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The reappraisal of the post-Soviet landscape is in danger of overlooking two of its mostimportant elements: firstly, the mass modernist housing that was more extensive herethan probably anywhere else; and secondly, the post-1989 capitalist context of propertyspeculation, office development and decay. These routinely missed landscapes constitutethe very things travelled through on the way to utopian, if ruined, monuments, such asthose documented in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP — Cosmic Communist ConstructionsPhotographed. When visited, the surroundings of these structures turn out to be at leastas interesting as the photogenic modernist monument itself. This essay is an account ofa visit to one of the most architecturally contemporary of these structures — the Park ofMemory crematoria in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, designed by Abraham Miletsky in1974. In Chaubin’s photographs, the curling concrete volumes of the Park’s centralcrematoria are flamboyant, fantastical and self-referential, the very ‘iconic’ architecturethat many post-Soviet capitals would like to have in order to attract tourists. There is alot more going on in the surrounding city than what is typically recorded in its visualrepresentations, however, as discussed in this essay. Such monuments are not mute, andcannot be severed from their surroundings
