A municipal worker sits on a bench, next to a statue, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, during the 2018 soccer World Cup, Thursday, June 28, 2018. Nizhny Novgorod was a “closed city” during the Soviet era. It was known as Gorky until 1990 and it was here that dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov was held under house arrest. Now the city hosts six World Cup matches and is teeming with tourists. That was unthinkable in the Soviet era and even rare now in a city that is seldom visited by outsiders. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

Workers pull apart a house in Khandyga, Russia, on February 2, 2018. The shifting ground caused by the uneven thawing of permafrost each summer causes buildings like this Soviet-era apartment house to sag and collapse. (Photo by Amos Chapple/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

People have fun on an alley through Christmas lights in downtown Chisinau, Moldova, 23 December 2021. Traditionally, people from former countries of the Soviet Union, still celebrate Christmas on two occasions, on 25 December and 07 January. (Photo by Dumitru Doru/EPA/EFE)

A woman jumps into water from the roof of Murru prison, an abandoned Soviet prison, in Rummu quarry, Estonia, during hot weather July 4, 2015. During the Soviet time, Rummu quarry was used as a mining site for Vasalemma marble and most of the workforce came from among the detainees of Murru prison. When the prison closed after 1991, pumps that once kept the quarry and the prison dry were shut down, causing water to fill the quarry. It has become an unofficial and unguarded swimming and diving spot, attracting locals and tourists. (Photo by Ints Kalnins/Reuters)

In this photo taken Thursday, May 7, 2015 photo, remains of Soviet soldiers killed during World War II lay in a coffin prior to a reburial ceremony at the Sinyavino Heights memorial near the village of Sinyavino, 50 km (31 miles) east of St. Petersburg, Russia. Hundreds of people came to a World War II battleground outside St. Petersburg this week to bury the remains of 964 Soviet soldiers recovered by volunteer search teams. Fifty crimson coffins containing skulls and bones were solemnly buried at the Sinyavino Heights memorial as Russian war songs played and an honor guard fired a salute. (Photo by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Photo)

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and his daughter Irina Virganskaya attend the Free Your Mind Award Presentation at the Cinema For Peace charity dinner at the China Club on November 8, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images). BERLIN – NOVEMBER 08 2009

In this file photo taken on Saturday May 1, 1993, an elderly communist woman clutches her head as police on horseback patrol the streets in Moscow. When Alexander Zemlianichenko started working as an AP photographer in Moscow, the Soviet Union was nearing its demise. (Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo)

Scaffolding holding a remnant of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle, is seen on a rooftop of an abandoned building in the town of Pripyat on January 25, 2006 near Chernobyl, Ukraine. The town of Pripyat, deserted since the 1986 catastrophe, once housed 30,000 people, the majority of being workers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Days after the catastrophe the inhabitants were relocated to other locations in the Soviet Union. The town of Pripyat has remained uninhabited since. Prypyat and the surrounding area will not be safe for human habitation for several centuries. Scientists estimate that the most dangerous radioactive elements will take up to 900 years to decay sufficiently to render the area safe.