Original subtitles

The poetry of bus stops...

It is the poetry of small forms, the poetry of small architectural objects.

It is the poetry of the earth.

Hey, pussycat.

It's a chilly morning here in Gori, the birthplace of Stalin.

Just trying to find my way out of town and back onto the highway.

This car is a bit of a tank,

but I'm sure it's going to be great going up the mountain.

This is definitely not the way out.

Okay, let me try that again.

There's a bus stop I want to photograph.

It has eluded me for years.

It's up atop the 2,000-metre Goderdzi Pass.

Like many of my favourite bus stops, it is found off the beaten track,

hiding as if it didn't want any attention.

I've been told this one has wings, like an angel up in the clouds.

The poet Osip Mandelstam famously said "only in Russia poetry is respected".

It gets people killed.

He would later die on his way to the Gulag.

It all makes me wonder, how were these bus stops possible during the Soviet Union?

It's another 15 kilometres.

The last couple of kilometres have been really rough.

I don't know if I should actually go on.

I mean, I want this bus stop, but...

I mean, at some point this...

It's ridiculous.

I photographed my first Soviet bus stop by chance 20 years ago in Lithuania,

while riding my bike to St Petersburg.

Since then, I've taken pictures of thousands.

When you see the bus stops together, collected,

it becomes something grand.

Over the years, the bus stops have become a part of me.

Even in my dreams at night, I'm driving, searching,

finding weird magical creations that I long for when I wake up.

The bus stops are disappearing so fast.

If I come back a year from now, they could be gone,

demolished or rebuilt.

These pictures may be all that's left in the end.

I want to give them some kind of immortality.

Not all the bus stops created in the Soviet Union were special,

or what I would call a hero.

Hundreds of thousands were built in basic designs,

but thousands weren't.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to find the unique ones.

They can literally be anywhere.

Good day.

I am working on a project about old bus stops, the architecture.

Do you know where this beautiful bus stop is?

This is Tjernelivka and you are going to Tjepelivka.

I wish I spoke better Russian so I understood exactly what they said.

- Drive there to the traffic light. - And after the traffic lights?

- Then you just have to go straight ahead. - Straight?

It's after the traffic lights. I think so.

Thereare no records or archives to work from

so in the end, I just have to drive as much as I can.

So far I've covered over 50,000 kilometres of roads in all 15 countries.

The Soviet Union was massive

and had a road network of almost 2 million kilometres.

Since I can't drive every single road, I try and do as much homework as I can.

But too often, I find a bus stop, and by the time I get there,

it's already gone.

Definitely not on that road.

And at the crossroads you have to go straight ahead.

This bus stop is exciting and beautiful.

In Canada they are all so boring.

The bus stops, they're a mystery to me.

Despite their humble size, they seem so brave.

Were these unique designs an act of rebellion?

A discreet cry for freedom in a society where everything was controlled?

Or was this all part of Soviet state propaganda?

Who made these?

In Soviet cities, housing construction has priority.

The soviet industrial might has been turned

to the biggest housing program in the history of the world.

There are fourteen other republics in the Soviet Union.

And many minority nationalities.

47% of the people are not Russian.

The Soviet economy, regulated by a central plan,

Puts a low priority on things like

fashionable clothing that are not necessities.

In this land, all forms of communication are controlled by the State.

The Bolshevik revolutionaries recognised

that the arts could be powerful tools in moulding the new society.

The fine arts of music or painting could also carry political messages.

Art must be useful,

and experimentation is discouraged.

And since the 1930s, there has been no place for the artist who is an individual.

The initial idea in the 1960s,

if we're talking about this Modernist, post-Stalinist period,

was to build everything cheap and easy and quick,

with standard designs.

Soviet system wanted to all be planned.

A Latvian friend once joked to me about how everything back then was standardized,

even the food.

A chicken Kiev ordered in Tashkent or Murmansk

would look and taste exactly the same.

Whereas the collection of bus stops is full of unstandardized designs.

In an era where everything was so controlled,

part of me wishes for one easy explanation.

A beautiful central master plan for the bus stops.

But none exist.

There are no official records of who made them.

So every time I track down one of the creators,

it's a huge victory.

