Former Soviet scientific megastructures captured in striking photos

These colourful photographs capture the remains of what was once a constellation of Soviet scientific megaprojects, all intentionally designed by the state to replace religious objects of worship.

Photographer Eric Lusito gained access to many of these Soviet sites for his new book, Soviet Scientific Institutes. Starting in Ukraine, Lusito spent four years travelling across the former Soviet Union, liaising with scientists and visiting many locations that had remained shuttered since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The first three sites Lusito visited were in Ukraine, in late 2021, before the start of the Russian invasion, and reminded Lusito of comic books from his childhood, such as Edgar P. Jacobs’s Blake and Mortimer and Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin. “I found these scientific places very exciting and wanted to see more,” says Lusito. “I was drawn to their mysterious beauty, their history and to the way they had evolved over time.”

While many of the sites were in disrepair, some were beautifully preserved and frozen in time, such as the control room for the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope in Armenia (below), which was designed by Soviet scientist Paris Herouni in the 1970s. The beautiful design of rooms like these were no accident; speaking to Herouni’s niece, Lusito learnt that Herouni had to battle against Moscow’s scientific administrators to get it built.

At their peak, thousands of scientists poured through the hallways and control rooms of these scientific institutions, each of them recording their clocking in on machines like the colourful attendance board in the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (below).

Some of these were doing important practical research, such as in the high-voltage hall of the building previously known as the Electrotechnical Institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine (below), where scientists produced lightning-like bolts of energy, in order to learn how to protect the country’s first unified grid system. A Soviet-era mural, of a hand grasping a lightning bolt, can be seen on the rear wall.

Others, however, were doing purely fundamental science, such as in the MAKET-ANI experiment in Armenia’s Aragats Cosmic Ray Research Station (below), which measured high-energy particles that fall through the sky and settle on the high-altitude snow-capped peaks of Mount Aragats.

Many of the scientific sites that Lusito visited in Ukraine had to suspend their scientific operations after the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine, like the Institute of Ionosphere in Kharkiv, which houses several parabolic detectors, including a 100-metre antenna (below).

Much of what Lusito saw were derelict or decommissioned, but there were some green shoots. At the Assy-Turgen Observatory in Kazakhstan, Lusito photographed the 45-metre high pavilion housing the AZT-20 telescope (main image), which was originally started in the 1980s but ceased construction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The project resumed in the 2010s and was finished in 2017, becoming Kazakhstan’s largest telescope and one of the largest in the post-Soviet region.