All posts tagged Independence Square

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

From the press photos I wasn’t anticipating too much but ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ turns out to be a really interesting and rewarding exhibition, fully deserving the two floors of gallery space given over to it.

First room of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

One of the problems is the promotion web pages and images just show one photo at a time and some of them look a bit meh, don’t feel that good, as a group they don’t add up to a unified look’ etc. It’s only when you get to the exhibition that you realise a number of key facts which transform your understanding.

1. Amateur Boris Mikhailov got into photography by accident, had no formal training, and so was free to invent and make things up. A lot of these innovations are really interesting.

2. Articulate Mikhailov is a very good explainer of his own work, so the wall labels which explain it are not only informative but his explanations of his innovations are unusually inspiring and interesting.

3. Bad photography One of these was the simple idea of bad photography. In the Soviet Union photography was a profession like any other, heavily controlled by the state with approved styles and qualities to promote uplifting images of perfect life in the workers’ state.

Mikhailov opened up a whole new world when he realised that bad, out of focus, poorly framed, damaged images were themselves a valid aesthetic, and a political statement. Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were, he realised, the appropriate response to the shabby reality of Soviet life: ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’. This explains why some of the images, when seen in isolation on a web page are only meh, whereas seen en masse, and accompanied by an eloquent explanation, they gain so much more power.

4. Sets It also explains why Mikhailov’s images are conceived and designed to be seen in sets and the sets don’t just represent a new subject, but the best of them embody an entirely new technique and way of thinking about photography. As he explains:

‘The idea that a single picture contains maximum information is a lie; I don’t believe in absolute truth. Exploring something from many different angles gives you a heightened sense of the truth. I need the sum of the images, the sum of the sequences in order to cast doubt on the correctness of one single, possible perception. The vibration between the images expands their possibilities.’

Biography

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. He took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene.

His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series ‘Case History’, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine. Having learned of him via his post-USSR collapse photos, Western fans were then able to go back and review his subversive works from the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition presents the complete body of his work in chronological order.

‘Ukrainian Diary’ brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including:

Slideshow: Yesterday’s Sandwich (mid-’60s to 1970s)

One day he threw a couple of slides onto his bed and they stuck together. When he held the stuck slides up to the light he realised they made a dramatically surreal image and hence was born the series ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich’. As he experimented with the technique he realised the juxtaposition of random images could be thought of as reflecting the dualism and contradictions of Soviet society.

His commentary is fascinating. He explains that the 60s and 70s were a time, in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, of hidden messages and secret codes. No-one took official propaganda seriously but all organs of free expression were ruthlessly suppressed. Hence codes and secret signs and hidden allusions. In actual fact no particular ‘message’ emerges from these images except a surreal subversion of the normal, logical, sensible everyday world.

Nearly 100 of these wonderfully funny, crazy, surreal images are here displayed as a slideshow projected onto the wall of a darkened space in the gallery. For some reason they are displayed to a severely edited version of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon’ which Mikhailov considers an ‘exaggeration of beauty’ conveying a kind of ‘paradise lost’. It makes it an even more surreal experience, watching images from a distant and vanished society accompanied by such a familiar homely soundtrack.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the composite images in the Yesterday’s Sandwich slideshow (photo by the author)

Black Archive (1968 to 1979)

‘Black Archive’ documents everyday life in Kharkiv, often revealing the disparity between public life and private life in domestic spaces. Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to photograph everyday life and so Mikhailov was forced to hide his camera in order to take furtive snapshots, often taken from behind and at odd angles. By contrast, the private sphere of people’s apartments was a space of freedom, most vividly expressed in the carefree nudity of many of his subjects.

But in the series Mikhailov also deploys his concept of ‘bad photography’— the deliberate production of sloppily printed, blurred, and low-contrast images full of visible flaws — as a metaphor and a tool for social critique.

