The places
of the Soviet Union.

Red Square (the original Kremlin facade, the Lenin Mausoleum, the GUM department store, the State Historical Museum, St Basil's Cathedral). The Kremlin itself — the Armoury chamber holding the imperial regalia and the Soviet-era state gifts; the cathedrals of the Annunciation, Archangel, and Assumption; the Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon. The Moscow Metro stations of the 1930s-1950s line (Mayakovskaya, Novokuznetskaya, Komsomolskaya-Kolskaya, Belorusskaya, Kievskaya, Park Pobedy) are visitable on a metro ticket and constitute, collectively, one of the great public-art programmes of the twentieth century. The VDNKh exhibition complex preserves Stalin-era socialist-realist architecture and the original Vostok rocket display.

The Winter Palace (the State Hermitage Museum, with the rooms where the Provisional Government was arrested in October 1917 preserved on the ground floor); the Smolny Institute (the Bolshevik headquarters of 1917, and Kirov's office where he was assassinated in 1934; now a working government building, visitable with arrangement); the Aurora cruiser still moored in the Bolshaya Nevka; the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery (the mass graves of the 470,000 Leningraders who died in the 872-day Siege); the Museum of Political History at the Mansion of Kshesinskaya (where Lenin spoke from the balcony in April 1917).

The site of the largest urban battle in history (August 1942 – February 1943). Mamayev Kurgan — the central tactical high ground of the battle, on which Yevgeny Vuchetich's 87-metre The Motherland Calls statue stands; the panorama museum at the foot of the kurgan houses the largest single battle-panorama painting in the world. The Pavlov House (a four-storey apartment building defended by a single Soviet platoon for 58 days, now preserved with the original wartime brickwork on one side and modern reconstruction on the other) is a few streets from the city centre. The flour mill ruins are preserved untouched on the riverbank.

Outside Moscow, the closed-city training base of the Soviet (now Russian) cosmonaut corps since 1960. The training pool (where cosmonauts practise spacewalks in mock-up modules), the centrifuge, the Soyuz simulators, and Yuri Gagarin's preserved office are all open to tour visits arranged in advance. The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre maintains a small museum on site. Two hours from central Moscow.

The Motherland Monument (62 metres of titanium statue commemorating the Great Patriotic War, completed 1981); the Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War in its base; the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide near the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra; the surviving Stalin-era avenues (Khreshchatyk was substantially rebuilt 1944-1954). The Chernobyl exclusion zone is two hours north of Kyiv; tour access varies. Travel conditions at the time of writing reflect the ongoing war.

Almost entirely destroyed in the Great Patriotic War and rebuilt 1944-1954 as a showcase Stalin-era city. Independence Avenue (formerly Lenin Prospekt) is the canonical Stalin-era boulevard, with monumental neoclassical façades for fifteen kilometres. The Great Patriotic War Museum (relocated to a new building in 2014) is one of the most extensive WWII museums anywhere. The Khatyn memorial (75 km north, the burned village preserved as a memorial to the 9,200 Belarusian villages destroyed during German occupation) is a major Soviet-era memorial site.

The Republic Square (the central Stalin-era ensemble, completed 1957); the Matenadaran (the institute of ancient manuscripts, founded as a Soviet institution in 1959); the Genocide Memorial at Tsitsernakaberd (the central memorial to the 1915 Ottoman genocide of Armenians, built in 1967 — the date is significant; the Soviet authorities had refused permission for such a memorial for decades, and its eventual construction reflected the dynamics of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period). Excellent base for trips to the medieval Armenian monasteries (Geghard, Khor Virap, Tatev).

The Old Town, surprisingly intact through the Soviet period; the Stalin Underground Printing Press Museum (in the cellar where the young Bolshevik Stalin operated an illegal press in 1903–06, preserved as a Soviet-era shrine, still maintained); the Mtatsminda funicular (Soviet-era infrastructure, still in use); and an excellent day trip to Gori — Stalin's birthplace, where the Stalin Museum and his preserved birthplace house (the cottage now stands inside an open-domed Soviet pavilion) are the principal sites. Georgia's relationship with the Soviet inheritance is more complicated than that of most former republics; the Stalin Museum's 1957 displays have been only partially updated.

Substantially destroyed by the earthquake of April 1966 and entirely rebuilt in late-Soviet style. The Tashkent Metro (opened 1977, the first metro in Central Asia, with elaborate Soviet-period stations including Kosmonavtlar and Alisher Navoi) is visitable on a single ticket. The Friendship of Peoples Square preserves the original Soviet ensemble. The Museum of Applied Arts of Uzbekistan and the State Museum of History are the cultural anchors.

The Soviet space launch facility from which Sputnik (1957), Gagarin (1961), and every Soyuz mission to the International Space Station have launched. Still operational under Russian lease from Kazakhstan until at least 2050. Tour access is available for crewed launches; the schedule and arrangements are coordinated through specialist tour operators. The associated city of Baikonur is open to authorised visitors only.

