At the collapse of the USSR, all the public paraphernalia of Soviet rule – statues, mosaics, frescoes – still lay scattered across Russia and beyond. Marxism-Leninism may have been kicked out of office, but what were people supposed to do with the public propaganda artworks which, for many Soviet citizens, were an unwelcome symbol of a failed and oppressive regime?

In 1991, giddy with excitement at the overthrow of the communist regime, Muscovites started removing Soviet sculptures of leaders, workers and peasants from across the city and unceremoniously leaving them on an empty site southwest of the city centre. It became a dumping ground for Lenins, Stalins, Kalinins and Sverdlovs from across Moscow. Feelings were running high, and after 20,000 Muscovites protested in front of the KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Soviet secret police) was dismantled and moved to the site with the rest of the sculptures.

In 1992 the new government opened a park on the site, named the Park of Fallen Monuments. The statues were hoisted to their feet, arranged throughout the park, and interspersed with a growing collection of contemporary sculpture. Now, renamed  the Muzeon Park of Arts, the park contains over 700 sculptures and is a pleasant place to spend an hour or so.

The neighbouring Krymskaya embankment has recently been pedestrianised and generally spruced up, like much of central Moscow. When I visited the embankment and park in late June, the city was sunny and brimming with World Cup fever. Children were running shrieking through a splash fountain, the adjacent Central House of Artists was hosting a Banksy exhibition, and café–goers watched skateboarders whiz along the banks of the Moskva river. But as pleasant and un-Soviet as the scene was, it was precisely the relics of Soviet-era Moscow which I’d come to see and photograph.

A few days later in the western Russian city of Pskov, I saw something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale. Here, miscellaneous Soviet relics had been laid to rest in the courtyard of the city museum, unceremoniously perched against walls and stuffed into unobtrusive corners.