Red (1968 to 1978)

The set ‘Red’ brings together more than 70 images taken in Kharkiv in the late 1960s and 1970s, all of which contain the colour red. From the wall labels we learn that red was a powerful symbol of the Russian Revolution (1917) and of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1991). Its presence in these varied photos indicates the extent to which communist ideology saturated everyday life. As usual Mikhailov explains all this in his vivid and fascinating way:

‘The word “red” in Russian has the same root as the word for beauty, it also means revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associated red with communism. But few people realised that red had permeated all our lives. Demonstrations and parades are an important part of this series. It’s a place where one of the main images of Soviet propaganda—the face of happy Soviet life, secure in its future—was created. They became absolutely kitschy and vulgar… I sometimes felt that I was surrounded by a herd of cynics, victims, and fools, followed by people wearing red ribbons as if they were policemen. As if the regime was using the people’s desire to celebrate for its own ends. And it was important to me to photograph them in such a way that you could tell the “Soviet” from the “human”.’

From the series ‘Red’ by Boris Mikhailov (1968-75) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portraits) (1971 to 1985)

After losing his job as an engineer, Mikhailov managed to make a living as a commercial photographer, sometimes working on the black market, enlarging, retouching, and hand-colouring snapshots of weddings, newborns or family members lost in the war.

In what is considered the first use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography, Mikhailov then appropriated and reworked these manipulated photographs for his own practice. Often using vibrant or exaggerated colours, he made them more ‘beautiful’, staying within the law while simultaneously mocking the way Soviet propaganda glorified mundane events.

By means of these simple techniques, Luriki comically undermined the absurdity of the iconography of Soviet life. Grouped together, the pictures are like a Soviet family album, a collection of surreal, ridiculous situations.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the Luriki images (photo by the author)

Dance (1978)

Apparently open-air dancing was a popular activity in Soviet Kharkiv. Mikhailov has a lovely set depicting people of all ages, sizes and shape, in 1970s Soviet clothes, sedately dancing, quite often women dancing with other women.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Dance photos (photo by the author)

Series of Four (early 1980s)

One wall is covered with these images grouped into sets of four. This came about by accident. Mikhailov set out to wander the streets of Kharkiv and take photos of nothing, of non-events, designed to capture the boredom and emptiness of Soviet life. But when he came to make contact prints he realised he didn’t have small-format paper so he put four images together on one sheet. At a stroke he realised he’d created something: the multiple points of view of the same scene creates complex effects. Suddenly a boring scene becomes part of a fragmented, multi-angled world. Presented in this way, they can also have a cinematic effect, telling a story in snapshots. And another effect is to create out of a mundane non-space a kind of cocoon, creating a compression of space, imbuing an anonymous nowhere with strange fugitive meanings.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Series of Four photos (photo by the author)

Crimean Snobbism (1982)

Mikhailov went to Gursuf, a seaside resort on the Crimean Peninsula and took portraits of himself, wife and friends frolicking by the seaside, adopting holiday poses etc. As with many of his sets, Mikhailov gave them a sepia tone, making them feel historic and detached from the present, and also suggesting their subversive intent. Because the entire set is intended as a parody of the kind of carefree, bourgeois lifestyle then associated with ‘the West’ and far beyond the reach of your average Ukrainian citizen, and which he satirises in phrases: ‘We’re so happy. We’re so beautiful. We’re so in love etc’.

Viscidity (1982)

In another interesting experiment, in the early 1980s Mikhailov started combining text and image together in a conceptual way: he glued his photographs carelessly onto sheets of paper, then scribbled thoughts—banal, poetic, or philosophical—in the margins. His fragmentary thoughts were not intended as captions, nor to illustrate or elucidate the photographs; they were often utterly unrelated to them and intended to be equally important, a composite reflection on the social stagnation of the Soviet Union.

‘Viscidity’ is the word he used to describe the period the country was living through at the time — ‘a peaceful, quiet, featureless, dull life, a time of deep political stagnation, a frozen day-to-dayness. There was no catharsis, no nostalgia, just grey, everyday life. Nothing was happening, nothing was at all interesting.’ Hence ‘lousy photographs with these lousy texts’, ‘unchanging ordinariness and timelessness.’

