Seeing Red: Postcards of Soviet-era architecture

Over the last few years there has been a strange craze for glossy photo-books of Soviet architecture.

The once absurd idea that there was anything worth looking at in the cityscapes of the USSR and its empire has been embraced in the likes of Richard Pare's The Lost Vanguard, Frederic Chaubin's CCCP or Roman Bezjak's Socialist Modernism, among many others.

Some of these books are intriguing, others much more voyeuristic and shallow, but when putting together a book on the architecture and urbanism of the Soviet era I tried as much as possible to avoid this approach, preferring quick snapshots that showed these spaces being used - as they are - rather than as grandiose monuments to a vanished civilisation.

The postcards here came from a similar impulse. Mostly found in second hand bookshops in Warsaw, many of them are photos of quite mundane places - housing estates, TV towers, modern public buildings - often rendered in strange, cheap colours, giving an undeniably nostalgic effect.

Some countries seemed to offer more 'socialist' postcards than others - postcards from the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Crimea offer images of sun, sea and concrete not massively dissimilar from the Costa del Sol.

In much of the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia, though, you could buy a postcard of a cultural centre in a mining town, or of a prefabricated housing estate on the outskirts of a provincial city.

They were little reminders that these ordinary spaces were once regarded as something rather special - places that if you visited or got rehoused in them, you'd want to write home about.

Landscapes of Communism is out now, published by Allen Lane.