- My name is Enu Mäela. - And my name is Jüri Konsap.

Horse flies. We had them back then. With two wings and so on, just smaller.

Probably they were hungry, like us. There was far less food back then.

So it took more work to survive.

We made this bus stop.

I never heard it called anything other than "the spider".

It looks like one.

In 1971, Yuri and Enu created this wooden spider

for this furniture factory they worked at.

The Soviet artist Mayakovsky famously said,

art should not be mainly in dead shrines called museums.

Instead, it should be on the streets and in the factories.

As we've seen several times, it's right outside of a factory.

Totally unique design, obviously they've just had it made for the workers,

for the factory.

It's kind of cool.

In 400 metres, your destination will be on the left.

Okay, look at that.

And the windmill actually works on this thing.

Oh, God, it's slippery.

- Do you like our bus stop? - Yes, I've come to see it.

I am working on a project where I photograph bus stops.

I am a librarian and was wondering what you found interesting.

- I think it's beautiful. - Our factory director built it.

Okay. Interesting. Goodbye.

Yes, it works. Ball bearings.

- It's great. - It stalls when the wind is calm.

They don't seem that vicious.

So since now photo and video shooting is prohibited,

we'll just get close to the bus station, you just shoot.

What makes Chernobyl fascinating for me is that it's pretty much frozen in time.

Very little has been removed or changed.

No one is tearing down the bus stops here.

You can see on the glass here still this imprint of the A for Octopus with wings,

which I think is quite cool.

- Look straight ahead? - Up here.

We're standing on it, and you see that the guy with the counter is just going off

because of the radiation that travelled deeper into the soil after the accident.

I'm freezing.

Oh, but there's also little animal prints.

An animal came from somewhere over there.

You can see maybe a rabbit or something.

Quite like the bear.

I mean, I guess it looks quite like the bear

they had as their official mascot for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

I mean, I guess what it was used for is that's the main road to the plant,

and then this is a turn-off here.

Even though there isn't a house or anything around here,

people would, I guess, switch buses or change buses to go up to this.

There's a military surveillance centre up at the end of this road,

which the Soviets used to detect missile launches.

As a child, I often pictured the Iron Curtain being a physical thing.

The Dugar radar system near Chernobyl, nicknamed the Russian Woodpecker,

is close to what I imagined.

Besides missile detection, it also transmitted a sharp staccato sound

disrupting radio communications with the West,

leaving people to wonder what was on the other side.

Welcome to Minsk, ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated

with your seat belts fastened until the seat belt signs have been switched off.

When we talk about the Soviet era -

- is it primarily as a totalitarian period.

There was only one ideology.

People's focus was on fixed, predetermined ideals.

There was to be only one style in architecture, literature and music.

One of the first major speeches of Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin

included praising the benefits of prefabricated concrete slabs,

the building blocks of a socialist utopia.

Khrushchevka became the unofficial name

of the rows of easy-to-construct apartment blocks,

using these revolutionary concrete panels.

660 million square metres -

- or approximately 15 million apartments...

The party indicated a solution to the housing problem:

The creation of a strong construction industry.

And such an industry has been created.

Spread across the country, there are 1800 mechanized factories -

- producing large concrete blocks for the construction of houses.

♪ Bridges are built from bank to bank. ♪

♪ And everything that catches the eye is created by construction workers. ♪

♪ And everything that catches the eye is created by construction workers. ♪

I suspect some of these concrete slabs...

You can see that they have like little hooks on them.

I think they're sort of prefab concrete

that probably has a different purpose originally and was just,

you know, they used what they had

and sort of tried to make something quirky out of it.

It's simple, it's kind of clean, but it's a cool bus stop.

It reminds me a lot of my favourite from Kazakhstan,

that's also in sort of a similar kind of wheat field setting.

Historians claim that like everything in the Soviet Union,

the unique bus stops only exist because they carry a message.

Obviously, some were Soviet propaganda.

But I don't think that was always the case.

I often regret naming my books Soviet bus stops.

Many celebrate a local town or a region more than the Soviet state,

while others just celebrate the creative spirit of whoever made it.

The uniqueness of a bus stop -

- was also based on regional differences -

- between different republics.

Belarus had their solutions, we Lithuanians had ours.

