Traces of Soviet Union in Moscow

Some of the former Soviet Union countries have removed all traces of their Soviet part. Ukraine recently saw a mass removal of many Lenin statues, although many still remain, but Moscow is different and the Soviet legacy is visible all over the city, starting with the red stars above the Kremlin.

It's true that the Lenin bust in Leningradsky Station is now gone but other monuments like Vera Mukhina's monumental statue "Worker and Kolkhoz woman," near VDNKh metro station, still stand proud. Indeed, it is now more prominent than in Soviet times after being put on top of a huge building a few years ago.

The best place to see a hammer and a sickle is to go to the Seven Sisters, the set of Stalin-era skyscrapers, which are home to huge statues of workers and Soviet heroes.

The Moscow metro is paradise for lovers of Soviet metal work, mosaics and red stars. If you look at the mosaic at Serpukhovskaya metro station, which show a joyful crowd carrying a portrait of a cosmonaut, presumably Gagarin, you can see that it looks out of place. That's because the crowd did once carry a portrait of Josef Stalin, but it was changed once the leader fell out of favor in the 1950s.