Across Tiraspol and Bender, the streets are lined with Soviet residential blocks — the khrushchyovki and later brezhnevki that were the dominant form of mass housing built across the USSR from the 1960s through the 1980s. These prefabricated concrete panel buildings were constructed at enormous scale as the Soviet state attempted to solve the urban housing crisis, moving millions of families out of communal apartments into private flats.
In Transnistria, these buildings remain the primary housing stock, largely unchanged since construction. The absence of major investment or redevelopment means the landscape of the city looks remarkably close to how it did in the late Soviet period. Facades show their age — streaked concrete, rusting balcony railings, occasional patches of mismatched renovation — but the buildings continue to house the population of a state that the world does not officially recognise. They are the most ordinary and most revealing architecture of Tiraspol: not monuments, just where people live.