True Colours? A Lost World ? The Photography by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

 

Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.

“At 9 [PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911, “Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.” As well as telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like church roofs radiant in the sun.

As the editor and publisher of the prominent photography magazine Fotograf-Lyubitel, Prokudin-Gorsky had used his position not only to report on advances in color photography but also to illustrate these discussions with select reproductions of his own images, establishing him as a leader in the field and garnering widespread public notice for his portraits of Tolstoy. The wave of fame these photos brought him culminated in a 1909 invitation to the Romanovs’ summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo, where he gave the imperial family a private demonstration of his work. On the strength of that original presentation, Nicholas granted the photographer virtual carte blanche to pursue his dream of documenting the empire via 10,000 images in full color, allowing him access to areas that would otherwise have been off-limits and even outfitting the expedition with a special train-car-turned-dark-room.

Drawing upon the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Adolf Miethe, and others, Prokudin-Gorsky honed a technique that mimicked how the human eye processes light by dividing it into three discrete channels. With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one. The positive images, when projected using these same filters, could then be recombined and overlayed to produce a gem-bright composite. In its elaborate three-shot, three-filter requirements, the technique differed from other early color photographic technologies, notably the Lumière Brothers’ potato-starch-based Autochrome, which the professor considered “complex and capricious” and discarded in favor of his own methods.

The most well-known of Prokudin-Gorsky’s works possess both a vitality and the peculiar bittersweetness that comes from seeing a world lost to the past: boys studying at a school in Bukhara’s Jewish community, now largely dispersed through emigration; nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia whose traditional way of life would soon be radically altered by forced settlement and collectivization. But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. Here our focus strays away from elegant landscapes and fantastical Orthodox church domes and toward the great effort involved in staging and producing the photographs themselves.

The phrase “true color” occurs a number of times across Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings. To him, this was his œuvre’s chief virtue, the quality that set it apart from both black-and-white photography and other forms of art. “These images are everlasting—they do not change”, he wrote in a letter attempting to convince Tolstoy to sit for him. “No painted reproduction can achieve such results.”5 Projected for audiences across Europe — the most common way Prokudin-Gorsky’s works were seen by the public during his lifetime — his photographs were met with wonder and rapturous praise: a record of one such display for a group of specialists reports “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation among those present”.

Yet the photographer’s claims of “true color” elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it. The photographs printed during Prokudin-Gorsky’s lifetime, for instance, were rendered in considerably more muted tones than the bright hues in which they are typically shown today. The prints and digital images familiar to modern viewers are themselves the product of painstaking efforts by various parties in recent years to overlay the photographer’s triplicate filtered negatives to create a single unified scene. Done manually, proper matching of a single image can take hours, a process that has been sped up somewhat by the advent of new digital tools. But no matter the technology at one’s disposal, harmonizing the three color-filtered exposures is tricky, not least because both the subject and the camera may have shifted between the first and third shutter release. For those attempting to align the resultant staggered negatives, these disjunctures present a quandary: which is the “true” photo, the composition with which the other two negatives must be made to conform?

Of the several efforts that have been made to tackle this challenge, two prominent ones have come out of the Library of Congress. The institution has housed all known surviving negatives of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work since 1948, when the library purchased and removed the collection from the cramped Paris basement where it had been kept following the family’s departure from Russia. The hand of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who produced a set of color composites for the LOC in 2004, is instantly recognizable by the thick bands of color that form a kind of ersatz frame around each image: smooth gradations fraying into discrete strands of red, blue, and green. Walt Frankhauser, who began work on the collection in the 1990s, chose to draw out more brightness and contrast in his renditions. When surveying several versions of the same shot, the certainty of Prokudin-Gorsky’s “true colors” soon becomes nebulous and difficult to pin down.

The photographer must have been acutely aware of the difficulties his technique posed when it came to overlaying three negatives to create a crisp scene. He generally avoided photographing anything that might move when working indoors, where low light levels required a single exposure to drag out for ten minutes or more. Instead, viewers are treated to a series of still and dead subjects: wooden saints, elaborately costumed mannequins, and taxidermied animals whose rictus snarls were guaranteed to hold from shot to shot.

 

 

The bright light of the outdoor sun shaved down exposure times considerably, and it was here that Prokudin-Gorsky attempted to capture scenes of life. But even if he worked at top speed, there was always the risk that a sudden stray movement would create what Agüera calls “ghosting”— a candy-colored blur where a solid form should be. A Turkmen camel shakes its head pinkly; the breeze splays a carpet across the visible light spectrum; a baby pops in and out of existence between takes. Certain subject matter presented further challenges to the professor’s method. Rivers proved difficult: at Five Brothers Rock, the swift-flowing Chusovaya runs red, while in a shot of Girvas Waterfall, the rapids are alive with flashes of strange rainbow light. Clouds and smoke are similarly transformed into sweet blurs as they move across the sky. While Prokudin-Gorsky may well have understood these difficulties as faults of his technique, they constitute a fundamental part of its charm: documentary fidelity tips into something imperfect, enchanted, and alive.