Unfinished dissertation (1984-5)

On the back of the tattered pages of a stranger’s university dissertation found in a rubbish bin, Mikhailov pasted poorly printed black-and-white photos of inconsequential moments and then jotted down his thoughts about art and life in the margins. The photos don’t synch with the text, neither shedding light on each other, except obliquely.

Salt Lake (1986)

Mikhailov’s father used to tell him about a salt lake in southern Ukraine where people went to bathe in the 1920s and ’30s, believing that the warm, salty water had healing properties. When Mikhailov went to visit himself he found the crowds of people on the beach near to a disused old factory, washing themselves in the factory pipes and smearing themselves with mud.

He found it ‘the quintessence of an average person’s life in the Soviet context. Despite the horrible, polluted, inhuman environment, the people were relaxed, calm, and happy.’ To the modern Western ye, this looks like a gallery of grotesques in a grim, squalid environment.

Later Mikhailov toned his images sepia, like photographs from another era and explains: ‘There was a kind of an interplay there, a fusion between the old and the new. Old, because it was something my father had seen, and at the same time a reality that still existed… An elaboration of an idea I’d explored before: we’re both there and not there, it’s both today and a long time ago.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Salt Lake photos (photo by the author)

By The Ground (1991)

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mikhailov took to the streets with his panoramic camera slung low around his waist. While the panoramic format is conventionally used for sweeping vistas and beautiful landscapes Mikhailov captured bleak street scenes which captured the shabby poverty of the streets.

Mikhailov also devised a protocol for installing the series: the prints are hung low on the wall, forcing the viewer to stoop down to see the images, as if to bring us closer to his subjects. As with previous sets, he also treated the images, toning the silver prints brown, imbuing them images with a sense of nostalgia. As always his own comments on his process are fascinating:

‘I “aged” the images by toning them in sepia… embedding the photos in layers of time to trigger parallel, photo-historical associations, to show that photography has become as elusive as existence itself.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the By The Ground wide-angle photos (photo by the author)

I am not I (1992)

A series of nude self portraits in which Mikhailov parodies traditional masculine stereotypes. The stereotypes he mocks are those promoted by the recently collapsed USSR but they are also recognisable as American stereotypes too. Thus he photographs himself in a range of comic or demeaning poses, wearing an absurd curly wig, holding a toy sword or, most strikingly, an artificial phallus. Like all the sets, these gain in meaning and humour when you see 20 variations next to each other.

From the series ‘I am not I’ by Boris Mikhailov (1992) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Green (1991 to 1993)

In the early 1990s Mikhailov produced a series of hand-coloured photographs known as the ‘Green’ series. The images are suffused with a lingering, toxic green tint to reflect the environmental decay and societal collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union. The series is represented here by a monumental triptych showing a decaying junkyard in an overgrown landscape. The colour green has a particular resonance for Mikhailov who says it is the colour of a swamp and indicates the moss which had grown on Soviet life, a metaphor for Soviet decay.

In earlier sets he had had photographed people living in poverty, drug addiction and social degradation using a disposable camera and cheap gelatin silver paper to evoke awkwardness and fragility. Here, he takes the concept further, using stains and drips of paint on the thin, crumpled paper as if to embody the worn, impoverished landscape and lives he saw around him.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing ‘Green’ (photo by the author)

At Dusk (1993)

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union Mikhailov wandered the streets of Kharkiv with a swing-lens camera that took in a 120-degree panoramic view, capturing the life of destitute people on the streets. He tinted all the images a heavy cobalt blue. Why? Several reasons: the colour (along with the title) indicate the transition from day to night. But blue also represents his boyhood memories of the Second World War, of fleeing with his mother on one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv to escape the Nazi advance. Blue, he explains, is the colour of blockade, hunger and war. Tinting these images of street people the same colour a) indicates the severity of the crisis of poverty which hit his country and b) also produces images of intense and haunting beauty.

