Rebel, photographer, addict In an excerpt from his new book, Howard Amos recounts the life of Dima Markov, whose lens exposed Russia’s raw beauty and brutality

Dima Markov lived on the edges of Russian society, both as an artist and as a person. A former journalist turned photographer, he chronicled life in orphanages, back alleys, and desolate towns, capturing moments of intimacy, hardship, and resilience. His work blurred the lines between documentation and activism, drawing attention to those Russia often overlooks — addicts, orphans, soldiers, and the poor. In an excerpt from his new book, “Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire,” Howard Amos traces Markov’s journey from a chaotic childhood to a life spent balancing photography, social work, and self-destruction, revealing a man whose art was both his salvation and his curse.

I first met Dima Markov on a train heading to Pskov Region. It was July 2007, and we were travelling overnight from Moscow with about thirty other volunteers to take part in a month-long summer camp at the state-owned Belskoye Ustye orphanage for physically and mentally disabled children. I was a university student at the time and had flown into the Russian capital a few days earlier. As the train rolled through north-western Russia, Dima was swilling from a can of beer. He was stick-thin, lanky, and had closely cropped hair. He introduced himself to the volunteers and recounted anecdotes from other orphanages he’d visited. He told me that he was a photographer, and, as if to prove the point, got out his camera and flicked through his photos.

Summer camp would be a life-changing experience for many of the volunteers on that train, but none more so than Dima, who was then twenty-five. Each of us had different reasons for being there: some were training to be speech therapists, psychologists, or teachers and needed work experience; some had lofty ideals; some just wanted an adventure. Dima was there, first and foremost, to take photos.

Every volunteer was allocated to a group of children at the orphanage, and Dima was placed with a group of older boys. He quickly became a hit. His easy eloquence, honesty, and empathy made him instantly popular with the muscled and sometimes intimidating teenagers. Instinctively, a few of the volunteers adopted schoolteacher-type personas with the kids, chiding them for scuffles or not washing their hands. But Dima was never like that: he remained himself. With the older boys, he smoked incessantly and peppered his conversation with expletives. For group performances, he taught them to break-dance.

Most volunteers were deeply affected by the plight of the orphanage children and became convinced of the need to do something — anything — to help break the vicious cycle of institutionalization. Some went on to become teachers, found charities and children’s villages, and a couple even adopted orphanage kids. Many returned repeatedly to summer camp, and a few — like Dima — ended up moving to Pskov Region. Later, Dima described the desperate feeling that arose after leaving Belskoye Ustye the first time: “I told everyone about it — those I should have told and those I shouldn’t. Some looked at me like I was a madman. Which, at that moment, I was.”

Soon after our first summer camp, Dima left Moscow and moved to live permanently in Fedkovo, a village near Porkhov, where, under the auspices of a charity, he helped to set up a halfway house for orphanage kids. The young men who came to live in Fedkovo were the most physically and mentally able. At first, they would come for short spells, and then, if they adapted successfully, would relocate permanently. While the majority had lived in Belskoye Ustye, Dima also sought out teenagers from other local institutions. He spent his time doing fostering paperwork, as well as dealing with orphanages, social services, and courts.

Initially, Dima funded his life in Fedkovo by occasional trips to Moscow, where he’d photograph parties at elite nightclubs attended by Russia’s super-rich. The contrast with the orphanage was devastating. “It was really difficult for me to comprehend what I saw in those two places. And I was not only seeing it, but also taking part,” Dima said. “It was difficult not to start judging. I don’t think rich people are bad, swindlers, or thieves. They were intelligent people . . . It was just difficult to observe such a difference.” As soon as he could afford to, he gave up the work in Moscow.

It was while living in Fedkovo that Dima managed, for the first time, to successfully combine the two things he felt most passionately about: photography and social activism. It was a delicate balance. While he’d use his photographs to publicize causes, raise money, and attract attention, he did this through intimate portrayals of those under his care.