Then there are those photographs in Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection that were affected not by a chance occurrence while they were taken but by an accident in the century since. Over the intervening decades, negatives have shattered or become breeding grounds for fungi; scenes once clear have grown faded and patchy as their emulsion has broken down. The names bestowed upon these imperfections by conservators sometimes possess a startling poetic quality: “butterfly wing”, “fern life”, “frost on a windowpane”. Frankhauser, who produced digital renderings for roughly 1,400 of the LOC’s 1,902 negatives and generally favored greater intervention to sharpen his pictures, reached the conclusion that “unfortunately, some images simply could not be processed”. But Agüera’s digitization effort, which tackled the Prokudin-Gorsky collection in its entirety, gives us a sense of how even these extremely damaged pieces could look. In one photo, color defects turn a Danube landscape into Rothko-esque planes of pure color; in another, a wedge of unalloyed pink slices through an otherwise bucolic scene of peasants lunching in a hayfield. River views break out in pox, ferns emerge through the snow of mountains in Uzbekistan, and a blue fingerprint smudges the foreground of a shot across the Kem. It is precisely where the image is unmade — colors bleeding together, coming apart — that we get a sense of how it was created in the first place.

                                                                            

If Prokudin-Gorsky felt that the great strength of his photographs was their fidelity to nature, he was also quite clear about the effect he hoped they would work upon the viewer. Seeing the breadth and beauty of the country, he wrote in notes to a lecture for his fellow Russian émigrés in Paris in the 1930s, was “the only way to show and to prove to Russian youth, who have already forgotten or who have generally never seen their motherland, the full power, full significance, full greatness of Russia and in this way awaken that national awareness that is so necessary”. Even before the Russian Revolution, which precipitated the photographer’s departure for the West, a nationalistic and imperialistic bent is clear in his work. Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings are dotted with assessments of Russian advancement in photographic technology that explicitly measure his home country against Europe, comparisons that evoke a long history of anxieties about Russia’s status vis-à-vis the West. In this context, significantly, imperial possessions were often used as barometers of Europeanness, a sentiment perhaps most infamously contested in a quotation from a newspaper column by none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky celebrating tsarist conquests in Turkestan: “This shame that Europe will consider us Asians has been hanging over us for almost two centuries now…. With our push toward Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”

 

 

In this respect, it’s significant that Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic survey completely eschewed Russia’s principal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in favor of forays into the imperial periphery. The 1905 public demonstration mentioned above, which won the photographer “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation”, focused on views of Finland, Dagestan, and the Caucasus — conquered territories populated by peoples whose ethnic backgrounds, languages, and religions differed from those of many metropolitan viewers. Likewise, his celebration of railroad technology — a prominent staple of his albums and the mode of transit that made possible their very creation — obscures the fact that these and other imperial infrastructure projects were often built by forced laborers. Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s most frequently reproduced photographs come from colonial Turkestan, where visions of broad, unpeopled landscapes and deteriorating Timurid mosques with no one there to maintain them — images whose lack of living subjects was likely at least in part dictated by the limitations of his three-color technique — suggest empty terrain ripe for the taking by Russian settlers. Among his less picturesque views of the region, we find a series of photographs of factories and machines used to process cotton — a boon for the imperial economy whose cultivation was a major driver of Russian settlement in colonial Central Asia.

If photographic archives like Prokudin-Gorsky’s are indices and tools of empire, what happens when the images they contain are broken? It’s tempting to read into the collection’s imperfections, as if a negative’s flaws might reveal the instability of the powers that created it, the lie beneath all claims of “true color”. Like the Central Asian nomads and migrants whose movements constantly frustrated Russian colonial authorities’ attempts to pin them down under the border regime, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of the world required a deathly stillness that never comported with reality. Should something move, should the wind blow too forcefully, or should anything happen to the delicate glass slide once the photograph was taken — then only ghosts would remain.

In Search of True Color :  Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images. By Erica X Eisen. The Public Domain Review, December 7, 2022

In​ the decade or so before the revolutions of 1917, the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky crisscrossed the Russian empire on its growing network of railways. He visited the medieval towns of Yaroslavl and Smolensk, went deep into Siberia and north to the Solovetsky islands, and travelled south to Bukhara and Samarkand, Central Asian cities colonised over the preceding century. He photographed churches and monasteries, factories and waterways, landscapes and natural wonders, famous people (Tolstoy, the emir of Bukhara), peasant girls and factory workers. He travelled in style, with his own carriage, half of which contained his bespoke darkroom. The Ministry of Transport did its best to accommodate the unusual traveller and his considerable baggage. He was, after all, a man of importance: Tsar Nicholas II had received him personally in 1909 and requested more of his striking colour images. But Prokudin-Gorsky also had a wider audience in mind. His goal was to reveal the diversity and richness of the empire to audiences in St Petersburg and Moscow. With that aim, he put together a series of colour postcards for sale and gave frequent slide demonstrations to the public.

In 1970, an American graduate student set off for what was then the Soviet Union, taking a camera he’d bought for the trip. William Craft Brumfield spent the next half-century travelling through the Soviet Union and its successor states, becoming a specialist in the region’s architectural history and a respected photographer in his own right. Along the way, he developed an interest in the work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He visited and photographed many of the same sites, and in Journeys through the Russian Empire he brings the two collections together. The juxtaposition of the newer photograph with the old, often taken from the same angle, captures the twilight, and in one case the aftermath, of two empires – the Romanov dynasty and the USSR.