The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights (formerly the Museum of Genocide Victims) occupies the original KGB headquarters at Aukų gatvė 2A, with the cells, interrogation rooms, and execution chamber in the basement preserved. One of the most thorough museum documentations of Soviet repression anywhere. Also: the TV Tower (where Soviet troops killed thirteen unarmed civilians on 13 January 1991, with the memorial preserved on site); the Soviet-era monumental sculptures relocated to Grūtas Park, 130 km south, for ironic display.

The Museum of Occupations and Freedom (rebranded Vabamu in 2018) documents the Estonian experience of Soviet and German occupations and the Estonian independence movement. The Patarei prison complex, a former tsarist sea fortress converted to a Soviet prison and used by the KGB for executions, is a stark unrestored site visitable in summer. The Maarjamäe palace, now a Soviet-era history annexe of the Estonian History Museum, preserves the Soviet-era victory monument in its original form and the disassembled statues of Lenin and other Soviet figures.

The exclusion zone around the destroyed reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (26 April 1986) covers about 2,600 square kilometres of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Tour access from Kyiv (when conditions allow) takes visitors to the former town of Pripyat (the abandoned Soviet city of 49,000 evacuated in April 1986, preserved largely as it was left), the duga radar installation (the enormous over-the-horizon Soviet early-warning radar, declassified after the Soviet collapse), and the New Safe Confinement structure that since 2016 covers the destroyed reactor.

The former fishing port of Moynaq, on the southern shore of the Aral Sea. Soviet irrigation programmes for cotton cultivation diverted the rivers that fed the Aral starting in the 1960s; the sea has retreated approximately 200 kilometres from Moynaq since. The town's harbour, with about ten fishing trawlers and tugs preserved on the desert floor where the sea used to be, is the single most visible monument of Soviet environmental policy. The annual Stihia electronic-music festival (since 2018) is held in the dry seabed.

Founded in 1929 on a greenfield site at the Magnitnaya mountain in the southern Urals as the centrepiece of the First Five-Year Plan. Built with American architectural and engineering assistance (the Cleveland firm of McKee designed the steel plant on the model of US Steel's Gary, Indiana works). Population today: about 400,000. The original Stalin-era city centre and the steel complex are still operating. Air quality is among the worst in Russia.

The Soviet Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch, founded in 1957 outside Novosibirsk in the forest, was the Khrushchev-era project to relocate substantial Soviet scientific capacity east of the Urals. The result was a city of about 70,000 academics and support staff, with substantial autonomy, an unusually well-educated population, and (in the 1960s) a relatively liberal intellectual culture. The institutes are still operating; the architecture is intact 1960s late-Soviet modernist; the Geological Museum on the Lavrentyev Avenue is a particular highlight.

Opened on the 15th of May 1935. The first-generation stations of the 1930s-1950s are public museums in their own right; a self-guided tour of Mayakovskaya (1938, the canonical Soviet Art Deco station, with mosaics designed by Aleksandr Deyneka), Komsomolskaya-Kolskaya (1952, Stalin-era victory baroque), Park Kultury (1935), Kropotkinskaya (1935), Belorusskaya (1952), Kievskaya (1954, with the famous mosaics on Ukrainian themes), Novoslobodskaya (1952, with backlit stained glass) takes a full afternoon. Single metro ticket; total cost about a dollar.

The first metro in Central Asia (opened 1977). Stations particularly worth visiting: Kosmonavtlar (in honour of the cosmonauts, with portraits of Gagarin and other Soviet space figures), Alisher Navoi (Uzbek classical literature in tilework), Pakhtakor (the cotton-pickers' station). Photography in the Tashkent Metro was prohibited until 2018 and has been restricted at periods since; check current rules.

The Russian-speaking community of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighbourhood, populated principally by Jewish emigrants from Odessa and other Soviet cities in the 1970s and 1990s, preserves a Soviet urban culture in striking concentration. The boardwalk restaurants serve the dishes of late Soviet special-occasion cuisine; the bookstores stock Soviet- and post-Soviet-period Russian literature; the streets still hear Russian as the dominant language. The community is changing, but the visible Soviet inheritance remains substantial.

The principal Soviet war memorial outside the former Soviet Union, opened in May 1949 by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. Designed by Yakov Belopolsky, with Yevgeny Vuchetich's 12-metre bronze of the Soviet Soldier holding a rescued German child and crushing a swastika underfoot at its centre. About 7,000 Soviet soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin are buried at the site. Maintained today by the Berlin Senate under the terms of the German Reunification Treaty of 1990, which requires perpetual upkeep of the Soviet war memorials in the former GDR. The single most striking surviving Soviet monument in Western Europe.