Just ealier today - indeed, an hour or so ago - I was thinking about Soviet architecture and aesthetics. Specifically, I was thinking about how a lot of the early Soviet revolutionaries changed their names into scary super-villain names in order to be more awesome when they entered the public sphere. Stalin means "Steel". Molotov means "Hammer". It would be like me changing my name to Inferno and then running for office and winning. To me, there's something so ... shameless about it. And not in a bad way, either. These folks were totally unashamed of their affectations, and I think it has a lot to do with what the Soviet Union was all about. 

They were basically destroying their old culture, their old history, their old way of life, and building something completely new from the ground up. Yes, I will gladly admit that it all fell to crap pretty quickly, and much of that was the fault of a system which would allow a lunatic like Stalin to gain power and retain it, unchecked, for so many years. But along the way, they did some really neat things with architecture and music and statuary. To this day, I can't listen to the Soviet national anthem as sung by the Red Army Chorus without feeling a fluttering in my chest. 

And then I get home, and a posting in a community I'm in led me to some Wikipedia-browsing, which led me to an image of this monument to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space: 



Of all of the many Soviet munuments and such I've seen, this has to be the most unabashedly and completely awesome. I mean, good enough that Stalin and Molotov chose super-villain names for themselves, but Gagarin here looks like a fucking cosmic super-man. Just breathtaking. And there's that Soviet sense of aesthetics; angular, striking, striving, victorious.

I view it as a considerable tragedy that they never got around to finishing construction on the Temple of the Soviets, which looked like it would have been a truly amazing piece of work.