Rather than attempt an overview of the entire Prokudin-Gorsky collection, Brumfield concentrates on religious buildings. His selection includes Prokudin-Gorsky’s portraits of individual churches and monasteries, and – in one chapter – mosques and madrasas. He also includes a striking urban panorama of the Siberian city of Perm, taken in 1909, with its cathedral, mosque, railway bridge, foundries billowing smoke, steamers and barges on the Kama river. This is a city undergoing rapid industrialisation, a dynamism caught in the smoke moving across the skyline.

For the most part, however, Prokudin-Gorsky’s pictures have a static quality. The process he used to produce colour photographs required a relatively long exposure, making it impossible to capture the bustle of a city scene. His pictures of religious buildings were shot at quiet times: in the market town of Borisoglebsky, for example, he photographed the Rostov monastery before the market stalls had been set up. Without people or movement, these pictures seem timeless. Although in other photographs Prokudin-Gorsky sought to capture some of the great transformations underway in the early 20th century – new railways and waterways – his depictions of churches and monasteries, often set against a rural backdrop, suggest an unchanging country. The vividness of the colour images, and the nostalgia of their composition, explains the interest Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs have attracted in recent decades, as Russians look for alternatives to the Soviet legacy.

What happened to this pre-Soviet heritage in the decades after 1917? Is this really a Russia that was ‘lost’? On first viewing, the two journeys presented in this collection suggest not. Brumfield was able to re-create set pieces that differed little from those of his predecessor: the same church still stands, sometimes crumbling or missing parts, sometimes restored, but always recognisable. Photographs of the town of Suzdal, taken almost a century apart, show few signs of change: green fields and low wooden houses still surround the Intercession Convent, with no evidence of a Soviet imprint. The new industrial centre of Yaroslavl was built to the west of the old city, so the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield are still bordered by the trees we see in Prokudin-Gorsky’s images. There are exceptions: Brumfield’s shots of Yekaterinburg show a city transformed, the Cathedral of Saint Catherine destroyed and the district court overshadowed by Soviet blocks and post-Soviet skyscrapers.

The impression that Russia emerged largely unscathed and unchanged from the Soviet years feels wrong, of course. The revolution was meant to bring a grand transformation of every aspect of contemporary life, one that could only be achieved by destroying the old. Religion – its practices, places and people – was certainly part of the ‘old’ world. The most famous church to be destroyed was the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Built to celebrate the retreat of Napoleon in 1812, it was dynamited in 1931. Stalin intended a great new Palace of the Soviets to replace it. A national competition was launched to find a design but the project was eventually shelved in favour of an enormous public swimming pool: a holy site made into a palace of leisure for the masses. Prokudin-Gorsky chose not to photograph either St Petersburg or Moscow, so the church doesn’t feature in this book, and as a result the pairs of images, all of provincial outposts, seem to tell a story of continuity rather than rupture. Yet once you get past the often striking similarities between the two sets, a more complex story emerges. In the Soviet era, religious buildings faced many possible fates. There were certainly episodes of violent destruction, but also of neglect, reappropriation and restoration, and these phases overlapped and intertwined, reflecting an attitude to religion and its heritage that was above all inconsistent.

The anti-religious struggle began during the Revolution and the Civil War, when the Bolsheviks targeted the wealth and infrastructure of organised religion, especially the Russian Orthodox Church. The year 1929 is often referred to as the ‘great breakthrough’ because of its breathtaking targets for industrial output and collectivisation, but it also saw the intensification of the state’s anti-religious measures. In the Russian republic, a quarter of Orthodox churches were closed in just two years. The onion domes of the Cathedral of the Deposition in Suzdal, which Prokudin-Gorsky photographed in 1912, were destroyed in 1929 when the building was converted into a power station, supplying electricity to a nearby prison. The baroque Cathedral of Saint Catherine in Yekaterinburg was demolished in 1930. Such iconoclastic acts were typical of those years. Sometimes churches were dismantled more stealthily. At Borodino – where Napoleon was pushed back in 1812 – much of the village was burned to the ground when the German army retreated in 1942. The church’s bell tower survived, but was taken apart piece by piece by the chairman of a local collective farm, who was desperate for bricks to use in postwar reconstruction. The ruin of churches could also be a form of collateral damage. In 1961, the village of Krokhino was flooded when a new reservoir was created. Left standing precariously on the water’s edge, the Church of the Nativity of Christ gradually collapsed. The most common fate was for places of worship to be stripped of their valuables and put to other uses. Monasteries and churches became prisons, old people’s homes and warehouses. The mosque in Perm was used to house the local Communist Party archive. In the town of Vytegra, the cathedral lost its bell tower and cupolas, gained larger windows and became the local club, where meetings, social events and film screenings were held. Interestingly, as the historian Catriona Kelly has noted, church buildings in the USSR were never appropriated for housing, though this has been happening in Western Europe since the 1960s. What Kelly called a ‘sense of the sacral’ seems to have remained.

 Conflicting impulses were at work. Buildings were required to house prisoners, or grain; bricks were needed for new structures; gold was taken from cupolas to boost the state coffers. There were political aims too. Destroying or disfiguring sites of worship demonstrated not only their obsolescence, but also the power of communism to bring about transformation. Once the violence ended, the preferred narrative of the Soviet authorities – that of overturning the Church’s tyranny – risked being forgotten. At the height of Stalin’s cultural revolution, the destruction of churches, including Christ the Saviour, was captured on film in a bid to preserve the moment.

