Warsaw-based documentary photographer Rafal Milach has devoted years to recording daily life in post-Soviet Russia and the former Warsaw Pact countries. His photo essay 7 Rooms focuses on seven young friends in the Russian cities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg (where he shot this hammer and sickle on the roof of an apartment block in 2008), and Krasnoyarsk. "They were born in the U.S.S.R., grew up in the transition time of Perestroika, and started their adult life in Putin's Russia," he says of his subjects. Now that Vladimir Putin is practically guaranteed to win 12 more years as president after his current stint as prime minister, the country seems to be sliding inexorably back toward Soviet-style rule. As Milach's photos suggest, those harsh decades never entirely ended.