Other republics also differed.

They became a place to gather.

They brought art to the public

and often involved the local community in the construction and decorating process.

One could see this as socialism in action.

Or, is the fact that I'm thinking this, proof that they are all propaganda?

And I am Lenin's Polesny-Durak, a useful idiot seduced by the master plan.

I've been looking forward to finding this bus stop.

It's really quite wild.

As you can see, it's a bird which sort of can climb inside its wings for protection.

So I mean, I think this is one of the more sort of outlandish designs,

which I really quite like.

I think it's, yeah, a lot of fun.

For me, the bus stops are an alternative window in which to view the Soviet era.

The state was brutal, but I'm interested in what the individuals did.

The Soviet period was an absolutely cruel moment

but on the other hand, it's a huge part of the history of our country.

A huge part of the history of our lives.

We tried to sow in this period some positive moments.

For example, some progressive points of culture, some progressive points of art.

You ask "why bus stops?".

In the socialist world, individual transportation was limited.

It was not developed. People didn't have cars to a large extent.

The entire system was built on bus routes.

That was what united the country.

The bus stop made sure we got a new road.

We didn't wait for an order but made it for the locals.

No one saw it as something Soviet. It was ours.

It had to be comfortable and look good.

How did the bus stops get away with not being standardized?

One reason is that the bus stops were classified as a minor architectural form.

There's something to be said about being small,

non-threatening, quiet.

I think this is what I've been looking for.

I don't know what is in the pipes.

Maybe it's gas or some kind of water.

But in the towns, because they don't bury them always underground,

so they have them out of ground.

And so you'll often see them built up like this where people drive through.

And the pipe is running straight into the bus stop.

And so they've actually built in the pipe

to go up and over and support it on top of the bus stop.

When we talk about smaller small buildings,

there were no regulations and rules.

Everything was based on the architects' knowledge and ideas,

which were then implemented.

The bus stops in the cities were standardized.

That made them cheaper to build.

The bus stops in the countryside were not standardized.

- Try saying that again. - The NATO forces are getting closer.

- Closer? I do not understand. - Your Russian is bad.

Yes, I'm sorry about that. But the road should be good?

- It goes through the taiga. - Taiga?

- It is a type of forest. - Thanks. Goodbye.

Good luck.

I am very interested in this bus stop.

Why is there such a beautiful one here?

I do not know. Our village is very beautiful.

They have put a burkhan on top. We have everything. We have berries.

Okay. And is this the traditional architecture?

- Your bus is coming. - My daughter at home knows languages.

Thanks. Take care.

Of course, the farther from the centre, the less control.

It's a huge territory, you know.

You can't control everything from one point.

Or maybe there was some strong local figure who has control,

but he wants to do something different that was suggested from the centre.

The late George Shikava was one of those local officials with influence.

He was the deputy minister of highway construction in Georgia.

At the same time, he was an architect

and helped design the iconic ministry building where he worked.

This building up here is really cool.

It used to be the Ministry of Transportation.

More importantly, he used his position in the late 1960s

to really push the limits and become a pioneer in bus stop experimentation,

inspiring artists throughout the Soviet Union.

Shikava was deputy minister of the Ministry of Car Roads.

In this case, he was basically a commissioner

and commissionee in one person.

- He was the client. - Exactly.

And I guess it gave him, as a deputy minister,

as a chief architect, it gave him a lot of freedom

to design what he wanted or the way he imagined.

So he gave total freedom to his imagination to create this form.

This is amazing.

This is it being built.

And what are we looking at?

It's like a metal frame.

They would experiment on this part.

Was it formed?

Was there wood around that they poured in?

No, no, no.

They applied it with the hand, just like very primitively,

very basically.

They would put cement and then make it straight.

And this was in the late 60s?

This was late 60s, early 70s.

How does it work? - Look there.

Do you want to photograph me?

There was quite a lovely exchange.

Lively, I mean to say, exchange between architects from different republics.

So people knew what was happening in other places.

And maybe they got challenged and wanted to make better.

It was some kind of club. It was a friendship.

I worked in the road system.

We met once or twice a year.

These are the medals I received in Moscow for my bus stop.

I am very proud to have had the opportunity.

