Follow of the week: Soviet mosaics from the Far East to Moscow

A post shared by бетон и кусочки (@rukhina) on Jan 8, 2015 at 8:44am PST

Follow the Instagram account @rukhina for all your Soviet mosaic needs.

The account focuses not only on Moscow and well-publicised mosaics from the bigger cities but also posts lots of images from less well known places like Khabarovsk, Naro-Fominsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Tolyatti.

The Soviet mosaics are mix of art and propaganda — superbly crafted from the technical point of view but also propagating the ideas of the Party. Adorning the walls of factories, administrative buildings and apartment blocks, their location brought both beauty and ideology closer to people’s everyday lives. Themes stretch from the victory of communism to the nuclear-free planet, and are mostly in line with the ideology, with the rare exception of a piece focusing on imagery from folk stories and Russian history before the Russian Revolution.

There is information on the location of all the featured mosaics and buildings in the captions, available in Russian and in English (the English ones are usually posted as a separate comment under the photograph).