Traces of the Soviet Union

In early April this year I attended a presentation in Berlin of a photo project titled Lost Territories. The project was carried out between 2008 and 2016 by a group of photographers, collectively referred to as Sputnik Photos. During the Berlin event one of the photographers, a Pole named Michał Łuczak, presented the main purpose of the project. His presentation was followed by a discussion with a Russian writer, Sergey Lebedev and me. During the conversation we came to the conclusion that the greatest value of the project did not lie in the artistic quality of the photographs or the interesting travel recollections that were shared by the photographers. Rather, it was how it captured the traces of the Soviet Empire, both material and non-material, which can still be found today in what some call the post-Soviet space. Does this fact mean the Soviet Union, which formally ceased to exist over a quarter century ago, has survived, despite conventional wisdom? Or perhaps, its death is a slow and painful process?

Through Sputnik’s lenses

The international group of photographers, who describe themselves as a “collective” (a communist-sounding name in itself) and call their project Sputnik Photos (www.sputnikphotos.com), was established in 2006. The project brings together artists from Poland and other Central European states whose biographies demonstrate that this is an initiative of a certain generation. The majority of the photographers were born in the late 1970s, which means that at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse they were still teenagers. They set up the group when they were in their 20s (shortly after completing their studies and starting their careers) and are now reaching 40. This is the last generation that had first-hand experience with communism. At the same time, this is a generation that has been formed by the new post-communist reality.

Through photography, film and a photobook the group has been constructing, for over a decade now, a record of the transformation of the former Soviet bloc (let me admit that the topic of photographs has been limited solely to the territories of the former USSR). The artists have been working with a team of curators, writers, graphic artists and cultural activists. With documentary photography being their exit point, the project contemplates the contemporary dimension and function of this space. It experiments with form and content and thus, an important component of Sputnik Photos are its diverse forms of visual education which support and promote young artists from the region.

So far the Lost Territories has been the most important project of the Sputnik group. It includes the Lost Territories Archive (or LTA), which is a collection of several thousand photographs that have been used in numerous installations, exhibitions and books. They have been applied in many different narratives devoted to understanding the various aspects of the post-Soviet space. What is more, the LTA should be seen as a collection of works of individual artists who have travelled across the former Soviet republics and who have taken photographs independently of their work from the Sputnik group. Each photographer has worked for his or her recognition, presenting the photos or publishing texts with their own names. Yet those individual projects are later de-constructed, which deprives them of their unique context and they become a component of a completely new chronicle. When used as part of the Sputnik project, the authors do not receive credit for the photos. In this way, they become part of the collective work of the whole group. Individual narratives captured by the photographers’ lenses are, instead, marked by numbers assigned based on the simple order of their creation.

A dictionary and a photobook

The first product of the LTA to be the published was the Lost Territories Word Book. It is a unique dictionary, published as a printed book, offering an explanation of certain concepts that are uniquely related to the former Soviet Union. It was prepared by a group of 21 people – writers, journalists, political scientists, historians and artists among them. The dictionary also publishes the Sputnik group’s photographs which are used both as illustrations and commentaries. For example, the definition of the term “invasion” (written by Sebastian Cichocki) is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of the earth from above, taken from a small airplane window. The explanation of the term “resources” (authored by Aleksandra Jarosiewicz) is accompanied by an image of a large hay pyramid stacked in a meadow, while the definition of the term “Musora” (in Russian a derogatory slang term describing militia/police) authored by Małgorzata Nocuń is published together with a faded photograph of two extremely tired Georgian policemen, sitting sideways on a hospital bed.

LTA3 is a photobook titled Fruit Garden and is meant to visually paraphrase the famous sentence of the Soviet fruit farmer and breeder, Ivan Michurin: “We cannot wait for favours from nature; our task is to wrest them from her.” The book is, as the authors state, “a trace of research which hides, under a layer of haphazardness and chaos, a determined quest to fulfil destiny. The search is obsessive, with a series of experiments which instead of results generate the need to observe new trials. Here the oppression of Soviet ideology is reflected in the devastated and objectified nature. The titled fruit garden becomes a training ground for different modules: space, animals, micro-organisms, plants and people. All these are parts of one multi-dimensional ideological experiment which is undertaken without any regard to its consequences.” 

Is this a Soviet?

After looking through the Sputnik Photos’ books and exhibitions, one gets the impression that the role this project plays in photography is comparable to the contribution that the French Annales School once made to historiography. Specifically, the researchers who were associated with the scholarly journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, now titled Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, introduced the expression longue durée (the long term in English) into academic discourse, stressing the role of the long-lasting historical structures. By doing so they broke away from the earlier dominating event-oriented historiography, which was more focused on describing past individual events which – at the very most – were connected by a cause and effect relationship. In the view of the Annales School this was what the chroniclers and journalists do, while historians should focus on the long-lasting political, economic, social and cultural processes.