When I spent time with Dima in this period, I always found him intimidating. Partly, I was in awe of his raw talent and his growing celebrity. But he could also be fierce and unforgiving. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. I was never able to keep up with his drinking, which could be unrelenting, and his swearing, which was non-stop. He enjoyed arguments, attention, and shocking his interlocuters. As he got drunk, Dima’s lanky body seemed to turn floppy, and he would become even more conflict-prone and sometimes aggressive. Eventually, he fell out with the orphanage staff so dramatically that he was banned from entering the building. In one incident while living in Fedkovo, he asked a confectionary shop in Pskov to bake a cake decorated with two reindeers having sex, and created a mini-media storm with outraged blog posts when they refused. And in 2012, he went along to the trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow with a sign reading: “Have you lost your fucking minds?” He was immediately detained by police.

At the same time, though, Dima seemed to be able to charm almost anyone — from an alcoholic on the streets of Pskov to the curator of a prestigious Moscow art gallery. He was also empathetic and deeply kind. He helped me find somewhere to live when I first moved to Moscow. And I remember one time arriving in Fedkovo in the dead of winter, several hours before dawn. Dima had ensured there was a freshly made bed and hot stove.

For many years, I knew nothing of Dima’s background or why he started taking photos. But not long before he died of a heroin overdose in 2024, we had a long conversation about his childhood. Dima was born in 1982 in Pushkino, a commuter town just outside Moscow, and grew up in an apartment on Factory Street. His early years were defined by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic and social upheaval of the 1990s.

Violence was never far from the surface. He described his father’s reaction when his mother came home in tears, saying she’d been attacked on the street. “My father grabbed an axe — his ax was always by the door because fucking alcoholics occasionally got the wrong door and tried to get into our flat — and took my mother by the scruff of the neck and went to find the fucking guy who did it.” Nor was there a refuge from the violence at school, where teachers would turn a blind eye to kids with bloody noses. Dima recounted a strict hierarchy among the boys and fights behind an old greenhouse. “When a group of people is trapped in a cycle of violence, it needs to be constantly maintained,” he said. “All those fights were necessary to keep the cycle going and ensure no one escaped. You have to maintain the level of violence; otherwise, everything falls apart.”

Dima’s father drank heavily, sparking frequent arguments, and would pass out most evenings. When Dima helped carry him to bed, he could knock his father’s head against the door frame without waking him. Dima’s mother took refuge in God, becoming a devout Orthodox Christian when he was twelve. 

Dima was still in school when he started taking drugs. Initially, it was marijuana given to him by a cousin (who had bought it from police officers selling seized drugs). Dima tried heroin for the first time when he was eighteen. He studied for a few years in college before buying a fake school-leaving certificate, which allowed him to enrol at a university. But this was just a ruse to avoid military service: he never attended classes and was eventually kicked out when caught with drugs. After that, he worked in a video store. “At that time, I was using anything that I could get my hands on and, at that time, you could get your hands on everything,” he recalled.

In one of several breaks with the past, Dima suddenly decided to move to Moscow in his early twenties. He landed a reporting job at national newspaper Argumenti i Fakti, where he spent four years learning the craft of journalism. Only then did it occur to him to try his hand at photography. With a digital SLR camera bought on credit, Dima gravitated towards Moscow’s Three Stations Square, a gritty terminus of three railway lines and a hub for bootleg goods, homelessness, and petty criminality. Looming over the square was one of the capital’s Stalin skyscrapers. “It was covered in stalls selling everything from fucking Czech porn to clothes and gifts for kids,” Dima recalled. “There were many different types of flamboyant people around. I also remember that the fucking police were very angry, and very drunk.”

It was about this time that Dima found himself a photography teacher: Alexander Lapin, a prominent, Soviet-trained photographer then in his sixties. Characteristically, Dima emailed Lapin on a whim after reading his book and was invited to his flat. Lapin did not run formal courses or give lectures but adopted photographers in whom he saw potential, setting them tasks and chatting with them for hours in his kitchen.