The goal was not to be rewarded, but we were invited,

we met and exchanged ideas.

I used my imagination.

What is the purpose of a bus stop?

It must protect those waiting from rain, sun and snow.

The hole here can be used to see if the bus is on its way.

It is also important that the bus stop is nice to look at.

It should beautify the road.

I think they do beautify the road.

A woman once told me that seeing the photos now

reminded her of being a child, travelling on holiday from Vilnius to the Black Sea.

She would just stare out the window,

waiting for the fun-looking bus stops to entertain her along the way.

They're happy memories for her.

Amazing, brutal bus stop here just outside of Samarkand.

Love it.

I mean, sharp lines, nothing I've ever seen before.

It's close to the airport.

You can see they've got an old, like, Soviet Aeroflot mosaic on the wall here.

No, it's great.

Nice, open scenery behind it, nothing really obscuring it too much.

I mean, it's a bit tough with the traffic to find the right angle,

but I think I'm going to get something that I'm really going to love here.

You have to go into town. It is beautiful in the city.

In Samarkand? Yes, it is beautiful.

You can take beautiful pictures there. It's not pretty here.

No, no, I'm interested in the architecture here.

It looks like the one in the picture, but it doesn't look good in real life.

It's not beautiful.

OK.

I always thought it was a rooster or a chicken or something, but it's a...

Well, they called it elephant.

There is a sketch...

There's also, close to this, there's one that's a fish.

There is a fish, there is a cat, there is a saddle,

This one is this blue octopus, yeah.

That's how it started?

That's how it started.

Oh, my God.

Oh, that's so groovy.

- And so a car crashed into this? - Yeah.

And then they took it down.

Unfortunately.

The concrete octopus was one of my favourites.

The older a bus stop gets, the worse it looks,

and some people think they're an embarrassment.

There is a food stall or a small shop.

When I'm photographing them,

I often have to try to convince people

that I'm not trying to make their community look bad,

but rather the opposite,

that the bus stop is something special that I want to make look good.

Hello.

Good day. I am a photographer from Canada...

- It's not a gallery, it's a market. - Market?

Yes, it's a market. There's no gallery here.

Here you can buy pomegranates and clementines.

- I'm making a photo book... - There's nothing here.

They were never published, you know, as an expression of people's art.

So it was just ignored.

Most bus stops retained some resemblance to a functioning shelter,

while others took full advantage of the opportunity

and were more art than anything else.

Without a care if it worked as a bus stop.

I cannot answer why there is no roof. That's their problem.

I make art.

The Black Sea coast, at the time also known as the Soviet Riviera,

was a popular holiday escape.

It was here in the late 60s a young Georgian artist,

Zurab Tsereteli, would decorate bus stops using colourful mosaic tiles.

He would go on to a prolific career as an artist.

I decorated many bus stops.

And here it is.

This is my mosaic.

My name is Zurab Tsereteli.

I'm still young. Because when you make art -

- you don't get old because you work every day.

These great architects from the state project invited me to it.

I worked with them after art academy.

It was extremely educational. Why I made them?

Because they required the hand of an artist.

You cannot deviate from the forms. An artist's hand must touch everything -

- from a toilet door

to a large architectural work.

Something's wrong with the sound.

Can you hear me?

Hi Victor. How are you?

I'm well.

Good, good. Same here.

I could feel inside,

with these projects,

that I wanted to work with the aesthetics of bus stops.

Because it is a living organism.

There are many who meet there and chat, and then they part again.

When drawing small buildings,

it is important to take the surroundings into consideration.

From a philosophical point of view, a road reminds me of music.

Because just as music moves forward in time -

- a road does the same.

That's why it's not just about big things and loud noises -

- but also about the small pauses and silences.

Harman calls it the poetry of the road.

This is also what gets me excited about photographing them.

Trying to find the best angle that shows off the bus stop,

but balanced with its relationship to the surroundings.

I mean, this fog really helps pull the bus stop out from the background,

and it's nice.

I really like this much more than a sunny blue sky.

Not that I'm trying to make it look depressing or anything,

I just want the bus stop to stand out from its surroundings.

Fog and snow and clean horizons help me do that.

