‘As the last to go, I should turn off the lights’ The photographers who stayed in Russia share what they’re feeling and what they’re shooting

Story by Meduza. Translation by Emily Laskin.

Because of its war against Ukraine and subsequent mobilization, Russia has lost tens of thousands of professionals from all sectors. IT specialists, entrepreneurs, and journalists, among other groups, have left en masse. The emigration of photographers is perhaps not the most obvious exodus, but it’s nonetheless particularly painful. The country has lost people who recorded the daily changes taking place in it – their loss is a growing blind spot. But Russia hasn’t seen the last of them, thanks to those who stayed. Meduza asked photographers who haven’t left to describe, in pictures and words, how they feel about their worlds in wartime.

Today’s events are like a disfigured collage of what humanity survived in the 20th century. It’s like a dream, the most unbelievable things can happen. I want to suddenly open my eyes, exhale with relief, and say “I just imagined it all….” But no. We’re sensing in real time that the future we counted on, the plans we made, are disappearing, and so are the people we surrounded ourselves with for so long. Every day is full of mass suffering and fear; and the news feed has long since become a poisoned source, but you can’t stop drinking from it.

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I’m an irrepressible optimist. I was. Physical pain, depression, and hopelessness. The complete lack of a horizon for planning: you live out the day, everyone is alive and well, they’re free – that’s good. The city is empty, there are fewer traffic jams, you go to a coffee shop – only girls. There are fewer and fewer young guys on the street, but more police and national guard. At the same time, you’re not fighting weekend crowds in public spaces. Anxiety permeates everything. Many are leaving. I have the sense that, as the last to go, I should turn off the lights.

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After September 21 [the day Putin announced “partial mobilization”], I started paying attention to how the gender balance is noticeably off, there are fewer and fewer men around. You can see a new level of nerves, deep in random people’s eyes. As one of the heroines of my photo project, about women left behind without their husbands, put it, “even the dog lovers stopped saying hello, everyone is afraid of each other.” Numbness. Or at least a holding of breath. The world around us is frozen, waiting for catastrophe.

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They say interest and anxiety are at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Now I’m trying to drag the slider from one position to another. It’s like we’re all in a big ship with boarded up windows, in the heart of a storm, and God only knows whether we’ll be wrecked on the rocks or, when the storm quiets down, we’ll see the shore of a new world.

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These photos show a playground and a room in my home under camouflage nets. I wove the nets all summer and fall of 2021, for a series on the militarization of childhood, which was going to show playgrounds covered in these nets. The arrival of war made working on it impossible. After the onset of mobilization, new thoughts arose: the well-being of my own family was under threat. Now we live with that constant fear that my husband will be ordered to fight and the children will be left without a father. These photos are my symbolic gesture, the attempt of a wife and a mother to hide her family and protect them from war. 

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I live in a country where the word “peace,” and distaste for war, are outlawed, and the general situation is reminiscent of a well-known dystopian novel. More and more often, I want to be in the forest, to dissolve into it, its smells and sounds, to become one with it. I want to be further from the crowds, from endless doomscrolling, and I want this madness to end.

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A huge number of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues have left Russia, but a fair number have also stayed for their studies, work, and families. I have a military ID, but I never served or went through training. I know people who wanted to go and fight even before mobilization, and they’re headed there now. It’s an unpleasant feeling, I wouldn’t want to see them on the Internet [in photos or videos from the war]. There are people who got summonses but don’t plan to mobilize. Mine hasn’t come yet. But my friend’s has.

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A totalitarian state – that’s our new-old reality. The photograph shows Levashovo Memorial Cemetery, the burial site for those who were shot in Leningrad during the Stalinist repressions in 1937-1953.

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I live in a city where weapons have been manufactured for many years. There are several large defense enterprises here. We’re servicing the war. After mobilization was announced it was like the city froze. A few weeks passed – life went on as usual. It’s striking how fast people get used to it.

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I’m choosing to stay in Russia, but every moment of the decision has been frightening. Military call-ups, the normalization of violence – they’re now everyday components of a city of millions. 

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The Z symbols didn’t flood Yekaterinburg right away. At first there weren’t any, but after the attacks of a certain TV-*** [the photographer gives an unflattering description of the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov], local authorities got embarrassed about their insufficient patriotism and started sticking them everywhere including, apparently, on the backs of stray dogs that ran by. Now they’re everywhere. As for that shot, it was a normal gloomy Urals morning, and I saw that tram with gloomy women sitting in it. It would seem like everything is normal, but the Z with sausages in the background gave the scene a monstrous, surreal meaning. Some kind of doom and hopelessness appeared in this picture. I should probably say that I try to shoot all this obscurantism, so I was ready for this scene. In fact, I haven’t seen that tram again.

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After Vladimir Putin announced mobilization on September 21, practically nothing changed visually, as far as I could see, unless you went by a military commissariat or draft collection point. Unless there were fewer male people out on the street, but that could have been a false impression. But what was happening to people internally was noticeably more intense. The degree of rage, hopelessness, malice, irritation, and, for some, happiness that Russia is in a state of war, all openly increased. Most people who are against the war unleashed by Russia went into internal emigration, and when they happen to meet their own kind somewhere, they’re desperately happy.

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After the war started I moved to a place near this park. Every time I walk from my home to the metro I pass by this attraction. And every time, I look at the pictures of tanks and the bumper cars painted with red stars and military camouflage, and the happy people driving them. And every time, I see the answer to the question of whether Russians want war. I’m really tired, I can’t change even one of my close relations’ minds about the war. I don’t have the inner strength to catch the “decisive moment,” to build a composition, to wait for the light. I just press the button and shoot what’s there. For me, now isn’t the time for aesthetics in photography. The main reaction to photos now isn’t “wow,” but horror.