Above all, Lapin preached the importance of composition. “Alexander believed photography was a visual language. In a picture, you are imparting a certain mood to someone that’s impossible to pin down — you can only feel it,” Dima said. “A photograph is like a language, and any language works according to rules.” 

Dima’s decision to set up the halfway house in Fedkovo — another break with the past like his move to Moscow — was likely an attempt to reduce his drug use. Such changes of circumstance appeared to allow him, at least temporarily, to manage his addiction. He later said those few years in Fedkovo helping extricate teenagers from Russia’s orphanage system were a second childhood and one of the happiest periods of his life. Of course, there were failures as well as successes. But there is no doubt Dima’s interventions helped several young men escape a life of institutionalization.

It was hard adapting to the rural Pskov region, and Dima felt torn between Fedkovo and his previous life. “I find it hard to live in the countryside and, after everything that’s happened, impossible to live in the city. It’s with horror that I realise it will probably be like this forever,” he wrote to me in an email in the autumn of 2010.

The end of Dima’s time at Fedkovo was precipitated by tragedy. One of the young men in their care — a blonde, kind-hearted teenager who suffered from kleptomania — died from a seizure. The exact reason was never established. Perhaps inevitably, Dima and others at Fedkovo pointed the finger at the orphanage (where the boy still attended school). The orphanage staff blamed Fedkovo. While the death was a catalyst, it was not Dima’s only reason for moving on: he was also burnt out. Either way, his departure pushed him into a spiral of drug use in which, at one point, he injected with a man whose child was locked in the next room. Eventually, Dima was hospitalized and diagnosed with HIV.

In yet another bid to reinvent himself, Dima moved to Pskov. This was the moment when he abandoned traditional cameras and switched to using an iPhone that allowed him to get closer to his subjects and dispense with the paraphernalia of prints, exhibitions, and galleries. He became an early user of Instagram and quickly amassed a large following. Some said, half in jest, that Dima’s Instagram page was the sort of page Dostoevsky would have run if the social network had been around in the nineteenth century. And his feed filled up with perfectly composed images from the Russian regions, usually taken on the edge of towns or cities, among crumbling blocks of flats, muddy rivers, and old garages. His subjects were the most marginal in society: alcoholics, the homeless, addicts, orphans, the very old and dying, shaven-headed conscripts, and children. While most Russians would, instinctively, turn away from such people, Dima imbued them with beauty, glamor, and even eroticism.

Street photography allowed Dima to give free rein to his ability to capture fleeting moments of symmetry and emotion. When he arrived in a new town, he would look online to find out where the biggest concentrations of people were likely to be — markets, railway stations, or shops. Sometimes, he would roam the suburbs listening to electronic music and looking for something to photograph. I never saw him on one of these walks (he said being in the company of other people made photography impossible), but he had a distinctive gait, with all his weight pitched forward, and I can imagine him striding around, earphones in, searching for the perfect image.

While Dima’s photos can often seem unbearably sad, he humanized his subjects — whether they were bored shop assistants, scared soldiers, beggars, or children playing in the street. One of Dima’s friends, the journalist Aleksei Pivovarov, who I spoke to in the weeks after Dima’s death, compared Dima to the painter Caravaggio. “He saw the light inside nondescript people and shone his love onto them. And they become the centre of the universe,” said Pivovarov. “Dima was a great humanist who followed directly in the footsteps of the best artists of the Renaissance.”

Taking pictures helped Dima manage his addiction, and he often said that, without art, he would have been dead long ago. For Dima, finding and creating the perfect image was akin to a religious experience — a prayer — or, perhaps, a substitute for a chemical high. “As an addict, I can tell you that, when you see that a photo is coming together, the feeling is . . . the highest, most satisfying thing life has to offer,” he told one interviewer, going on to compare the process to an expression of divine grace.