♪ The smooth run of my fate. ♪

♪ Night, sorrow and the glitter of the soul. ♪

♪ Moonlight and rainy days in May. ♪

♪ At dawn, voices call to me. ♪

♪ At dawn, voices call... ♪

For me there's a sense of freedom to these bus stops,

maybe because no one was signing their name in the concrete.

Sometimes an architect could sketch up a design in the Ukraine.

It would make its way to a construction team in Tajikistan.

They would use it to create something on their own.

Getting credit wasn't an issue.

It was all just a rare opportunity to take an idea and see where it leads.

No fame was involved, but also no real blame.

A liberating thought when it comes to being creative.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and that was also the end of the bus stops.

Investing in unique bus stops is unlikely in a capitalist society.

Even preserving them is not a priority.

When I photographed this one,

I had no idea that the legendary architect George Chikava created it

using interlocking concrete components that he designed.

I guess there used to be an old road here,

so they've just kind of left it in the farmer's field.

They've built a new bus stop over there, right beside it.

This bus stop was demolished a year after I photographed it.

Nanna Zaleshvili is part of a new movement

of young people growing up after the Soviet Union

who are trying to save some of the hero bus stops.

Society started to think about how to preserve them.

Is this something we really want to have here,

or should we demolish and put the new ones?

It is something to think about.

Does all art created under an oppressive regime represent that regime?

Because for me, the bus stops are more

individual creativity being expressed in spite of state control.

They stand at the side of the road kind of like small defiant acts of poetry.

Still, for millions, the Soviet Union was a brutal occupation.

And for some, these bus stops are a painful reminder of that era.

So I also do understand if some want them removed or to reclaim them.

You can see where there's like, up in here, this was obviously like a flower.

God knows what else was going on, but...

I mean, you can see on the outside of the bus stop,

they haven't painted over it,

so you can actually see how colourful and vibrant the mosaics were on the inside.

One and a half years ago, there was a special decommunisation law

This law says that all Soviet symbols will be demolished in a public space.

Yeah, and they seem to do it even if it isn't blatantly Soviet,

like there was no hammer and sickle.

Yes, it's just about being from the Soviet period

because this decommunisation law created a trend.

The Soviet era is an absolutely a black period in our history.

Mosaics disappeared everywhere.

And we tried to gather just a photo more quickly,

ask people and artists from everywhere

to make a photo and send us just a photo for history.

To fight against destruction of the buildings

or any structures we love is really heartbreaking,

because people's voices are heard so seldom.

It's commercial pressure, and unfortunately,

it also kills beauty, kills individuality.

This standardisation is not ideological, as it was in the Soviet times,

not a communist standardization, but a mass culture standardization.

It produces ideals and foists them on us:

"This is good. It can be sold."

"You have to like this. That's why it's good."

Everywhere, in every part of the world, you go and everything is the same.

So these bus stops, when you travel, even if they're totally abandoned,

out of nowhere, gives you some sort of feeling about shapes,

material, what it was before, and that's part of history.

You like it or not, it exists, and humans created it.

That's why, as a young architect, I find a lot of inspiration in it.

Outside, wind and weather have started to take their toll.

Inside, you can also see that it is worn out.

My wife.

My wife also worked at the factory at the time.

It's nice to see the bus stop now -

- and remember when it was built.

We created something of value that still stands today.

Was that all? Are we done?

Thanks.

I don't think a little Georgian wine will hurt anyone.

Here you go.

Take something to eat. Come on, redfish.

See you later.

Bus stops will never stop!

Good luck.

The vehicle doesn't make it.

And it turns out the road and the pass were actually closed.

But we did get some help.

Lovely guy with the snow plough got me the last 10 kilometres to the top of the hill.

I'm very determined to see this bus stop.

Got a little bit more sunlight before it goes down.

The car is stuck at the bottom of the hill, but that will be tomorrow's news.

I'm really worried this is just going to be completely buried under snow.

It's supposed to be here somewhere.

Okay, there it is.

This is what it all boils down to.

I like it.

I like it, I might clean some snow off it.

Love what Armin said about the road.

It's like music.

Not only are the loud and the big objects important,

but also the pauses and the quiet.

The small things.

Bus stops will never stop!