In the larger cities such as St. Petersburg, since the collapse of the communism most of the old Soviet street names have been changed to something a little less, erm, communist.<\/p>\n
Not so in Yuzhnii.\u00a0 Here we still have a Karl Marx Street, a Kommunisticheskii Prospekt, a Komsomolskaya Street, a Lenin Street, and a Lenin Square with the bearded twat himself still mounted on his perch.\u00a0 Not being content with simply a Victory Square complete with war memorial, we also have a Glory Square – complete with war memorial, and five hundred metres from Victory Square.\u00a0 The latter looks as though it was built in the seventies.\u00a0 We also have not one, but two streets lined with the war heroes from the Soviet conquest over the Japanese on Sakhalin in 1945 (a non-Russian account of which I would dearly love to read, if for no other reason than to validate what the Russians claim happened in terms of military\u00a0excellence and casualties on either side).\u00a0 And to cap it all off we have a park\u00a0dedicated to Yuri Gagarin who sits triumphantly in his spacesuit, arms aloft, helmet on knee, atop a\u00a0concrete obelisk\u00a0at the park entrance, no doubt wondering where it all went wrong as he contemplates the slovenly juveniles in shellsuits drinking vodka at its base.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the larger cities such as St. Petersburg, since the collapse of the communism most of the old Soviet street names have been changed to something a little less, erm, communist. Not so in Yuzhnii.\u00a0 Here we still have a … Continue reading