At the height of the Soviet Union, just 30 in every 1,000 Soviet citizens owned a car. Even the scrappiest lemons cost a fortune, so instead of driving to work, most people took the subway—which, it turns out, was stunning: (From 2019) 📸: Chris Herwig
it "a symbol of the new society that is being built," containing "our blood, our love, our struggle for a new man."
That struggle extended thousands of miles across the Soviet Union, and the metros followed. Over the next five decades, while the United States built the Interstate Highway System , the Soviets opened 14 more subway systems in cities as far-flung as Novosibirsk, Siberia, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Their budgets were smaller and the stations often simpler, but their originality sparkled.
Originally from Canada, Herwig began trekking around the former Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s, when it was "cheap and fun" and "you could see operas and ballets for a buck or two." The region's unique metros caught his eye, but so did its eccentric bus stops. He shot those on and off for 17 years, driving 30,000 miles to find them, before switching to metros in 2017.
Herwig's photos subvert that tradition, breaking the underground open like a geode to reveal the intricate world within. Each station seems more imaginative than the next, with some hearkening back to ancient Egypt or Greece and others looking ahead toward a space-traveling, futuristic utopia. That utopia never came, but to Herwig, the metros offer a small taste of it—"what one would have hoped from a socialist society that actually worked.
Of course, the metro was only the grandest form of Soviet mass transit. Most cities were too small to merit one, and even Moscow's carried a minority of all passengers. The majority packed into older trams and buses aboveground—dreaming, perhaps, of the day they could finally buy a car.When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission.
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