From the series ‘At Dusk’ by Boris Mikhailov (1993) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Case History (1997 to 98)

A few years after the collapse of communism, Mikhailov realised that in his hometown of Kharkiv, not only had a new ruling elite of millionaires emerged, but a significant part of the population had also been plunged into poverty. The mid-1990s produced a new group of people, the bomzhes or homeless.

So Mikhailov set about photographing these pitiful people, right at the bottom of society. He produced a series of 400 raw portraits. As with other sets, he deliberately transgressed the codes of photojournalism by paying his subjects, and he and his wife Vita also often offered them hot meals in exchange for posing. Some of the poses are stage in the manner of the Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.

This exhibition shows one image of one abject couple blown up on the wall and a display case of 100 small test prints from his archive. They are pitiful to look at.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing the one blown-up image and 100 test prints from ‘Case Study’ (photo by the author)

Reflecting on these images the next day, I realised that their abjectness is emphasised by their nudity. What I mean is that, unless you have a buff toned body, most of us already look a bit embarrassing when naked and caught in everyday postures, in the shower, getting out of bed etc. Many (half?) of the shots in the Case History exacerbate the poverty and squalor of the subjects by showing old, ugly, maimed or ill people, naked or half-clothed. What I’m trying to convey is how this nudity powerfully amplifies the general air of degradation and humiliation.

The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013 to 2014)

Euromaidan or the Maidan Uprising was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.

In late December 2013 Boris and Vita Mikhailov documented the protests, photographing protestors who had pitched their tents in the central square in Kyiv. Mikhailov comments that the situation was so tense that scenes felt like they had been staged. ‘The bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted — everything created a general feeling of tension. It was unclear how it would all end.’

The protests succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia but soon afterwards, on 27 February 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimea, starting the Russo-Ukrainian War which continues to this day.

Thoughts

Many of Mikhailov’s images are very strong in their own right, and display adeptness in an extraordinary range of styles, from the photojournalism of Salt Lake to the nostalgic surrealism of Yesterday’s Sandwich, the warlike intensity of the At Dusk series to the blistering poverty porn of the miserable Case Histories.

But as well as the appeal of individual images, or the impact of specific sets, the exhibition as a whole builds up into a powerful portrait of life in a Soviet state – to the shabby, unhealthy, stiflingly boring nature of life under communism – and then after 1990, to the catastrophic collapse in living standards for large swathes of the population in post-Soviet society.

It’s not only an impressive body of work by a consistently inventive and innovative artist, but a powerful portrait and indictment of life in Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Video

This is not the usual 30-second exhibition promotional video but an extended, 14-minute-long interview with Mikhailov which really brings over how articulate and interesting he is.

Related reviews

Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future @ Tate Modern (January 2018) – similar portrayal of the squalor of Soviet life, but in Russia
Photographers’ Gallery reviews
Photography reviews

Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum London is hosting a free exhibition of photos taken in the Ukraine by internationally renowned photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind from the Ukraine. It’s a smallish display, in just one room, of 17 big colour photos.

Maybe the Ukraine came to most people’s notice with Russia’s invasion of 24 February 2022. But something like that doesn’t come out of the blue and in fact Ukraine has been in a low-level war since 2014, the year when a complex political crisis in Ukraine came to a head. This explains why the exhibition is divided into three parts or ‘moments’ and 2014 is the first one:

1. 2014 protests (3 photos)

Background

In 2013 the Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), something which marked a decisive shift away from its eastern neighbour, Russia. Russia, for its part, offered Ukraine very favourable trading arrangements, large state loans and brought political pressure to bear on Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych who, as a result, at the end of 2013 abruptly cancelled the negotiations with the EU and reaffirmed Ukraine’s economic and political ties with Russia.