Characteristically, the work of the photographers gathered in the Sputnik collective put the Annales’s principles into practice. Their stories present the post-Soviet world in terms of its longue durée. As a result, there are no classical portraits or landscapes in the individual photographs. Or if they are, they are an element of a certain whole – a whole that is larger not only because of the size, but also the time period which it covers. Therefore, quite often instead of a landscape we are presented with a detail, a mark; like, for instance, in the photograph of a Soviet factory that shows only its skeleton and which is very narrowly cropped. On a note, many ruined and abandoned and overgrown with weeds industrial buildings like this can still be found in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus. I remember particularly well one of them: I was travelling with my colleague and his ten-year-old son in Armenia when we run into the site of a former factory. My friend’s son, trying to understand what he was seeing, asked his father: “Daddy, is this a Soviet?”

Another example is the image of a lonely horse walking along a road. Quite strikingly, the most important object in the photo is the black and white guardrail, the same which can be found along roads from Arkhangelsk to Khorugh. Thus, looking at the photograph we do not know whether it was taken in Russia or Tajikistan; today or thirty years ago. The still life photograph of a table with fruit and a sunflower is another example. I have seen many such tables covered with an identical characteristic tablecloth in Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. These ruined factories, roadside guardrails and old tables are indeed more durable monuments of the Soviet Union than busts or statues of former Soviet leaders – as we see in many of the former republics that have been sluggishly building their statehood since independence; dozens of these monuments have been destroyed, but these other traces remain.

Looking at some of the photographs one gets the impression that you are watching a documentation of an archaeological project. They portray objects produced by an earlier civilisation. Seeing them we keep thinking that we have already seen something like this elsewhere and that our neighbour has something similar as well. Given these feelings, I daresay that the artists of the Sputnik collective have created their own school of presenting a reality – the post-Soviet one, at least.

Common denominators

However, is talking about a post-Soviet reality justified in the first place? Or is it more of an offence? Or put another way, does the term “post-Soviet” even make sense today – that is, 26 years since the Soviet Union collapsed? Political scientists tend to answer this question with a “no”. They point to the diversity of the former republics – now independent states – and that it is incorrect to treat them as one uniform group.

Let us take the example of two countries: Latvia and Kyrgyzstan. What do they really have in common? Latvia is a member of the European Union (and three years ago it also introduced the euro) and NATO. Kyrgyzstan is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States and two Moscow-dominated integration structures – the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and the Eurasian Economic Union. Latvia is relatively well-off, Kyrgyzstan is definitely much poorer. Latvia has Christian roots (with Protestantism being the dominant religion), and in Kyrgyzstan the majority of the population are Muslim. Latvia is highly urbanised (around 70 per cent of the population lives in cities), Kyrgyzstan is mostly rural (around 70 per cent of people live in the countryside). Latvia is flat (its highest “mountain” is slightly over 300 meters), while Kyrgyzstan is quite mountainous with peaks reaching 7,000 metres above the sea level. In practice, the only common denominator that connects the two states is their Soviet past. Is that past enough to talk about any modern-day connections?

An image of a large hay pyramid stacked in a meadow accompanies the term “resources” in the Lost Territories Word Book – a dictionary of post-Soviet terms. Photo courtesy of Sputnik Photos

The works of the Sputnik photographers suggest that the answer is “yes”. In other words, even the smallest common denominator is enough to find relevant ties. Their work shows that the post-Soviet space still exists today, in 2017. It includes at least twelve states: Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (in South Caucasus) as well as five states in Central Asia (including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). Even if we exclude the three Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia), which were incorporated into the Soviet Union at a later stage and probably absorbed the least amount of Sovietness, the space still makes up quite an impressive territory.

Yet, what are the common denominators of this vast territory? What are its determinants, or oecumenes – to use a term of the former fellow with the Carnegie Moscow Centre, Alexy Malashenko? The first that comes to mind is the Russian language which is still used from Brest (Belarus) to Magadan (a sea port in Russia’s Far East), from Vorkuta (Russian north) to Termez (in Uzbekistan). Naturally, the command level of this language these days is much lower than it was 25 years ago and there are even places where it is much easier to communicate in English than Russian, but for the majority of states that form what we call the post-Soviet territory, this is the most widely used and best understood language.

