The ornate beauty of Moscow's palatial metro stations

Depending on where you get off, you'll receive a crash course in such diverse architectural movements as Baroque, Art Deco or Futurism, and face stained glass windows, marble columns, crystal chandeliers, gilded mosaics and painted scenes from Russian history.

"They're just these extraordinarily beautiful places that are unlike any metro station I'd ever seen," says Vancouver-based photographer David Burdeny.

Palaces for the people

In 2014, Burdeny traveled to Russia to produce the first formal study of these architectural wonders for his series Russia: A Bright Future. In all, he photographed 20 of the most beautiful stations.

Burdeny, who himself has a master's degree in architecture as well as a bachelor's in interior design, first found out about Moscow's metro stations while working on a separate series on Italian palaces and theaters. He was struck by the use of opulent architecture to elevate an otherwise drab destination into a work of art.

"Typically, a metro station is a pedestrian place which serves as a utilitarian device to get you from one place to another. But these were extraordinarily built and constructed, [with] a whole architectural narrative built into them."

In many ways, Moscow owes its elaborate undergrounds to dictator Joseph Stalin. Russia's first metro system, part of his first Five-Year Plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s, was meant to show its citizens -- and the world -- the power and possibilities the Communist Party presented.

Burdeny had originally planned to focus on Russian stations more generally, taking photos of examples in both St Petersburg and Moscow.

"But when I saw the ones in Moscow, they just completely blew away the St Petersburg stations," he says, citing the Baroque Komsomolskaya Metro Station as the one that best "reinforced the idea that these were palaces for the people."

(СNN)