This led to huge pro-EU protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities which turned into violent clashes between protestors and security forces. Government buildings were occupied, there were running street battles, in all over 100 protesters were killed and over 1,000 injured. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption and abuse of power, the influence of oligarchs, police brutality, and human rights violations. A large, barricaded protest camp occupied Independence Square in central Kyiv throughout the ‘Maidan Uprising’.

Eventually a bill was introduced into Parliament stripping Yanukovych of the presidency and a few days later another one called for his arrest. He fled to the Russified east of the country. This demonstration of people power came to be referred to as the Revolution of Dignity or the Maidan Revolution.

Photos

Taylor-Lind was in Kiev during the Maidan Revolution and took some cracking photos, in fact the single best image from the exhibition captures the messy defiance of protesters swarming over some grand statuary in central Kiev while thick black smoke from burning tyres gives the scene an apocalyptic vibe.

Anti-government protests, Kyiv, February 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

The 17 photos in the exhibition can perhaps be sorted into 3 or so categories: one is actuality, snapped on the hoof, as it appears, such as the image above. A completely different type is the photographs Taylor-Lind took in the makeshift studio she created which could be quickly set up in trouble spots. She rigged one up in central Kiev during the revolution and spend weeks photographing hundreds of protesters, including tired, injured Yevhen Shulga.

Yevhen Shulga, Kiev 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

There are four of these ‘studio’ portraits in the show and, interestingly enough, one of the other three is also of Shulga, but from 2022, showing his transformation from street protester to fully-fledged soldier in the Ukraine Army.

2. 2014 to 2020 the Donbas (4 photos)

Unfortunately, overthrowing an unpopular president wasn’t the end of it, the Maidan Revolution wasn’t as decisive or final as the overthrow of communism had been in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other Eastern bloc countries 25 years earlier.

Ukraine’s situation is complicated and the war doesn’t make any sense unless you listen to the Russian side. The Russians have a number of grievances. Number one, in deep history, Kiev is actually the spiritual home of the Russian Orthodox Church, for it was here, in 987, that the Kievan Prince Vladimir married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor and concerted, along with all his subjects, to the Orthodox religion. To quote Michael Ignatieff’s excellent study of modern nationalism, ‘Kievan Rus is the beginning of the Russian nationalist experience’ (Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff, 1993, page 87). So there’s a deep Russian nationalistic claim to the capital.

During the nineteenth century the Ukraine was fully incorporated into the Russian Empire and the eastern part of the country heavily settled by Russian speakers. As a result of the Russian Revolution the aristocracy fed and the middle classes expropriated of their land. Between the wars Stalin pushed through the forced collectivisation of the vast fertile farms of central Ukraine and this led to one of the biggest man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, when as many as 5 million Ukrainians starved to death between 1931 and 1933. The Russians also attempted to exterminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

This explains why, when the Nazis invaded as part of their attack on the USSR in June 1941, they were at first greeted as liberators from the yoke of the murderous, semi-genocidal Soviet regime, at least until it became clear that the Nazis were even worse. The whole brutal period is described in Timothy Snyder’s often stomach-churning book.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)

So Ukrainian nationalists, predominantly in the west of the country, found themselves fighting a three-way war, against the Soviets and against the Nazis and, a few years later, when the resurgent Red Army pressed the Germans back through the Ukraine, many nationalists fought the Russians. In fact Ignatieff says that some nationalist guerrilla forces weren’t completely neutralised until the 1950s. Ukrainian nationalists may remember these forces as heroes but the Russians, of course, lump them together with the Nazi enemy and this gives them a veneer of plausibility when Russian propaganda paints anyone who opposes Moscow’s wishes, right up to the present day, as ‘fascists’.

Back to 2014 and Russia didn’t take the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych lying down. Within a matter of weeks two things happened:

Russia annexed the Crimea
Russia sent paramilitary forces to bolster armed uprisings in the far east of Ukraine, on the Russian border

1. The annexation of the Crimea

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This in-depth article gives the reasons why.