The second example that comes to mind is cuisine. This feature is best captured in the introduction to the Polish translation of Irina Glushchenko’s book Food and Drinks: Mikoyan and Soviet Cuisine where a Polish culinary critic, Maciej Nowak, writes: “While it is debatable whether a Soviet man has been successfully created, a Soviet cuisine certainly has. At the level of culinary traditions the Soviet cuisine has integrated recipes from Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, the North and South Caucasus and Central Asia. At the ideological level it introduced guidelines for healthy nutrition a few decades before they become trendy in western societies … At the practical level, it has created mechanisms which destroyed earlier practices of home-cooking”. That is why, in the thousands of canteens and restaurants in different locations from Brest to Lviv, up to the borders with Iran, Afghanistan and China, you will find Ukrainian borsch, pelmeni, Caucasian shish kebabs and Central Asian plov. Not to mention Moldovan or Georgian wine.

Soviet afterlife

The third determinant that needs to be mentioned is less tangible but more debatable. This is the post-Soviet mentality and a sense of belonging to the post-Soviet (or even Soviet) world. I observed traces of this phenomenon on many occasions. The last time was at a bazar in Samarkand where I spoke with an old man who was probably close to 100 years old. It turned out that he was a veteran of the Second World War and fought in combat near Warsaw. When he found out that I am from Poland, he cried out: “We are neighbours!” Today’s Uzbekistan does not share any borders with Poland, but the Soviet Union did. And it is this non-existing border that my interlocutor probably had in mind. It suggests that he had to feel, at least to a certain extent, that he was still a citizen of the Soviet Union.

A friend of mine had a different, yet somewhat similar, adventure. He stopped for lunch at a small roadside restaurant somewhere en route from Almaty to Bishkek. It was a place mostly attended by truck drivers, a majority of them Turks. At first my friend was mistaken for a Turk. However, when he explained that he was actually Polish, the owner – a young Kyrgyz guy – almost threw his arms around him, screaming: “Finally, our Slavic brother is here!” Clearly, for this guy the imagined ideological community, which was deeply rooted in the USSR and the sense of familiarity that it had generated, was much more important than the real ethnic community (the Kyrgyz are related to the Turks and have actually little in common with Slavs).

Artists from the Sputnik photo group also share many similar stories. Listening to them gives you a sense that they are portraying a distinct “civilisation” (oecumene), which is neither European nor Asian, and neither western nor eastern. Therefore the question that comes to mind is: if there is such a civilisation (oecumene), maybe we should no longer talk about the post-Soviet space and just simply refer to it as the Soviet space?

I would disagree with this assertion, nonetheless. The Soviet Union no longer exists. What we are seeing now is rather something of a “Soviet afterlife”. I would admit though that it is correct to say that the USSR has not fully collapsed and that its collapse is still taking place. Some claim that the last straw of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s collapse was the division of Czechoslovakia, or that the end of the Ottoman Empire was brought about with the announcement of Kosovo’s independence;  if these cases are plausible, perhaps we can argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union is also a process and not just one single event. This would seem to mean that the process began sometime during the mid-1980s with the beginning of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and that it has been unfolding through today. One of its stages would also appear to include the Russian intervention in Ukraine and the war in Donbas.

A promised land?

For many the end of the Soviet Union was a traumatic and personal tragedy. Even today we can meet those who miss the old times and talk about them with great nostalgia. They are often labelled as Homo sovieticus while their feelings are explained in terms of being an “escape from freedom”. The truth, however, is that the post-Soviet space in the 1990s saw crises, poverty and, in some areas, war.

The signs of this civilisational regress can also be found in the Sputnik productions, especially LTA3 or the Fruit Garden. They were to be seen in an exhibition, titled Lost Territories: Sediment (LTA2), which was on display at the Warsaw Centre for Contemporary Art and whose curator, Paweł Szypulski, said in a press interview: “We are showing the heritage of a grand utopia, which – as usually is the case – turned into a nightmare and the world that exists after the awakening from this nightmare. [We show] the marks that the Soviet Union has left on the landscape of the individual states: wounds after atomic tests or uranium mines, moving of borders and places of current military conflicts”.

Thus, the Sputnik photographs can help us understand people who nostalgically sigh when they talk about the Brezhnev times and the Soviet utopia, even if you consider them an aberration. Moreover, they will provoke us to ask the question whether these “lost territories” are indeed lost forever, or are they – at least symbolically – recoverable? Will they, by any chance, ever become a “promised land”?

Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Wojciech Górecki is a Polish analyst, journalist and historian specialising in the post-Soviet space, especially the North and South Caucasus and Central Asia. He is the author of several books, including Abkhazia (2013) and a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW).

Armenia, belarus, Former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Photos, Russia, Sputnik photos, USSR