An alternative to destruction – which was costly and time-consuming – was to preserve religious buildings but change their meaning, flip them from places of worship into sites of atheist learning. Museums of atheism were opened in former churches and mosques from the 1920s onwards, but especially in the Khrushchev era, which saw the launch of new offensives against religious activity. Displays showed visitors scenes of the misery inflicted throughout history in the name of religion. At the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, Roman Catholicism was represented by a diorama depicting a medieval torture chamber with a prisoner on a rack. Religion became a closed chapter in human history, a horror to be gawped at, a barbarism unimaginable in the present day. In this manner, the heuristic function of the building’s desacralisation was re-enacted each time a school group or coach of tourists visited. But attitudes to religion continued to shift, and by the 1980s, many displays were being reworked to give a rosier view of Russia’s religious past.

In fact, as Journeys through the Russian Empire quietly illustrates, the desire to preserve religious buildings as part of a national past was not solely a phenomenon of perestroika. Preservationists were active throughout the Soviet period, and even if their efforts were sometimes overwhelmed by waves of violent anti-religious activity, the idea that religious buildings had an intrinsic cultural and aesthetic value never entirely went away. Local efforts to preserve these buildings were often successful. The chairman of the collective farm at Borodino was eventually forced to stop pilfering bricks from the church by historians and preservationists. In the 1960s, the film director and actor Sergei Bondarchuk was instrumental in campaigning for the restoration of the church’s exterior, including its bell tower, which featured in his movie version of War and Peace. Several of the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield were restored while Khrushchev and Brezhnev were in power: in the 1950s, the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal; in the 1960s, the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Smolensk and the Transfiguration Monastery on Solovetsky Island, as well as other buildings in Suzdal after the town was made a national cultural landmark in 1967; in the 1970s, the Archangel Cathedral in Ryazan; and so on. The desire to preserve a national past was felt beyond Russia, too. In Central Asia committees were formed in the 1920s to preserve historic buildings, including madrasas, and although preservation work faltered in the 1930s, new initiatives were launched in the 1950s, with work beginning in earnest in the early 1960s. The Miri Arab Madrasa in Bukhara and the Gur Emir in Samarkand (the burial place of Tamerlane) – shown in the penultimate chapter of Journeys through the Russian Empire – both underwent extensive restoration during the Soviet era.

 This is all quite different from the story of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which seems to follow the arc of communism’s rise and fall. When Soviet power ended, the cathedral was rapidly rebuilt, once more serving the religious needs of the capital’s political and cultural elite. As such it also became a site for protest – Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance of their ‘Punk Prayer’ here in 2012. Yet the fate of the religious buildings surveyed in Journeys through the Russian Empire shows that the pattern of church destruction in the Stalin era and recovery after the fall of communism was not universal. The question of what to do with religious buildings was unresolved throughout the Soviet era. Blowing them up was appealing to the Bolsheviks, but so was protecting them as symbols of national heritage and pride; or preserving them while transforming their use and meaning, turning them into props for the story of communism’s secular triumph – a fragile narrative that had to be constantly retold. Contemporary Russia may like to see itself as the saviour of a religious tradition all but obliterated by the communists, but this too is a fragile narrative. The traces that survive suggest a less straightforward history.

Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky by William Craft Brumfield. Duke, 518 pp., £43, May 2020, 978 1 4780 0602 2

How to Flip a Church.  By Miriam Dobson. London Review of Books, February 18, 2021

Photography, since its inception, has provided an invaluable window into Russia’s turbulent past. The revolutions of 1917 irrevocably altered the course of Russia’s history with seismic political change, but also rendered an entire way of life not only obsolete but also taboo. Historians were left to pore over sepia-toned photos to piece together the vanished and vanquished world of imperial Russia.

How fortunate we are, therefore, that much of the pioneering color photography of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), who documented the Russian Empire in its waning decades, has survived for posterity. In his latest authoritative book, “Journeys Through the Russian Empire,” (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He also puts his own magisterial career into sharp perspective with his own late 20th and early 21st-century photographs taken of some of the same subjects. The result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and, indeed, two Russias.

Prokudin-Gorsky was a creature of his expansive and creative era. This polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and photographer was a scion of Russia’s provincial nobility. He received an excellent education in St. Petersburg that focused on both science and the arts, perfectly positioning him to pursue his passion for the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky felt strongly that photography demanded a full understanding of the science behind the technology, but he also understood its inevitable march towards main-stream use by amateurs; his ability to make peace with these competing notions was one of his greatest strengths, and a strong entrepreneurial streak enabled him to harness the economic potential of the emerging phenomenon in a ground-breaking career.

 Prokudin-Gorsky studied in St. Petersburg, graduating in 1889 from the faculty of Natural Sciences, after which he traveled to both Berlin and Paris to work with leading chemists and photographers. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.

The scope of Prokudin-Gorsky’s ambitions matched the size of the Russian empire he sought to capture and preserve with his new color technology: a daunting one fifth of the world’s land mass with a Byzantine imperial bureaucracy that hindered access to many of the empire’s more picturesque corners and subjects. Fortunately for Prokudin-Gorsky, in 1909 his work came to the attention of the imperial family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and after successful presentations of his color slides to the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael and his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Prokudin-Gorsky secured an invitation to present them to Nicholas II and his family.

