Ten years ago, the French photographer Frédéric Chaubin published a glossy, mass-market coffee table book on late Soviet architecture, with a fake Cyrillic pun for a title — CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. With its epic depictions of strange architectural objects, monumental artworks, and epic interiors, it sold well. But what happened next is more interesting.

Chaubin’s book certainly led to a fair bit of exploitative work on the region, inspiring dozens of Westerners to write about haunted Soviet wastelands, all devoid of context or human presence. But it also encouraged many young people in the region to simply look closer at what was all around them. Writing in Tribune, the Ukrainian Instagrammer Dmytro Soloviov said it was Chaubin’s book that led him to finally appreciate these neglected, ideologically uncomfortable public buildings for the first time.