KZBlog

According to Adil Nurmankov, the retro style restaurant that featured nostalgic Soviet chic, RVS, is now just a restaurant [RUS]. Once a magnet for tourists featuring Lenin’s portrait on the walls and quotes from Soviet documents, apparently now:

in the halls, they have the same tables, but without the revolutionary menu. However, they do have ashtrays. Somehow, they claim, that they smoking rooms.The walls are defiantly naked all the old stuff (rare phones and cameras, typewriters, portraits of leaders and the socialist advertising posters) have been removed.

RVS was a great place to meet, with old pictures of the Soviet Union, propaganda posters, and banners featuring clever satire on old Soviet slogans. My favorite was the banner outside that read: “Factories for the workers, Land for the farmers and Vodka for me!” It also featured old Soviet products and actually gave a good sense of what life used to be like. The menu was ironically English/American pub and bar food–some of the best chicken wings and potato skins in the country although over the years I noticed them adding more and more high class items. And the menu itself used to be in the form of a revolutionary handbill with nods to Cheburashka, Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet icons.

It’s one place I would have highly recommended to tourists, but now I guess it’s better to go to a pizza bar or something.

I don’t know what happened to cause them to change their style, but I present below a small tribute to RVS in the form of photos taken last summer.