Crashed spacecraft surrounded by white butterflies, from Spaceship Junkyard, Russia, 2000. By Jonas Bendiksen.

After the Soviet collapse, economic, political and ethnic disparities gave birth to a series of unrecognized republics, national aspirations and legacies. Bendiksen’s “Satellites” is a photographic journey through the scattered enclaves, unrecognized mini-states, and other isolated communities that straddle the southern borderlands of the former USSR. The itinerary goes through places such as Transdniester, a breakaway republic in Eastern Europe, Abkhazia, an unrecognized country on the Black Sea, the religiously conservative Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, the spacecraft crash zones between Russia and Kazakhstan, and the Jewish Autonomous Regi. There’s more images on the Magnum website.

Via artdaily.

Our Soviet selection: October 4, 1957, first satellite launched into space, Trip to abandoned Russian places, Hand-painted Russian movie posters, Soviet poster database, Soviet Unterzögersdorf, Soviet and Russian photography, Children’s Books of the Early Soviet Era, Soviet anti-alcohol posters, etc.