Photographer Travels Across Russia and Captures Forgotten Artefacts Of The Post-Soviet Era

Photographer Lana Sator travels across Russia in search of abandoned places. Her Instagram dedicated to industrial tourism and Soviet architecture have already attracted an impressive audience.

For Westerners trying to peer in, Russia seems impossibly secretive. But to Russians themselves, their cities are sprinkled with places deemed inaccessible to the general public. Places where rockets are built and spent nuclear reactors are stored, derelict bunkers and bomb shelters— a million eerie vestiges of a bygone Soviet era. And these are the places that urban explorer Lana Sator inevitably finds herself drawn to.

Lana lives in Moscow, and she’s been infiltrating some of Russia’s most secretive abandoned sites and buildings for more than 10 years. This act of “urban exploration”—commonly referred to as”urbex”—is highly illegal in Russia, insofar as it involves entering private property without permission. But for Lana, it’s a hobby and a way of peeking behind the curtain and lifting the lid on the country’s unique and enigmatic history.

More: Instagram h/t: vice