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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Weird Soviet metro stations 

Comrades! Now to be viewink Treehugger slideshow by Alex Pasternack "The Weird, Beautiful Metros of the Soviet Union."
From Petersburg to Novosibirsk, the former Soviet Union boasts some of the world's most unique and ambitious metro systems. Built at command-economy speed, these metros were the result of a political ideology that placed heavy emphasis not only on infrastructural prowess and efficiency (could communism be, dare we say, green?) but also on military readiness. Indeed, subways were seen as a crucial transport link for soldiers, and some of the USSR's metro stations were intended to double as bunkers in the event of war. Even if many of the subways have suffered from the financial and political turmoil left in the wake of the Soviet Union, they are still crucial modes of public transit -- and awesome eye candy for underground architecture buffs.

Tashkent


Leading architects and artists from Uzbekistan took part in creating the stations of the capital's metro, which remains the only subway in Central Asia. The seventh metro to be built in the USSR, the Tashkent metro is typical of Soviet subway systems: its stations are very deep, in the event that they need to serve as bomb shelters, and each is intricately decorated with mosaics, sculpture and bas-reliefs made of engraved metal, glass, granite, marble, or carved alabaster.

The themes of progress and internationalist culture are familiar, but the presence of Islamic motifs make the metro a singular, sometimes bizarre trip into elaborate Soviet subway design. It's not easy to take it with you though: it is illegal to take pictures inside the subway system or any of the stations because they are considered military installations.

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:03 PM

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