Tag: Soviet Era
100 cursed places found
Magadan
gulag sites and ghost towns - Amongst the most exotic destinations it is (just about) possible to travel to as a tourist – far out in Asian Russia , in...
Skrunda-1
Mežaine, officially Military training area Mežaine (Latvian: Militārais poligons Mežaine), is a Latvian National Armed Forces military training area of...
Iultin
(Russian: Иультин; Chukchi: Ивылтин) was an urban-type settlement in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, part of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia.
Soviet Tallinn
(non-guided) (guided) Like most cities that once formed part of the Soviet empire (whether as a member of the USSR itself or one of the Eastern Bloc...
Ligatne Soviet bunker
A marvellous Cold War relic from the Soviet era in Latvia – a formerly secret government bunker from where the Soviet administrative affairs were supposed...
Sorge open-air border museum
Another border museum on the former line of division between Germany East ( GDR ) and West ( FRG ) during the era of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War .
Monument to the 1973 uprising, Bangkok
A monument to and exhibition about the violent clashes between protesters and government forces in 1973, near the Democracy Monument, where protesters...
9th Fort
and Monument, Kaunas The top dark site in the area of Kaunas , Lithuania , hands down. In fact it's three sites in one, as it were.
EL-DE Haus
NS-Dokumentationszentrum A former Gestapo HQ and prison in Cologne , west Germany , and now also home to the city's documentation centre about the Nazi...
Kozloduy nuclear power plant
A large nuclear power station in Bulgaria – and until a few years ago one of the potentially most dangerous nuclear installations in the world.
Gori war museum
( if you can read Russian) A small museum in the Georgian town of Gori , which is better known for its large Stalin Museum .
Münchner Platz Memorial, Dresden
( for German speakers ) Part of a former courthouse and prison in Dresden , Germany , that was used as an execution site both by the Nazis in the Third...
Trinity
It was here, in the middle of the desert of the White Sands range in southern New Mexico, USA , that the first ever atomic bomb was detonated – in a test...
Karosta, Liepaja
Karosta - former naval base, Liepaja The formerly closed garrison town and Soviet naval base that takes up the northern part of the coastal city of...
Dresden
A city in the south-east of Germany that is in the dark annals of world history primarily as the victim of one of the worst aerial bombing raids in the...
Spitak
This town in northern Armenia was nearest to the epicentre of the devastating earthquake of 1988 that was accordingly named after Spitak – even though the...
Stutthof concentration camp
The concentration camp that the Nazis set up at the start of World War II for the Danzig/ Gdansk area, as the first such camp in what is today Poland .
Plac Solidarnosci
Plac Solidarności The area outside the main gates to the Gdańsk shipyards, famous as the backdrop for crucial parts of the media coverage of the trade...
Falstad Centre
This is the main memorial (as well as research/educational) centre in Norway about the camps for political prisoners, POWs and Jews that were established...
Maarjamäe memorial complex
There are three distinct points of interest here.
Ho Chi Minh Museum, Hanoi
Ho Chi Minh Museum (but weirdness factor 10!) A museum in Hanoi , Vietnam , about the country's deceased great communist leader.
Gori, Georgia
A town north-west of Georgia 's capital Tbilisi , and famous as the birthplace of Josef Stalin .
Mother Ukraine Monument
Motherland (Ukrainian: Батьківщина-Мати, romanized: Bat’kivszchyna-Maty [bɐtʲkʲiu̯ˈʃtʃɪnɐ ˈmɑtɪ]) is a monumental Soviet-era statue in Kyiv, the capital...
Sandbostel POW camp
memorial A former Nazi WWII camp for POW s, later overflow concentration camp , in fact one of the most significant such sites in northern Germany .
Kurchatov
Kazakhstan - darkometer rating : formerly 8 - now possibly no more than 5 or 6 ...
Harnekop nuclear bunker
Lost places: Harnekop nuclear bunker [ ] UPDATE: sadly, this place has now closed down, since it passed into new hands.
Enola Gay
The "Enola Gay" (for the plane alone; for the whole museum) This is the original B-29 bomber plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – now an...
Blood Road Museum
A small museum about the construction of a vital road in northern Norway during the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany .
Greenbrier
The Greenbrier nuclear bunker, West Virginia The formerly secret location of a nuclear bunker that was to house the USA 's Congress if World War Three had...
Seaplane Harbour
museum A modern, award-winning, recent addition to Tallinn 's portfolio of attractions. The Seaplane Harbour Museum is housed in a huge three-domed hangar.
Murmansk
A city in the Arctic north-west of Russia , close to the Barents Sea and the easternmost part of Norway .
Focsa Building
This article is part of the Hidden Architecture Series “Tentative d’Épuisement” , where we explore the practice of an architectural criticism without...
Druzhba Sanatorium
INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH WITH THE ARCHITECT IGOR VALIKEVSKY (Entrevista en español más abajo) Robin Monotti: In the West, when we think of the icons of late...