Contemporary sources characterize Nicholas II as a great waffler, but in the matter of Prokudin-Gorsky’s request for imperial patronage of an ambitious plan to photograph the Russian empire, the sovereign acted swiftly and remained steadfast. Nicholas II ordered the minister of ways and communications to furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed Pullman railway car for his laboratory and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout the empire on several regional expeditions, using his color method to document the ministry’s development projects, particularly the rapidly expanding railroad network that was fast-forwarding Russia into a powerful industrial nation. But along the way, he also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.

Prokudin-Gorsky’s innovative color technology involved photographing a subject with three separate plates. By necessity, his subjects had to be stationary or at least be willing and able to stand very still. But the resulting images are anything but static; Prokudin-Gorsky’s show masterful framing and use of perspective in photographs that pulse with life and color.

It is unlikely that Prokudin-Gorsky understood that he was documenting a world that would soon disappear. But disappear it did. In 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia, taking with him thousands of color slides, which he had tried to get the Stolypin government to purchase in 1910, but they had, as Brumfield notes, “with myopic parsimoniousness... let the matter die.” After Prokudin-Gorsky’s death in 1944, the Library of Congress acquired the collection of his negatives.

Fast forward half a century, and another photographer and chronicler of Russia’s rich architectural traditions began to document many of the same locations that first drew Prokudin-Gorsky. William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western expert on Russian architecture and taught at some of the world’s most renowned centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a foreigner, the Order of Friendship.

 Brumfield is an academic who thrives in the field — his outstanding photography of Russia’s architecture is an invaluable resource to students of Russian art and architecture, as well as the country’s history. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986 and his association with the library and the collection has continued to this day, with “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” as a magnificent culmination of this fruitful collaboration.

“Journeys Through the Russian Empire” presents a selection of photographs from eight of Prokudin-Gorsky’s expeditions throughout the Russian Empire, from 1909 to 1916. Brumfield has cleverly arranged these, not chronologically but in a logarithmic spiral like that of a nautilus shell, beginning with the oldest Russian principalities such as Suzdal in the center and expanding ever outwards to the Volga river lands, the Ural Mountains, Siberia, and Central Asia. The spiral culminates in a trip to the remote Solovetsky Islands, which in Prokudin-Gorsky’s day housed a monastery and in Brumfield’s — a decommissioned Gulag camp. Each chapter showcases selections of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work and Brumfield’s own photograph of the same subject, often from the same vantage. Occasionally, the shots are so uncannily similar that one has to refer to the notes to ascertain which image predates the other.

But in other evocative pairings we cannot help but note the effects not only of time but also politics and economics.  Brumfield shows us churches that have repurposed or simply allowed to decay, but he also shows us more recent attempts to restore and revitalize. While Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos were taken over only seven years, Brumfield’s span almost three decades, and in this progression we see the changes in Russia from the Soviet era through perestroika to the present.

Anyone who has traveled throughout Russia’s vast regions recalls the staggering beauty of nature and the magnificence of the architecture, particularly in the more remote corners of the country. Both Prokudin-Gorsky and Brumfield capture this richness with images that are so immediate and evocative that one almost feels the heat of the sun radiating off the stone walls of Registan Square in Samarkand or catches sound of the Volga River lapping against the shore of tiny jewel-like Uglich or detects the musty odor of a long-neglected church.  “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” deliberately eschews photos of either Moscow or St. Petersburg, allowing the quiet majesty of Russia’s often overlooked provinces to take center stage. This is an excellent decision by Brumfield, reflecting and honoring Prokudin-Gorsky’s desire to capture the breadth of Russia for the empire’s citizens.

 “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is a masterful achievement that readers will want to savor and return to again and again. In its pages are insightful lessons on everything from color photography to the nature of time. William Craft Brumfield has brought all of his considerable talent, expertise, and energy to produce an invaluable resource for students of Russian history, photography buffs, nature lovers, architecture aficionados, and anyone who longs to explore the expansive Russian empire through the eyes of two eminently talented and devoted photographers.

Excerpt from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire"

Above the Abyss: A Reflection on Photography as an Instrument of Memory

Time and memory are two of the broadest categories in human thought, fundamentals of philosophy, and of thought about thought. Interpretations of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic project—now universally available through the digitization of his collection at the Library of Congress—have often focused on their technical brilliance and the nostalgic appeal of a lost world vividly rediscovered in brilliant color. These photographs transport us back in time and create an illusion of memory. The images seem so tactile and so close. Such interpretations and glosses on Prokudin-Gorsky’s work tell us much, but what do they neglect?

In Prokudin-Gorsky’s idealistic project, photography, like the railroads that he rode and documented, served as a means of uniting a vast, culturally diverse empire through a vision that would enlighten those who saw the images. To behold the regions of the empire in bright colors would be to comprehend not only its diversity but also the role the empire played in uniting the peoples of an immeasurable Eurasian territory. In addition to documenting the medley of diverse cultures, he also recorded evidence of the empire’s development. Commissioned to photograph the expansion of Russia’s transportation network—seen as the engine of economic growth and progress—Prokudin-Gorsky paradoxically used that network as a means of recovering Russia’s past. Yet his vibrant images portray an order that would collapse in almost unimaginable violence within a decade or less of the photographing. It would be unreasonable to fault Prokudin-Gorsky for lack of foresight, although as a resident of Saint Petersburg he was aware of the possibility of terror attacks: One of them killed a potential patron, prime minster Peter Stolypin, in 1911. And when he photographed Leo Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908, he surely knew of the great writer’s fulminations against the imperial regime and the Orthodox Church.

