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Resist erasure. Capture the legacy of a vanished era.

Every year, thousands of fragments of an entire civilisation disappear.

Imagine losing 15% of your country's cultural heritage each decade. The entire Renaissance would disappear in a century. This is what's happening to socialist-era monumental art. Perhaps half has already vanished since the collapse of the Soviet Union — destroyed for ideological reasons, cleared for development, or simply left to decay.

This is insanity.

Yet monumental memorials still loom over Eastern European squares, cosmic structures rise across the Caucasus, and fading mosaics continue to colour cities in Central Asia. Dismissed as ideology made concrete, these works reveal something more: artists who smuggled beauty into a system that demanded obedience. But as redevelopment and neglect accelerate, they too risk being lost forever.

This archive exists for one reason: to document and preserve the world's most endangered art before it vanishes completely.

328works documented
146Architecture
82Art
100Urban Forms
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Soviet Synthesis: How Decorative Art Shaped the Built Interior
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Soviet Synthesis: How Decorative Art Shaped the Built Interior

Soviet decorative art treated the interior as a single artwork. This piece traces how mosaics, stained glass, ceramics, metalwork, and sgraffito were integrated into Soviet, brutalist, and modernist architecture across the USSR through the principle of synthesis.