So then I stumbled upon a sign referencing a five-year plan. Eventually this concept had become an ordinary planning tool, but the initial Plan was a grand effort to mobilize the population through a mixture of both terror and enthusiasm. This was the 'scientific' forecast that 5 years of hard work would eradicate the remainders of the old social order. The last would now be first. To the believers, Workers' Paradise seemed just around the bend.

Echoes of what Robert Conquest called 'the mentally deafening and psychologically disorientating vociferations of the young Soviet state' sound among those crumbling and withered set pieces of one of the world's great phantasmagorias. What could be more stirring now than physical references to that great Enthusiasm, to the totalitarian shimmering of those early days.