Palaces of Shelter

 

"The Kyiv Metro was the USSR’s third after Moscow 

and Saint Petersburg, with the first line complete 

in 1960, during the Khrushchev Thaw — it was the 

first system to have been built “clean,” without 

Gulag labor. Its earliest stations combined 

the decorativeness of Moscow with light, 

optimistic, modern ideas. There are grot-

toes like Universytet station, with its red 

marble walls, boasting niches with busts 

of scientific and cultural luminaries like 

Dmitri Mendeleev and Ivan Franko, and 

there are also concrete hangars like Dnipro 

station, on a bridge overlooked by statues 

of a man holding Sputnik aloft and a woman 

letting doves of peace fly free. Kyiv’s sta-

tions were mostly extremely deep, with 

Arsenalna still the deepest in the world at 

105.5 meters below ground; it was com-

pleted, after all, one year before the Cuban 

Missile Crisis. The Kharkiv Metro is the more innovative and 

modernist of the two networks. It was built mostly in the 

1970s, with spacious, vaulted stations decorated with 

futuristic, science-fiction motifs. "

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