Glienicke Bridge & Museum
Glienicke Bridge & Museum A small bridge with a big history, located right on the border between (West) Berlin and Potsdam .
Slavutych Museum
( ) ---------------------------- UPDATE 2 March 2022: due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, this site will be out of tourism reach for some time to come.
Andersgrotta, Kirkenes
Andersgrotta Kind of a cross between a cave and an underground bunker in Kirkenes , northern Norway .
Presidium of the Academy of Sciences
**Article written by Carlos Mombiela Torres ** The Presidium of the Academy of Science or “Golden Brains,” as it is popularly known in Moscow, is a...
Mödlareuth border museum
UPDATE: a new museum building at this site has opened on 9 November 2025. I guess I'll have to go on a revisit to check this out at some point.
Behrungen border memorial sites
An ensemble of relics of the former " Iron Curtain " in Germany , i.e.
Jewish Holocaust Museum, Vilnius
( ?) One part of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum which, as the name spells out, presents an exhibition about the Holocaust in Vilnius and Lithuania at...
Museum of Communism Prague
Museum of Communism, Prague A small private museum in Prague about the history and nature of communism in the CSSR and its downfall.
Marienthal government bunker
( for speakers of German) A part of a formerly huge underground nuclear bunker at Ahrweiler and Marienthal near Bonn that was to serve as the emergency...
Ekibastuz
Kazakhstan An industrial town in north eastern Kazakhstan , the country's principal coal-mining (in huge opencast pits!) and energy generation centre,...
Scotland's secret bunker
Scotland's Secret Nuclear Bunker A no longer quite so secret former government nuclear bunker in Scotland, Great Britain , that has been opened to the...
Titan Missile Museum
Titan Missile Silo Museum The only surviving Titan II ICBM missile silo open to the public, complete with a deactivated missile, its launch control centre...
Nordbahnhof ghost stations exhibition
Nordbahnhof – ghost station exhibition A small topical exhibition in a restored Berlin underground regional metro train station, which itself used to be a...
Army Museum Paris
Army Museum & Napoleon's tomb One of Europe's premier military museums, which amongst many things has extensive sections about World War One and Two...
Aralsk, Aral Sea
Aralsk & North Aral Sea This poor town used to be the main fishing port on the Aral Sea , before the latter began drying up.
Piata Revolutiei Bucharest
Piata Revolutiei, Bucharest A square in central Bucharest – and the place where some of the most iconic footage of the Romanian revolution of 1989 was...
Strategic Missile Force Base, Pervomaisk, Ukraine
Strategic Missile Base Pervomaisk ( ) UPDATE 24 February 2022: given the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia, this site will be out of foreign...
House of Terror
(Terror Haza Muzeum) A kind of modern-approach museum dedicated to Hungary ’s, and especially Budapest ’s, two darkest periods in its 20th century...
Babi Yar
UPDATE 2 March 2022: like the rest of Kyiv , this site is now out of reach for tourism due to Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine .
Russian Army Theater
“The representative buildings of Stalinist architecture — the wedding-cake skyscrapers of the “Seven Sisters” in Moscow, for instance — were far more...
Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen The site of a large Nazi-era concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin , Germany .
Haus der Geschichte Bonn
Haus der Geschichte, Bonn The main museum about Germany 's rich and intriguing post-war history .
RAF Shipton
Royal Air Force Shipton (more commonly known as RAF Shipton) was a First World War era airfield located north of the village of Shipton-by-Beningbrough,...
Aral Sea
The Aral Sea Rather: the area that once was the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake on earth.
contemporary history museum Ljubljana
Contemporary History Museum A remarkable museum in Slovenia 's capital city Ljubljana that charts the chequered history of this country from the beginning...
Montebello Islands
The site in Australia where the first British atomic bomb was detonated on 3 October 1952, making the UK the third country to enter the circle of nuclear...
Makronisos, Greece
Makronisos - Another former prison/exile island in the Aegean Sea in Greece – cf. the better known Yaros .
Point Alpha border memorial and museums
Point Alpha border memorial/museums A double museum on the themes of the former border between the GDR (East Germany ) and the FRG (West Germany), on the...
Tallinn
The capital and largest city of Estonia is the smallest but most touristy of the three Baltic capitals (the others being Riga in Latvia and Vilnius in...
In Ekker and Reggane
The two nuclear testing grounds that France used in the Sahara desert in Algeria for its first atomic bombs in the 1960s.
Rapa pyramid
(Fahrenheid mausoleum) - darkometer rating : (2 or) 4 - An isolated mausoleum in the form of a (steep) pyramid, originally built for the von Fahrenheid...
The Polygon, Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, Kazakhstan
The Polygon, Semipalatinsk test site - darkometer rating : formerly 10 - (see Top-20 list ) - but no probably only 6 or 7 ----------------------------...
Baikonur
The name resonates with historical significance and modern adventure like few others.
Sellafield
( in the past, now perhaps only or ) NOTE: this chapter is about the Sellafield site as such and in particular about its old/former visitor centre.