Nonetheless, with the eventual patronage of Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky embarked on a heroic enterprise to record the empire as none before him had done, an enterprise that continues to enrich our knowledge and vision decades later. The question is not what eluded his vision but how do we respond to that vision? What are the levels on which we can respond? These are by no means simple questions, and attempts to address them often have an ideological bent. “The Russia that we have lost”—who are “we” and what was “lost” after 1917?

The answers could well depend on the specific group considering the question. Among Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs of splendid Islamic monuments in Bukhara, there are portraits of haggard prisoners held under barbaric conditions. Some might argue that these portraits, together with those of ample local potentates, play into a European, orientalist narrative of Central Asian societies as semibarbaric. But such an interpretation is out of character for Prokudin-Gorsky and does not correspond to the direct humanity of his photographs. In any event few would regret the loss of the Emirate of Bukhara, a harshly repressive regime that at the time of Prokudin-Gorsky’s visit had the status of a Russian protectorate. But should we contemplate Prokudin-Gorsky’s specifically Russian photographs with-out an awareness of the other parts of the empire that was Russia?

A contemplation of the Prokudin-Gorsky photographs raises challenging questions of social and political history. Several of his photographs show Russian settlers and enterprises in the southern areas of the empire, but to whom had that land belonged? The perspective that Prokudin-Gorsky implicitly endorses in his photographs is that of Russians as bringers of progress and amelioration. This approach became especially pervasive after widespread peasant uprisings in 1905–6 that led to the “Stolypin reforms” of 1906. For the next half decade Peter Stolypin initiated policies for the re-settlement of hundreds of thousands of land-poor peasants from the Russian heartland to the empire’s peripheral areas—a process facilitated by railroad construction. Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs show evidence of this new Russian presence.

However, it was one thing when peasants were steered to uninhabited tracts in Siberia, and another when they were given plots in southern areas (particularly Turkestan) that were inhabited by non-Russian peoples. Already exposed to wealthy, extensively irrigated cotton estates (which Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed) in the Syr-Darya basin, significant elements of the non-Russia population harbored a festering resentment that contributed to the explosive Central Asian revolt of 1916. This uprising, exacerbated by wartime conscription of Muslims, spread through much of Turkestan (including the Samarkand region) in the latter half of 1916 and led to a staggering carnage that is referred to in contemporary Kyrgyzstan as “genocide.” Among other victims were Kazakhs and Russian settlers. The area that Prokudin-Gorsky had calmly photographed five years earlier was now torn by violence, while the photographer himself was at the other end of the empire at work on his last Russian expedition, to document construction of the strategic railroad to the new Arctic port of Murman (Murmansk). This urgent military project involved the forced labor of Central Powers prisoners-of-war, whom Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed.

The preceding comments should persuade us that nostalgic interpretations of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photography (“the Russia we have lost,” a sense of the lost idyll) may be superficially appealing, but they ignore a larger, at times devastating, context. We allow these photographs to transport us to reveries of the past, yet a knowledge of Russian history compels us to think about the future (now past) of the subjects portrayed. For example, to look at a group of children on a White Lake levee in Belozersk is to wonder what became of them in the next decade, after suffering years of war, social collapse, hunger, and savage violence. How many of them survived? The church in the background has long been a ruin, but what happened to the children?

The appealing, innocent faces of these and other children in Prokudin-Gorsky’s work remind us of the opening words of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Photography is “light writing,” and with an awareness of history Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs illuminate that Nabokovian moment. It might be added that Speak, Memory, first published as a single volume in 1951, is primarily devoted to a time and milieu that also nurtured Prokudin-Gorsky and was both forever lost and preserved through the writer’s memory.

Excerpted from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky,” by William Craft Brumfield. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. © 2020 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.

Photographic 'Journeys Through the Russian Empire' : William Craft Brumfield on the photographic legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. By Jennifer Eremeeva. The MoscowTimes, February 11, 2021. 

In honor of the 155th birthday of Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Google has designed a special Doodle to celebrate the man's revolutionary work. Here are a few facts about the scientist and his important contribution to the craft of photography.

His birthday has changed over the years. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in August 1863, in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. Because the Russian Empire used a slightly inaccurate system to count the days of the year borrowed from the Russian Orthodox Church, Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday was officially recorded on August 18, according to the Prokudin-Gorsky Project. Russia officially abandoned the orthodox Julian calendar with the formation of the Soviet Union, meaning Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday is actually on August 30.

He pioneered modern color photography. After training to become a chemist in Russia, Prokudin-Gorsky moved to Germany, where he met renowned photochemist Adolf Miethe and began studying under him. Building on the three-filter process of Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who had produced the first color photograph 40 years earlier, Prokudin-Gorsky and his teacher developed a photographic emulsion method that went beyond three-color photography to capture shades of colors in greater detail. The Doodle shows how, by running the same image through three different glass filters, Prokudin-Gorsky could recreate a composite picture of a landscape.

He photographed Leo Tolstoy. As Prokudin-Gorsky returned to Russia in the early 1900s, he began taking trips through the country, as well as to European countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. He developed a reputation for his photography and became feted by high society. In May 1908 he visited the Yasnaya Polyana estate and took the first official color portrait of the country's most renowned living writer, 80-year-old Leo Tolstoy.

