Mick Hartley

From Zupagrafika (David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka), a photographic survey of Soviet-era playgrounds:

The book was published in 2022. 

Through five chapters containing more than 150 photographs, taken by Zupagrafika and local photographers, the book documents the mass-produced, yet diverse play equipment installed in the communal spaces of socialist-era housing estates, such as rocket slides and earth-shaped climbers, spaceships and animal-themed ladders, cosmic roundabouts and bizarre objects that would probably raise safety concerns nowadays.

From Riga to Dushanbe and all the way from Kyiv to Vladivostok, children collectively dreamt of becoming cosmonauts, and enjoyed the many space-themed playscapes which had proliferated since the onset of the Cold War. While some are still in use, others are slowly disappearing to make way for modern equipment, becoming only a faint memory of a Soviet childhood.

Includes a foreword by the Ukrainian urban planner Mykola Gorokhov.

It was clearly all ready to go to press before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Zupagrafika website has added to that second paragraph:

While some are still in use, others are slowly disappearing to make way for modern equipment, or, more recently, being destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, becoming only a faint memory of a Soviet childhood.

Ukraine features quite heavily – second only to Russia itself. They just found time to insert one recent image – "Koshytsia Street in Kyiv after the Russian shelling of the Pozniaky residential area on 25 February 2022".

How many more of those Ukrainian playgrounds, I wonder, have since been destroyed by Russian bombs. And how many killed of the children who played in them?