Gagarin appears to be taking flight in this monumental mosaic, which exudes an impressive sense of dynamism. As the first man to fly into space, in a spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Gagarin became the hero of many mosaics across the Soviet Union. Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

Credits: Mathilde Ramkissoon (France, @sovietblocs)

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Bundled up, with only a pair of red-painted lips peeking out from between hats, scarves and coats. Good friends? Close relatives? In good company in any case, this pair of apashki (grandmothers in Kazakh) are making good use of the morning’s -15°C weather in Kazakhstan’s largest park, in Karaganda. Whether it’s morning or evening, a walk is a must for the inhabitants of Karaganda, regardless of the whims of the thermometer.

Credits: Hélène Garnier (France, @suneclat)

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This wall sculpture is located at the Museum of Memory for the Victims of Repression in the Dolinka Colony, also known as the KarLag Museum. For many years, the region was one of the main coal mining sites in the entire Soviet Union, and the KarLag labour camp provided the necessary manpower for this activity. Today, the town is still populated by the descendants of Germans, Poles, Koreans and other deportees from the 1930s and 1940s. The museum is located in the camp’s administrative building and opened to the public in 2011.

Credits: Mathilde Ramkissoon (France, @sovietblocs)

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The former infirmary of the Soviet prison labour camp in Karaganda (KarLag) reveals a bare interior where medical care must have been rudimentary. This labour camp, one of the largest in the USSR, covered 60,000 km² of steppe land converted into fields or pastures, to which up to 1 million prisoners were deported. An Austrian doctor, Angela Rohr, described the reality of the Gulag healthcare system in a rare testimony.

Credits : Mathilde Ramkissoon (France, @sovietblocs)

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In this office at the Karlag labour camp in Karaganda, the only decoration is a portrait of Lenin hanging on the wall. Some historians believe that Stalin’s Gulag was a natural extension of the labour camps run by Lenin’s Cheka. What is certain is that the article of the Soviet Criminal Code that would most often be invoked to imprison the regime’s real or supposed enemies in the camps was, in its original form, drafted by Lenin.

Credits : Mathilde Ramkissoon (France, @sovietblocs)

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In the administrative centre of the former KarLag gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, stands a brightly coloured flag, typical of the Stalinist era, bearing a slogan glorifying work. This type of message, intended to reinforce communist ideology in an environment as harsh as that of a labour camp, is a good illustration of the propaganda methods used by the Soviet regime.

Credit : Mathilde Ramkissoon (France, @sovietblocs)

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A shiny Yuri Gagarin stands tall in the city center of Karaganda. This monument dedicated to cosmonauts has been erected in 2014 to coincide with the 80th birthday of Gagarin. The city of Karaganda sits in the middle of the endless kazakh steppes. These steppes have been the landing site for many cosmonauts coming back from the International Space Station. Usually, Returning cosmonauts stay in Karaganda some days to recover and complete health checks, before being able to go back home.

Credits: Simone Bergonzi (Italy, @simobergz)

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