search and destroy US submarines during the Cold War.

After its first flight from a regular runway in 1972, parts were added to make it amphibious. It could fly low on the water, skimming the surface while patrolling for targets. Part space ship, part hydrofoil, it didn't exactly look elegant in flight, but it was packed with technical achievements.
Following the death of its inventor, Italian-born engineer Robert Bartini, in 1974, the project was abandoned. The VVA-14 only racked up about 100 flight hours and just two prototypes were built. The only surviving one now sits in an airfield at the Central Air Force Museum outside Moscow, its wings missing, a dilapidated relic of times past.

It is the perfect symbol for "Restricted Areas," a photo series produced over the course of three winters by Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko, which immortalizes Soviet artifacts in high snow.

Many of the areas where the photos were taken were inaccessible during the Soviet era, as they contained classified technology. They depict monuments, factories, military bases and various kinds of vehicles and technology, most in an advanced state of decay.

Tkachenko says the project is about humanity's utopian drive for technological progress. But this drive came at a high price, he thinks, because governments were ready to sacrifice almost everything for it.

"I travel in search of places which used to have great importance for the technical progress, and which are now deserted," he writes on his website.

"Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete. Secret cities that cannot be found on maps, forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came."

An old Soviet submarine, model B-307, Tango class, on the grounds of the Avtovaz Technical Museum in Tolyatti, Russia. The B-307 entered service in 1977 and was decommissioned in 2002. At 300 feet in length (91 meters) it was the world's largest diesel submarine of its time.

This futuristic building, which sits on the Buzludzha peak in the Balkan Mountains of Bulgaria, was erected in 1981 by the Bulgarian communist party to celebrate its history. 

This 350 ft (107 m) tall obelisk made of titanium was erected in Moscow in 1964 to celebrate the early achievements of the USSR in space exploration: among others, the first satellite (1957), the first unmanned Moon landing (1959), the first man in space (1961) and the first woman in space (1963). It depicts a rocket taking off and leaving an exhaust plume behind. The structure was inaugurated on the 7th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik-1, the first man-made object to enter Earth's orbit. At its base sits a museum which was opened in 1981.

Stages of space rockets in the Kyzylorda province of Kazakhstan, which hosts the world's most active spaceport, the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It is currently used to send and retrieve astronauts from the International Space Station, using Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Part of an unfinished structure -- which bears some resemblance to a Star Wars Sandcrawler -- in the vicinity of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.

A sarcophagus over a closed, 4 km deep shaft in the Murmansk region of Russia. The hole was drilled for scientific research and is not the deepest in the area: the nearby Kola Superdeep Borehole, drilled in 1989, is still one of the world's deepest artificial points at 12,262 meters (40,230 ft).

An abandoned tropospheric scatter station -- once used to send radio signals over long distances -- in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, a region in the far northeast of Russia which projects eastward forming the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.

A view of Dzerzhinsky, a town near Moscow where rocket engines were produced in Soviet times.

An old telescope at the Tien Shan Astronomical Observatory, located at an altitude of 2,800 meters just south of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan.

A test bench for missiles in Kazakhstan, Kyzylorda region.

* (via CNN, photos by Danila Tkachenko)