- Between 2003 and 2006 I lived in Kazakhstan, and explored the five ‘Stan’ countries and former Soviet states of Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
Along these ancient silk routes I found more fascinating bus stops, often appearing in the middle of the desert, steppe or countryside, with no other sign of human settlement in sight.
This is such a trip. I grew up in Moscow for 6 and a half years and these images bring me way back. It's a custom that residents of Moscow or most cities in Russia have their city house and their dacha, or little house, typically hours outside the city in the countryside. There are hundreds of little towns, Chesalki, Stariki, Makeevskoye, Volokolomsk, that litter the woods and fields. And you see these bus stops with this alien Soviet architecture stuck out of place and time amidst tiny wooden houses and dirt roads. Oh the roads. My grandfather, who, like my father, is prone to exaggeration, used to tell me that all the tiny roads west of Moscow were all built in the 40s. Can you guess why? The Nazis, in their eastward expansion, build roads behind them for purposes of transportation, and because they thought they would forever hold these territories, they built the roads well. My grandfather (whose own father went MIA, very likely killed, during the Great Patriotic War under Zhukov, fighting towards Berlin) was always a little fond of German engineering. The roads leading to our dacha were in pretty bad shape by the mid 90s, but considering that they hadn't seen any rehabilitation or improvement in 60 years of Russian winters (and Russian drivers), it was a testament to the Nazi engineering corps that there remained any road at all. Thanks so much for the share.
Yep. Well, since this is the internet, no. There's definitely someone else. But why urine?
Holy wow. I have seen some rural bus stops in my life, but this article has been a unique experience. Some of those bus stops are architecturely amazing to my eye. I'd love to see them personally. Nowadays, most (if not all of the) Russian city bus stops are either older rough metall ones (painted over quite a few times with a different color every time) or modern-ish plastic/glass ones (they'd better fit on a photograph than in the city: when everything around is either cheap colored plastics, cheap tasteless ceramics or roughed up concrete, they look out of place). Will provide visual examples if requested.