Heritage of an Empire

"Heritage of the Empire" is a photographic chronicle spanning fifteen years, during which one country was disappearing and another was emerging. It is the story of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Soviet Russia, told not only through political events, but above all through the fates of ordinary people caught in the midst of historical change.

From the late 1980s, I documented the events that determined the fate of a vast country: the final years of Soviet rule, political crises in Moscow, ethnic conflicts on the margins of the empire, social upheavals, and transformations in daily life.

The geography of these photographs stretches from Moscow to Siberia and Central Asia. Here, political leaders and anonymous individuals exist side by side, as do soldiers and refugees, residents of closed institutions and inhabitants of crumbling industrial towns. Grand history constantly intrudes upon private life, destroying the familiar order and forcing individuals to search anew for their place in the world.

Yet this chronicle is not only about catastrophes. It is also about the hopes that arose in the late 1980s, when it seemed that along with the Soviet system, fear, the lack of freedom, and the very possibility of returning to the past would disappear. It is about people who were about to determine their own future independently for the first time. And about how difficult it proved to turn political freedom into a stable state of society.

The photographs do not offer a sequential explanation of historical events, nor do they claim to deliver a final verdict on the era. Their task is different—to preserve the evidence of human existence at a moment when the familiar world loses its stability.

Oleg Klimov 2004