Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko scaled the length and breadth of the country during his search for the ruins of the once important structures in the remotest parts of the Soviet Union. His two-year-long journey has culminated in a unique collection titled the Restricted Area.
Tkachenko has tried to depict what happens when a nation tries too hard to create a utopian society via by progress in the arena of science and technology.
“I travel in search of places which used to have great importance for the technical progress—and which are now deserted. Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete. Secret cities that cannot be found on maps, forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came.”
Tkachenko’s work will be displayed at the Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin.
VVA14 Airplane–amphibia with vertical take-off
Residential Complexes in an Abandoned Polar Biological Research Center
Obsolete Tropospheric antenna
A Cultural Center In A Former Mining Town, now converted into a Bombing Trial Field
Remains of Industry on a spent Oilfield
The city where Rocket Engines were made was a Restricted Area till 1992
An Abandoned Observatory with a Shuttered Telescope
A Deserted Military stronghold with an Underground Bunker
The world’s largest Diesel Submarine, Now Beached
An Interplanetary Connectivity antenna to connect the strongholds that the USSR planned to build on the other planets
Secret City Chelyabinsk-40 where the first Soviet Nuclear bomb was made
Space rockets left while still in their Building stage
Boiler House of a deserted Aerodrome
Previous Headquarters of the Communist Party
Rocket Fuel Waste Storage
Hangar at the Research Complex for Biological Weapons
Spy Antenna for Radio Surveillance
A desolate Coal Processing Unit
A lonely 4-km-deep Shaft for Research Purpose
Water Intake Plant
Excavator on a deserted Quarry
Remains of the ZET Laser Technology
Ground Control station for Spacecrafts
Research Outstation
The Forsaken Telescope
An Unfinished Space Port
The rocket atop the Monument to the Conquerers of Space reflects German V-2 Missile
The Salvaged Ship “Bulgaria” that drowned with 122 people aboard
A memorial on an abandoned Nuclear Complex