Why Did Russia Give Away Crimea Sixty Years Ago?

In summary, 1) the Russians had only just finished managing a violent little civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia; 2) the new Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had himself been head of the CP of Ukraine and knew the republic well; 3) in the 1950s the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian.

In other words, assigning the Crimea to the Ukraine added nearly a million ethnic Russians to the troublesome Republic. It was a swift, administrative way of increasing the Russian minority in the country.

The downside was that the Crimea is host to Russia’s Black Sea ports and navy. This didn’t matter so long as Ukraine was under the thumb of Russia within the USSR. But amid the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear to the Russian military (Navy) that handing over Russia’s main Black Sea naval base to a different country was crazy. The status of the Crimean bases remained a source of controversy and tension throughout the 1990s, with Boris Yeltsin and successive leaders negotiating leasing and access deals.

In a way it’s a surprise that a leader as increasingly bullish and nationalistic as Vladimir Putin took until 2014 to annex the Crimea. You can see why, from his point of view, if Ukraine had remained under Yanukovych who would have been cemented to Russia by favourable trade deals, then Putin and the Russian military would have let the negotiated arrangements about Crimea continue; but how, when Yanukovych was overthrown, and the Ukraine parliament made clear its commitment to ally with the West, Putin and the Generals acted.

According to the 2014 census, Crimea had a population of 2.3 million, of whom 68% were Russian and 16% were Ukrainian. So although many in the West and international fora like the UN disapproved of the annexation, you can see both the a) military and b) ethnically nationalist thinking behind the move.

2. The Donbas

Back to the exhibition, the second consequence of the overthrow of President Yanukovych was that Russia supported rebellions against Ukraine’s government in areas along the border. I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

In March 2014, following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, anti-revolution and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, collectively ‘the Donbas’. These began as Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Armed Russian-backed separatists seized Ukrainian government buildings in the Donbas and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) as independent states, leading to conflict with Ukrainian government forces. Russia covertly supported the separatists with troops and weaponry, only later admitting sending “military specialists”. After a year of fighting, the conflict developed into trench warfare. There were 29 failed ceasefires. About 14,000 people were killed in the war: 6,500 pro-Russian separatist and Russian forces, 4,400 Ukrainian forces, and 3,400 civilians on both sides of the frontline. The vast majority of civilian casualties were in the first year.

Apparently, the conflict was very fierce in 2014 and 15 but then settled down to First World War-style trenches and attrition.

The exhibition includes four photos to cover this prolonged conflict. I mentioned categories of photos, above. The best photo here is an example of a hybrid form, which is posed, but not as posed as a studio photo. This, for me, is arguably the best image in the show.

At first I thought this was an interior, and the backdrop was some kind of old wood panelling, fitting for a comfy sofa and a framed oil painting. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that the ‘wall’ is made from a big stack of army ammunition boxes. In fact the wall label explains that the whole thing was set up under a bridge and completely outside. When you look closer you can see the sofa is a bit of old tat with rips in it and the painting is a cheap reproduction in a chipped frame.

So the whole thing represents a complex attempt to recreate the comforts of home in a war zone but is by way of being a sort of trompe l’oeil fabrication which, at the same time, beautifully captures the spirit of invention and blagging which characterises all front lines.

3. Spring 2022 Russian invasion (10 photos)

The third and largest part of the little exhibition contains 10 photos covering aspects of Russia’s invasion of the whole of Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022. By now you can see that this attack didn’t come out of the blue but had deep historical, cultural, political and military roots.

But if annexing the Crimea could, possibly, be justified by ethnic nationalism and politics, a full-scale attack on an independent nation state is clearly in breach of the United Nations charter and international law. It’s has been deplored by the International Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, and the International Criminal Court.

