Statues and Spacecraft in Moscow

They seem to have a bit of a thing for statues in Moscow.


We headed out today to the Art Muzeon Sculpture Gallery, which is apparently where the old Soviet-era statues live nowadays.  It was pretty cool to walk around and see the leaders and the more propaganda-style statues as well.

There wasn't an English translation, but we think this was showing the deposed elite on the ground with the workers triumphant above.

A defaced statue of Stalin (someone chopped his nose off).  That wall in the background is a memorial to the millions of people that he killed either outright or in the Gulags.  Each rock is carved with a face.

A statue of Lenin, with an old Soviet insignia in the background.  

Peter the Great Statue - we saw this from a distance and were wondering what the hell it was.  It's huge - 96m tall - twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.  Pretty damn cool.

Wandering through Gorky Park (a small amusement park), we found this space shuttle and freaked out - it looked real!  Looking at it closely, it had wheels, insulations, electronics... we couldn't work out why a space shuttle would be in a theme park.  We found out when we got back to the hotel that it was a Buran Test Shuttle - an earlier prototype which was subjected to stress and heat tests, and then retired to the amusement park for people to play on - apparently it's been turned into a simulator now.  Those crazy Russians :)