The 1980 Moscow Olympics were a financial disaster and became one of the reasons for the fall of the Soviet economy.
Russian photographer Anastasia Tsayder offers an illuminating case study in Summer Olympics, a series that revisits some of the venues the Soviet Union built for the ill-fated 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. “[I wanted] to tell a story about the hopes for a utopian future encapsulated in this architecture,” the photographer says, “and about how far from reality these expectations turned out to be in the end.”
Tsayder grew interested in shooting Moscow’s Olympic venues after moving to the Russian capital from St. Petersburg in 2012. Walking around the city, she kept noticing massive structures that looked like they belonged in sci-fi movies. Almost all had been built for the Olympics under an infrastructure project purported to have cost $9 billion (roughly $26 billion today). It was Moscow’s moment to shine, undone by geo-politics: 65 countries, led by the United States, boycotted the Games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Captured on a vintage Rolleiflex twin reflex camera, the venues look enormous—their soaring ceilings dwarf the people inside them. You can see how a westerner visiting Moscow for the games would have been impressed. And many were. Despite the boycott, the Games generally were deemed a success. Still, the Soviet economy faltered afterward, and of course the communist superpower collapsed just 11 years later. Tsayder says there are some in Russia who suspect the nation’s already downtrodden economy struggled to recover from the cost of the games.