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An aerial view of the Proletarka, a complex of red-brick buildings, in the city of Tver, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) northwest of Moscow, on August 8, 2020. The Proletarka was designed as model housing for workers. But a century later, its impoverished residents are living in squalor. Built at the tail-end of the tsarist era, between 1858 and 1913, it was a city within a city, housing some 15,000 workers from a mill making cotton in Tver. After the Soviets seized power in 1917, it was renamed “The Proletarian” and reached its heyday as a self-contained community with shops, a library, a hospital, two swimming pools, a theatre and even an observatory. But like with much of the communal housing that the Soviets set up across Russia, the Proletarka has become much less of a workers' paradise since the 1991 collapse of the USSR. (Photo by Andrey Borodulin/AFP Photo)
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