VDNKH

Opened in 1959, the largest museum in the former USSR was for a long time the pride of a country that demonstrated to sceptical mankind the effectiveness of "real socialism". At the main entrance of this Stalinist USSR miniature, the imposing statue of the worker and the kolkhozian (stainless steel, 25 m high, 75 t), erected in 1936 for the pavilion of the Universal Exhibition, sets the tone for this unique ensemble. On a territory of nearly 300 hectares, some 78 pavilions are as many temples erected to the glory of the achievements of the Soviet Union, from agriculture to medicine, including space, physics, chemistry, computer science, the atom... Many green spaces are spread out, the buildings are dotted with buffets and bars, pavilions built in the style of the former Union Republics, whose achievements bear witness to the benefits of communism on nations that it brought out of the Middle Ages and united by the principle of "friendship between peoples". In line with the policy of promoting nationalities, which aimed to rediscover the heritage of each people in order to merge all these civilizations into the new socialist culture, the aim was to introduce Muscovites to the particularities of each people. Each nationality therefore showed its traditional costumes, food, etc., and the Muscovites were given the opportunity to discover the particularities of each people. The whole thing is dominated by the huge 100-metre-high silver spire of the obelisk inaugurated in 1964, the symbol of the conquest of space of which Gagarin was the pioneer. The Cosmos pavilion, flanked by a reproduction of the rocket carrying the Vostok satellite on which the first cosmonaut in history, Yuri Gagarin, inaugurated the era of space flight on 12 April 1961, is the largest and busiest. Now that its role as a showcase for Soviet propaganda has been superseded, the park has become a very pleasant place to stroll. You can stop for a drink in one of the many small cafés along the paths and, in good weather, you can go for a bike ride.

Today another grandiose project aims to rehabilitate this place by building new exhibition halls, but this time for the development of economic relations with the CIS countries and regions of the Russian Federation.

Since 2011, the entrance has once again been decorated with the impressive sculpture of the worker and the kolkhozian, which overlooked the USSR pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition. It faced the pavilion and the Nazi eagles: a premonition of the coming war?