Photography was also a means for Dima to process his past. “Viewers see some of my subjects as bleak, if not, let’s be honest, depressing. But I feel the opposite: peace,” he wrote in his 2018 book Draft. “When I manage to express this bleakness in a text or photograph, I feel as if it becomes a little less inside me.” This was perhaps why he was drawn again and again to scenes of urban marginality — in other words, back to the people, emotions, and aesthetic of his childhood. “I don’t know why I’m so drawn to the past! It’s a fucking affliction that our country suffers from. And so do I! It’s some sort of fucking hankering after the past, and not the future,” he told me. “But, fuck it. I’m a person of my country. I’ve got the same affliction as everyone else.”

When I asked Dima whether he was religious, he had difficulty formulating an answer. Eventually, he said “yes.” But immediately qualified this by adding he knew religion was used by people, including his mother, as a crutch, and that nothing could replace therapy and medical treatment when it came to managing addiction. He said he only went into churches to take photos. “Sometimes I think there are . . . higher laws according to which day-to-day life is organized. And that they’re above our understanding. At other times I think there’s nothing else but the fucking theory of relativity.”

Despite his professional success, Dima continued to volunteer and remained involved with different charities, devising joint projects, taking photos, and raising awareness of causes through stories, interviews, and images. The charities he supported included orphan integration programmes, drug rehabilitation centres, homeless shelters, human rights groups, and hospices. He said he saw something biblical in the way staff at such organizations would work long hours caring for people despite there being no end to the suffering. “Justice is the realm of the devil; the realm of God is charity and forgiveness,” he said in one interview.

Dima attributed his popularity to the fact that most Russians — even if they were high-flying professionals in Moscow — retained a nostalgia for the Russia he photographed: the Russia of their childhoods. Some said Dima’s greatest service was how he packaged the provinces in such a way as to make them fashionable in Moscow’s fancy bars, restaurants, and cultural centers.

The last time I saw Dima was in Pskov in early 2023. We hadn’t been in touch for a while, and I’d forgotten how intense and impatient he could be. As we spoke, he sat on a kitchen stool and wrapped his spindly limbs around his thin body: legs crossed and arms twisted behind his back. Occasionally, he’d stop to crack his neck. He repeatedly ran the palm of his hand over his shaven head, and when he got particularly agitated, he paced the room.

Mostly, we talked about the war in Ukraine. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Dima had a major relapse, disappearing into drugs and doing little work for almost a year. He overdosed three times and told me he no longer had any veins in his arms. Amid the fires of war, he felt as if nobody needed his photos. And he admitted that he’d been blindsided by the level of support for the invasion in Pskov. “Even with all my experience, I was fucking shocked by the appetite for war,” he said. “Of course, I’d noticed it in some of my friends and protagonists. Hypothetically. Before it all started. But I was surprised by the scale.”

As Dima spoke, I had no doubt he was disgusted by the killing in Ukraine. He thought it would end badly for all involved. But I found myself wondering about the nature of his opposition to the war. Did he really want to see Russia humiliated on the battlefield? It dawned on me that he drew a substantial moral equivalence between the two sides. And that his sympathies lay, first and foremost, with the victims he could see in Pskov: the traumatized and injured Russian soldiers and grieving families.

After all, his lifestyle meant Dima was very close to those fighting in Ukraine. He’d taken photos of Pskov’s famous paratrooper division, lived for a time with a paratrooper, and several of the young men he’d helped over the years were serving in the army. As news of the invasion broke on the morning of February 24, 2022, Dima said he messaged the Pskov paratroopers he knew: “Take care.” Their phones were already turned off.

When I asked him how he explained the willingness of Russian men to go and fight, he pointed to how they lived. “When you don’t value your own fucking life, when there’s fucking nothing from which you can draw strength, and there’s no interest in life, of course you’ll fucking go off to war without a second thought,” he told me. “In normal fucking life, you have to think about where to live, about making sure your fucking woman doesn’t scream at you, and solving everyday fucking problems, which are boring and, fucking uninteresting. Fucking debts, all that sort of thing. But out there, there is only one question: either you remain alive, or you die. This simplifies everything. It’s easier for you. I have experienced this myself. It’s easier because you only have one problem, and it fucking makes life understandable; what you have to do becomes clear.” 