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I can see that everyone is tired. It all started on February 24 [the day Russia invaded Ukraine], September 21 [the day Putin announced “partial mobilization”] was just another twist. Everyone’s tired: those who are for war, those who are against it, those who abstain. They’re tired of living in stress, worry, of being mystified about the next step in a complicated dance. The authorities continue to put on festivals, carnivals, and other shows, including patriotic ones, non-stop, so they can make everything appear okay. But people are alive, they can feel that everything isn’t okay, that there hasn’t been a plan for a long time, and that that only adds to their fatigue.

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After February 24, my feeling of alienation from surrounding reality intensified. I couldn’t get the surprise out of my head that this historical-social forgetting had taken on an epidemic character, that common sense had either died, or it just generally hadn’t ever existed. The common sense we internalized in school, when they prepared us to live in a normal, democratic country, in partnership with other countries. My Russia is stuck somewhere on the pages of civics textbooks, but I don’t want to and can’t live anywhere else.

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I’ve never felt so foreign in this country, and I’m living through derealization. It’s hard for me to do nothing, or to fall into a dormant state, so I continue to take photos. A conceptual substitution creeps into Russian society. Television tries to convey to people that the “special operation” is “peace,” regardless of the fact that many Russians were raised on the certainty that war is horror and death. So now it’s common to find families where every member is for peace, but with a different understandings of what that means. People are living in fundamentally different realities, and the stress grows.

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Nothing is happening in my city. As if February 24 and September 21 hadn’t happened. Everyone inhaled and froze – they can’t exhale, because they’re afraid to disturb the beast within. Anyway here it is, life, nothing has changed: just the occasional green ribbons, the occasional lone protestor and stickers with two words [no war] that the police haven’t noticed yet. It’s just made people more uneasy. It’s just made people more silent and still.

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On September 29, I realized I barely remembered what had happened since September 21. The news of mobilization. The acquaintances who were taken away by night to the “special military operation,” to kill and die. The acquaintances who left in a rush for somewhere else. The acquaintances in jail for 15 days for “petty hooliganism.” Most of all, it’s the lies we repeat to ourselves that cause suffering. We live in a world where things don’t go by their own names. It’s painful.

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What has changed? Everything is like before, only at night I dream of war. But during the day my consciousness calls out to peace. I feel a sharper need to keep close relations around me, for simple pleasures, and everything petty and vain is no longer relevant. I sense the frailty of human life and of our planet, a person’s bewilderment at the scale of events. This is a time of difficult changes, a time of disorientation, when everyone chooses a role for himself – victim, punisher, judge, defender of rights and freedoms, public figure, preacher, or observer. I chose the last one, I have no position. I want to bring good for the world to our families and our hearts.

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On September 30, I was going to cover the anti-mobilization protests in Makhachkala, Dagestan. It seems like my plans irritated someone, because I was arrested right in the middle of the street and put in a special detention center for five days. Employees of the Center for Combating Extremism gave false testimony that I “behaved aggressively, used obscene language, and didn’t respond to police officers’ repeated demands that I stop breaking the law.” Behind bars I got notes from friends and messages from my cellmate, who was trying to convert me to Islam. He thought throwing these texts away was blasphemy, he asked me to tear them up first and then burn them.

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My method for dealing with this gripping anxiety is to walk a lot, or just steal time between tasks to move around. One of these walks coincided with the beach embankment closing up for the season. A door to nowhere, the shore, the concrete retaining wall, strong wind before bad weather, the sea which could become a path, a road, an exit. Or not – there are too many factors at work. In any case, the unknown and undefined awaits us.

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I’m afraid. Afraid that they’ll try to call me up for the army. Afraid that I can’t earn enough for a decent life, just as our country rides off into some abyss. I’m afraid that there might be a revolution and a person even more distanced from the economy and the desire for peace will come to power. I’m afraid that my children are growing up in an ever more hostile and aggressive environment. 

The natural desire is to leave, to hide, to walk out, to fence myself off from the state. In the city the sense is even stronger that your apartment, and the whole world we built, is fragile. It costs the government nothing to shatter it all without a second thought. Only nature provides any solace. The sounds of the swaying forest, birdsong, the noise of water, orange dawn and violet dusk, the autumn forest and the dried up grass, cool shadows and the heat of the sun.

You only have to read the latest news to understand that this is all an illusion. Protection is ephemeral. I have nothing to shield me. 

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It’s hard for me to feel the same sudden fear in my own life that thousands of guys in central Russia experienced, waking up one morning in September and learning about mobilization. I live in Dagestan. Extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, persecution – that’s what’s worried me for years, not misdirected call-up papers in the mailbox. I’ve already been in the situation where I was afraid to sleep at home, afraid of cars passing by. Will they suddenly cram me in and take me who knows where? I got tired of being afraid, so now I feel totally calm and I’m not planning to go anywhere.

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If it works out, we’re leaving Russia in the very near future. I’ve had a lot of feelings about it, among them, unexpectedly, something like sadness at leaving the territory where I’ve lived my whole life. Longing for Russia is pretty strange in the context of current events, considering that in recent years all my work has been fueled by the impossibility of being “my own person” here, by a sense of solitude and isolation from what’s going on. How did a change in my “relationship with my motherland” become possible at such a moment?

In one of my Telegram chats with friends I read that it’s something like a phantom pain. Only the pain isn’t from a loss, but from that which, it seems, was never there, and you feel it particularly acutely because just this moment it has become clear: it never was and never will be.

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There is no place for words.