He toured Russia in a specialist vehicle, given to him by the tsar. Using what he had learned abroad, Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a documentary tour of the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1915. The photographer documented local sites, as well as the day-to-day rituals and habits of the country's many citizens. In order for him to be able to work on the go, Prokudin-Gorsky received a railroad car, outfitted to work as a darkroom for developing photographs, courtesy of Tsar Nicholas II. The photographer traveled to over 30 regions of the empire, including parts that today fall in Belarus, Finland and Ukraine.

He wanted to use cutting-edge photography to educate children. After plying his craft across Russia and elsewhere, Prokudin-Gorsky had amassed an extensive catalog of pictures. His idea was to use his "optical color projection" in the classroom, to teach Russian schoolchildren about the various traditions in the large empire.

He left Russia during the civil war, never to return. Sent on assignment to Norway in 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky never made it back to Russia, as his patron, the tsar, was toppled by revolutionaries and Vladimir Lenin forced the Bolsheviks into power. Prokudin-Gorsky eventually settled in France, where he died in 1944. His photographs remain one of the most impressive catalogs of Russia at the turn of the century, before the rise of the Soviet Union.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Facts and Pictures From Pioneering Color Photographer Celebrated in Google Doodle. By Damien Sharkov. Newsweek, August 30, 2018. 

More information and photographs here :  Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Unknown Genius of Colour Photography.  Carusel, April 22, 2020

The Closure of Memorial and the Whitewashing of Russia's Past

The most important fact about Memorial, the Russian research and human-rights organization that the Kremlin wants to shut down, is this: no one knows exactly how many people fell victim to Soviet state terror between the Revolution of 1917 and the official dissolution of the U.S.S.R., thirty years ago last month. Memorial researchers estimate that about a million people were executed for alleged crimes against the state, out of some eleven million who were persecuted. Memorial has been working for more than three decades to document Soviet terror, but a full accounting is still years away. On December 28th and 29th, two Russian courts ruled that two organizations that make up Memorial—its historical-research arm and its human-rights arm, which are two separate legal entities—must shut down. The legal pretext for these rulings is alleged violations of convoluted rules imposed on Memorial because the state has designated it a “foreign agent”; the real reason for the rulings is that the regime sees Memorial as an enemy of the Russian state.
 
Memorial began in the heady days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. “It was a time when the desire for truth seemed to take hold of everyone,” Elena Zhemkova, the executive director of the research arm of Memorial, told me. Magazines and newspapers began writing about the Gulag and about the mass executions of the nineteen-thirties. Zhemkova, who was a graduate student in mathematics, found herself both shocked and ashamed. “I kept asking myself, ‘How could I, a grown woman of twenty-seven, not know any of this?’ ” In November, 1987, Zhemkova attended a large town-hall-style meeting on political persecution. Out of several hundred attendees, eleven people—none of whom knew any of the others well—stayed after the meeting to discuss the need for a memorial to the victims of the Soviet regime. Over the next few weeks, they wrote a petition for the creation of a memorial complex that would include a museum and a publicly accessible archives and library. Former dissidents and professional and self-taught historians joined the project, which they called Memorial. Similar efforts were taking shape all over the U.S.S.R., in large cities and small towns: a network of hundreds of groups and individuals who also called themselves Memorial.
 
As the Soviet Union was falling apart, armed conflicts flared up all over the empire. In 1991, Memorial decided to extend its research focus into the present. Since then, Memorial Human Rights Center has compiled accounts of human-rights abuses in conflict zones (most notably in Chechnya), brought lawsuits on behalf of victims (particularly refugees and internally displaced persons), and documented political persecution and assembled lists of political prisoners in the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia and, later, in Russia. In December, 2011, when Russians took to the streets to protest rigged elections and the state responded with mass detentions, Memorial spawned another project: OVDInfo, a news site and an essential legal-resource center for protesters. Memorial has provided office space and acted as a fiscal sponsor for OVDInfo. One of the newer organization’s founders was the child of a Memorial historian who co-founded its academic research center.
 
At the beginning, Memorial’s young founders imagined that their task was straightforward. “I thought everything was in the archives,” Zhemkova said. She and the others figured that, once the K.G.B. opened its books, historians would be able to piece together a complete picture of Soviet terror—and then create the museum complex they’d imagined. In late 1991, the Supreme Soviet of Russia passed a law that condemned political persecution and laid the groundwork for exonerating and compensating its victims. The K.G.B. opened its archives to historians, including those from Memorial. But, within a couple of years after the end of the U.S.S.R., the successor agencies to the K.G.B. had restricted access to the archives. Separately, the work of state committees charged with reviewing cases slowed to a crawl; only about four million of the estimated 11.5 million cases have been reviewed. Many regional memory activists lost interest or even changed their minds about the Soviet past. (For my book “Never Remember: Looking for Stalin’s Gulag in Putin’s Russia,” I interviewed a woman who had started a Gulag museum in Kolyma, the Far Eastern region where some of Stalin’s most brutal camps were built; after more than two decades, she was still running the museum but no longer believed that most of the inmates had been innocent.) What had started as the expression of the people’s will to know the truth became an increasingly marginalized movement.
 
