The Tubes of Sheremetyevo

So there we were in Sheremetyevo (Moscow Airport) on our way home from speaking at Interop and my buddy Winn said Dude, what are they? And I looked up, where he was pointing, and there were all these tubes. Apparently they served no purpose other than to decorate the ceiling. I decided they were Soviet-era, Cold War surplus tubes that had once formed part of the Soviet Internetski, an early competitor to what we now know as the Internet.