What is really curious about bus stops of the former Soviet Union?
Over one hundred of these exceptional bus stops are scattered throughout the former Soviet Union. The Canadian photographer Chris Herwig travelled around and photographed these works of Soviet´art for his book Soviet Bus Stops.
Well, standards, norms, equality and ordinarity was the main principle of Soviet aesthetic vision in every single part of live. Everything should be produced according to the standards issued by special controlling offices and approved by the leading Communist party.
We mentioned this principle of standards for fashion in our article of Post Soviet & the Russian Fashion which appeared to be so inspirational for modern global fashion scene. The same approach of global homogeneous almost uniform look was also applied to the architecture, urban planning and even life goals.
However, some who the creative spirit managed to come through and we can now be amazed by some crazy fun projects like all these bus stops. I assume that they were not built to impress somebody, because whom you want to impress in the middle of nowhere. They were just creative expression of artists, who could finally get crazy and do something special for them using state money, with probably unusually less communist´party control ever.
The whole transportation system in the former Soviet Union was built on bus routes, they united the country.
They were built in: Kazakhstan, Turtemenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus. Chris Herwig took amazing pictures and documented these unusual pieces of architectural art.
Nowadays, most of the bust stops are not being used anymore, because due to the changes, lot of villages and small cities died out. So these signs of the old times look strange and somehow sad, melancholic but crazy.
it´s all personal
Pictures by Chris Herwig
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