There’s widespread consensus (in the West, at any rate) that Putin intended his forces to mount a pincer movement on Kiev and seize it within a week, presumably intending to force the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy into exile, whereupon the Russians could impose their own Russia-friendly government and then hold some kind of rigged referendum or plebiscite. Their playbook really hasn’t changed since the deepest communist days of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

The most obvious thing about the war is it has revealed how rubbish the Russian army is. Despite the element of surprise and overwhelming superiority of numbers, their advances got bogged down on all fronts. As usual, their leadership was bad and the quality of the average Russian squaddie very poor. Discipline was bad, units fell apart, equipment was inferior to Ukraine’s western kit.

For humanitarians like Taylor-Lind and the IWM the focus is less on the historical and military roots than on the humanitarian tragedy the invasion has triggered. These 10 photos come from spring 2022 i.e. three or four months into the present conflict, and show: a grieving mother; one of Taylor-Lind’s makeshift studio portraits of two adult sisters who have fled the fighting and are now refugees; an older lady taking receipt of a coal delivery (since all the gas pipelines have been blown up).

There’s the shot of the back of a middle-aged woman receiving hospital treatment after a shell exploded in her back garden; there’s a sick old woman with a name tag tied to her wrist who’s being evacuated from a hospital near the front line. There’s a shot of four soldiers digging a defensive trench and another of five soldiers firing a volley over the grave of a local farmer.

There’s a mass grave being excavated at Bucha where the Russians are alleged to have carried out atrocities against civilians, tying their hands behind their backs, torturing them, executing them – a grim roll-call which recalls the behaviour of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil wars 30 years ago.

The brutal nature of this kind of hybrid warfare, with its paramilitaries and mercenaries, with its badly-disciplined troops encouraged by their officers to spread terror, hasn’t changed or evolved. Like a plague, like a scourge of God, it just visits different areas and leaves grieving relatives, burned out houses and mass graves. Above all it leaves destruction on an epic scale, and this is the fourth category of photo I’d identify in the exhibition – unpeopled ruins.

It’s not so much the deaths which appal me, it’s the unremitting, pointless, futile, death-drive destruction and devastation which forces like the Russians or the 1990s Serbs inflicted everywhere they went. Too weak, badly led and indisciplined to actually win battles, these forces nonetheless have the resources to destroy, mindlessly, pointless, for days and weeks and months, destroying home and offices, infrastructure, power plants, water. If they can’t have it, no-one can. It’s the pathetic infantile, teenage spitefulness of it which is so utterly soul-destroying. What wankers.

P.S.

Every photo has a caption. Initially, I thought these were the words of the people in the picture but, after counting, I note that only four of them are directly quoted, all the other captions are the comments of Anastasia Taylor-Lind or her long-term collaborator and friend, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova. Some of Alisa’s comments are enlarged and painted directly onto the wall to create a textual commentary.

May also be worth commenting that all the text, from the introductory wall label to the photo captions, is bilingual, printed in English and Ukrainian. The curators tell us this is designed to ‘engage directly with the UK’s Ukrainian community’. As a matter of interest I checked and at its peak, in 2019, there were 25,000 Ukrainians in the UK. Since the war that number has been swelled by some 82,000 refugees i.e. a little over 100,000 in total.

The end

I’ve been rereading Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s books about the Yugoslav Wars. Ukraine is a different situation but, based on comparable situations in Bosnia in particular, where neither side was strong enough to secure a convincing victory, my guess would be that:

the war drags on throughout 2023
if Western support for Ukraine doesn’t remain high i.e. keeping up a reliable supply of arms and ammunition, then the Russians might score some victories, but
eventually the UN will draw a ceasefire line across the eastern and southern parts of the country, which will remain in Russian hands, and the line will be like the one which divides Cyprus or Korea

It’s hard to imagine Russia seizing the entire country; think of the permanent insurrection and guerrilla war they’d face. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Ukrainian forces pushing the Russians right out of their country. So some kind of stalemate / ceasefire / partition seems the most likely outcome. But war is unpredictable, so it’s anybody’s guess.

More Imperial War Museum reviews

More Imperial War Museum reviews

More photography reviews

More photography reviews

Books & Boots