Dukla Pass
The site (or set of sites), on the border of Slovakia and Poland , of one of the bloodiest battles of WWII , namely between the advancing Soviet Red Army...
Karaganda
Kazakhstan A major city in central Kazakhstan which is mostly associated with a) its gulag -related history and b) its coal mining and heavy industry.
Occupation Museum Tallinn
Occupation Museum, Tallinn A modern museum in the heart of Tallinn that focuses on the periods in history that most Estonians would rather forget about,...
Mother Armenia, Yerevan
Mother Armenia & Military Museum, Yerevan A giant socialist-era statue overlooking Yerevan and symbolizing Armenia at large; inside the statue's gigantic...
KarLag memorial, Dolinka
A memorial museum about the Soviet Union 's gulag system in the area of Karaganda, Kazakhstan , which had its headquarters here in the village of Dolinka.
Zhivkov birth house, Bulgaria
Todor Zhivkov's birth house The place where Bulgaria 's communist leader of 35 years was born, and where a reception centre still displays a collection of...
Military Museum Sofia
Military Museum, Sofia The National Military History Museum (to give it its official full name) covers Bulgaria 's military history from way back to...
Stalin Monument
The Stalin Monument (Hungarian: Sztálin szobor, pronounced [ˈstaːlin ˈsobor]) was a statue of Joseph Stalin in Budapest, Hungary.
Sardarapat
A huge monument commemorating the decisive battle in which Armenia defeated Turkey in 1918 and thus "saved the nation" from potential annihilation.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
Ashgabat (but extra marks on the weirdness scale!) The capital city of Turkmenistan is one of the strangest cities in the world.
Marienborn border crossing memorial
site Helmstedt-Marienborn was the largest of the border crossing complexes of the GDR (East Germany) on the border with the FRG (West Germany), the most...
Wolfschanze ('Wolf's Lair')
at Gierloz A complex of semi-destroyed bunkers in the north of Poland , infamous as the place where Adolf Hitler had his main headquarters during much of...
National Palace of Culture
The National Palace of Culture (Национален дворец на културата, Natsionalen dvorets na kulturata; abbreviated as НДК, NDK), located in Sofia, the capital...
PEI Ark
In 1974, the provincial and federal governments invited the Cape Cod-based New Alchemy Institute to construct a demonstration on Prince Edward Island of...
El Mozote
The site of the worst single atrocity committed by the US -backed (and US-trained) right-wing militias in the Civil War in El Salvador .
Gusen
Gusen was nominally a satellite camp of Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria , though it eventually was even larger than the main camp.
Darvaza flaming gas crater, Turkmenistan
Darvaza gas fire crater, Turkmenistan A crater in the desert – aka "Door to Hell" – full of countless gas fires that have been burning for decades.
Life in the GDR Museum
A new branch of the Haus der Geschichte ( German History Museum, Bonn ).
Pavlodar
Kazakhstan The capital of the province of the same name in the north-east of Kazakhstan .
War Museum, Riga
A well-established museum in the Old Town of Riga that presents the war history of Latvia (and the country has seen more than its fair share of wars over...
Tbilisi, Georgia
The capital city of Georgia , and the hub of the country. It doesn't offer much in the way of dark sites itself, except a couple of minor sights.
Aksu
A small industrial town in north-east Kazakhstan , which can make for a day trip from Pavlodar or a short stopover when passing through (en route to...
Semey (Semipalatinsk)
A city in the east of Kazakhstan , whose old name of Semipalatinsk is forever associated with the Soviet -era nuclear test site ( Polygon ).
Ani
A city of ruins in the far east of Turkey .
KGB cells Tallinn
Part of the basement of a large building in the Old Town of Tallinn in which the infamous KGB had some of its cells for incarceration and interrogation...
Museum of Independence, Baku
( if you know Azeri or Russian) A museum in central Baku dedicated not only to Azerbaijan 's independence as such, but more so to the struggle for it as...
Tsitsernakaberd Armenian genocide memorial, Yerevan
Tsitsernakaberd Armenian genocide monument & memorial museum - The main site commemorating the Armenian genocide of 1915 (and the build-up to it),...
Reichstag
Berlin The seat of Germany ’s parliament right in the centre of its capital city, Berlin .
Memorial to Defenders of the Soviet Arctic during the Great Patriotic War
To the Defenders of the Soviet Arctic during the Great Patriotic War (Russian: Защитникам Советского Заполярья в годы Великой Отечественной войны),...
Lenin mausoleum
One of the " Big 4 " mausoleums of deceased communist leaders.
Nuclear Museum Albuquerque
National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, Albuquerque, New Mexico As you will probably have guessed from the name, this is the USA 's main museum...
Vanadzor
Armenia A provincial city in northern Armenia , listed here for its sprawling industrial wastelands of former Soviet chemical plants.
Bautzen
( for German speakers) A town in the far east of Germany primarily associated with the most infamous prison of the GDR era.