One of the tallest buildings built in Soviet-era Moscow was the massive edifice of Moscow State University.

EnglishRussia.com recently had this very cool photo essay showing the passage of some very brave individual all the way up the central tower and to the very top of the giant star.

One of the most iconic images of the Cold War era is the imposing citadel of the Kremlin: mysterious, vaguely threatening, its huge walls a perfect metaphor for Soviet implacability, its spires topped with glowing red stars that were for decades so ominous and then suddenly so pathetic. The Soviets didn’t build the Kremlin, they merely appropriated it for their own use, but it does seem like the perfect match, as if the Kremlin simply waited around until the Bolsheviks showed up to the party.

This post at the always-interesting English Russia blog talks about the history of the replacement of the Imperial Russian double-eagle symbol with the red stars and hammer-and-sickle. You would think that this was one of the first things the Bolsheviks would have done upon seizing power, but in fact it wasn’t done until the mid-1930s — a point in Soviet history where Stalin began creating the image of the mighty USSR, no longer a nation in revolutionary struggle, but an emerging power and the center of “the future of the world”.

The red stars still sit atop the two spires of the Kremlin, even though the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist almost 20 years ago. Maybe now that Communism has been more or less displaced with gangster-capitalism, they could replace the stars with the heads of assassinated Russian Mafia dons like these creepy grave markers .

This post at EnglishRussia.com has photos of a series of whimsical street lights in Moscow that represent the 12 signs of the Zodiac. The one I’ve posted here is Ares. I also really like the one for Pisces.

If you’re interested in the history of space exploration, you will thoroughly enjoy this website which has a ton of photos from a museum of the Soviet space program housed at the Energia Space Center in Moscow. Now a private company, Energia was the design center for most of the Soviet-era spacecraft.

(The spacecraft in the photo above is a replica of Sputnik 2, complete with a figure of Laika, the Space dog)