Dima was often asked why he didn’t leave Russia following the invasion, but, in truth, it was difficult to imagine him moving abroad. Theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov, a friend of Dima’s, told me Dima was bound to Russia through good or ill. “People like him can’t be outside Russia. Of course, it’s hard for them to be inside Russia, distressing even. And painful. But they stay in the country that they can’t live without.”

Dima said he felt sorry for amputee veterans he encountered on trains between Pskov and Moscow, for the conscripts rushed to the front with little idea of the horror that awaited them, and for returning Russian soldiers who had witnessed the death of their friends. They were victims, too, Dima seemed to be saying: victims of Russia’s pitiless war machine that had so little regard for human life. One of the last photos Dima posted on Instagram was of an alcoholic veteran back from the front, covering his eyes as he sobbed.

In the end, Dima chose to stay in Russia while the war in Ukraine raged — and he embraced that choice, making the compromises it required. To avoid jail, he stopped publicly expressing his political opinions and referred to the war by its official term of a “Special Military Operation.” Even in private, he was more cautious. For a time, he stopped using Instagram (which was banned by the authorities at the beginning of the fighting) and posted more content to Telegram, as well as Russia’s Facebook equivalent, VKontakte.

His position and his compromises, though, clearly caused him some anguish. Just ten days before he died, he addressed his critics — real or inside his own head — in a blunt post. “I understand that, having moved abroad, it’s easy to stifle your urge to pity,” Dima wrote. “But I am here. I can’t just stop loving those close to me and start hating them . . . I don’t know how to act correctly in this situation and be a good person for everyone, or whether, indeed, that is even possible.”

In the last year of his life, Dima became heavily involved with Survivor, a charity that helps drug users, and was part of a project to set up a rehabilitation centre in the city of Nizhny Novgorod for teenage addicts. He was even planning to leave Pskov and move back to Moscow.

At the beginning of 2024, he was living in one of Survivor’s centers and writing a book. When he went back to Pskov for a few days, he stopped responding to messages, and Survivor’s founder, Maksim Uryadov, raised the alarm. One of his friends in Pskov went round to his flat, where, through the window, she could see him on the floor. Eventually, the police arrived and broke down the door. There were several syringes on the table, and Dima was dead. He was forty-one.

The news of his death was reported on February 16, 2024, just a few hours after the death of Navalny in an Arctic prison colony. For many, including myself, it was a haunting coincidence. It seemed as if two of the brightest lights left in Putin’s Russia had been snuffed out simultaneously, leaving little but darkness. Dima’s family were strongly opposed to a public funeral, so the only guests who attended the remembrance services — one in Pskov, one in Moscow — were those on a pre-approved list. A few days after the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dima was buried in Pushkino.

In his last years, Dima was frank about his drug use, and whenever he’d told me the details, I’d been left with the uncomfortable thought that he was unlikely to live to an old age. He was always extremely thin, but latterly became almost translucent, the skin drawn so tightly you could trace his skull. One time we met in Pskov, his face was bloodied and bruised — he waved away a question about what had happened. Nevertheless, his death was still a shock. In the following days, much was written about his talents as a photographer, which would have pleased him. Some compared Dima to Henri Cartier-Bresson and said his photos would be studied for many centuries to come. Others placed him in a Russian tradition of socially orientated artists, like the writer Maxim Gorky or painter Ilya Repin, who made the “invisible” people of Russian society “visible.”

Re-reading Dima’s last posts on social media, I was struck by one I found on Telegram just a few months before his death. “One day, the happy moment will come along when, at last, I’ll die,” Dima wrote in a few paragraphs of philosophizing as he reflected on seeing a pile of his books ready to be shipped to buyers. “My few neurons will stop firing, and, along with them, all the mistakes that have piled up over the course of my tormented existence will dissipate. But, when all the dross is forgotten, my photos will remain. That’s the part of me for which I feel no shame, and which can be thrown into the future as little paper planes.”