“We’ve done so little of what we had planned,” Zhemkova said, when we talked in the Memorial offices after the December court rulings. The organization does have a ten-thousand-square-foot building, in central Moscow, which includes a dramatic two-story-tall auditorium and screening room, a basement exhibit space, a library, offices where desks are piled with books and binders, the document archives, and a collection of some eight thousand objects donated by Gulag survivors and their families. At this headquarters, Memorial has mounted a series of shows. The current one, called “Fabric,” uses clothes and other sewn and knit objects, including letters and memoirs written or typed on cloth, to tell the stories of women in the Gulag. One of the curators, Irina Scherbakova, took me on a tour of the show on December 29th, the day that the second court decision came down. A half-dozen people walked in off the street, one or two at a time, to join the tour. “A problem with our memory is that—unlike, say, with Nazi concentration camps—there is no film footage and virtually no photography,” Scherbakova said. Nor are there many objects: inmates had almost no possessions. Unlike Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag hasn’t inspired feature films that might have become popular enough to create lasting visual images of the terror. What Memorial has collected, and what it can put on display, offers a very rare opportunity for people to visualize the Soviet camps. “And if we survive—and if we can keep this show going for some time—then we will add QR codes for people to access the stories of people whose objects are on display,” Scherbakova said at the end of the tour.

 
Memorial’s most ambitious projects focus on names. One is called “The Return of the Names,” an annual event during which people in several cities in Russia and around the world read out the names of people executed during Stalin’s terror. In Moscow, the event is held in front of the F.S.B. (formerly K.G.B.) headquarters; people have been reading names from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., on October 29th, every year since 2007, and they are still only about halfway through the list of some thirty thousand names of people executed in Moscow alone from 1937 to 1938. Another project, called “The Last Address,” affixes postcard-size metal plaques to the walls of buildings where victims lived before their arrests. Since 2014, the project has mounted eleven hundred plaques in fifty-nine Russian cities and towns—a huge effort that represents only a tiny fraction of the people who died at the hands of the Soviet state. Crucially, Memorial has been compiling a database of names of people unjustly prosecuted in the Soviet Union. The undertaking began in 1998. The first CD, published in 2001, contained a hundred and thirty thousand names. The project has grown to an online database of three million people—which means it’s only about a quarter of the way to a complete accounting.
 
In 2012, following an unprecedented wave of mass protests, Vladimir Putin began his third term as President by cracking down on the opposition. A new law required organizations that received foreign funding and engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents” and to identify themselves as such in all their interactions with the public: on social media, in media interviews, in books they published, and so on. Memorial was among the first organizations to be branded a “foreign agent,” in 2013. In the years since, Memorial has appealed the decision repeatedly and lost, and has racked up millions of rubles in fines for ostensibly failing to identify itself as a “foreign agent.” But it has continued to work and even to grow.
 
In the last year or so, attacks on Memorial intensified. The organization was raided by police, attacked by self-appointed defenders of the Russian state, and defamed in state media. In November, the federal prosecutor general and the Moscow prosecutor filed lawsuits demanding that the Memorial Research Center and the Memorial Human Rights Center, respectively, be shut down by the order of the state. (The two organizations are registered in different jurisdictions.) The prosecutors proceeded to argue that Memorial’s ostensible failure to mark every single publicly available document with the “foreign agent” disclaimer violated the rights of Russian citizens to freedom of information, violated various international conventions, and could cause readers to become depressed.
 
The propaganda war against Memorial has focussed on other issues. In August, 2021, Aron Shneyer, a Russian-speaking Israeli historian, wrote, in two Facebook posts, that he had found the names of three Nazi collaborators in Memorial’s database of victims of unjust prosecution. “Shame on Memorial,” the first post began. (I asked Shneyer, by Facebook Messenger, how he had come across the names; he responded that he was “sick of the whole Memorial sewer.”) The next day, Russian state television reported on Shneyer’s supposed discovery under the headline “Memorial’s Fascists.” Memorial removed the names from the database. Zhemkova explained that they had come from a list of the unjustly prosecuted compiled by the authorities of the Komi region, which, in turn, was based on the card catalogue of local Gulag camps. On December 9th, Putin publicly answered a journalist’s question about Memorial. The Russian President said that he used to believe that Memorial was a humanitarian organization but had recently learned that it was defending Nazi collaborators as well as present-day terrorists and extremists. Two weeks later, a local court ordered that access to OVDInfo’s Web site be blocked in Russia, allegedly for defending extremists and terrorists. OVDInfo believes that the ruling stems from its reporting on the trials of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the pan-Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, both of which are banned in Russia. At the court hearings, one of the prosecutors accused Memorial Human Rights Center of defending extremists and “the most radical of protesters,” while another accused Memorial Research Center of including tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators in its database.
 
The prosecution’s key message would sound familiar to Americans who have been following the backlash against the 1619 Project. “Why, instead of feeling proud of our country, which emerged victorious from a frightful war and liberated the world of fascism, are we supposed to feel shame, to repent for our past, which is presented as relentlessly dark?” the prosecutor Alexei Zhafyarov asked. “It’s probably because someone is paying for it. And that’s the true reason behind Memorial’s evident reluctance to admit that it’s a foreign agent.”
 
 
“It is clear that Memorial is using the topic of political repressions of the twentieth century to create the false image of the U.S.S.R. as a terrorist country,” Zhafyarov said. Now he was getting to the substance of the conflict between the Russian state and Memorial. From its beginning, more than three decades ago, Memorial has used the term “state terror” to refer to the crimes it has documented. The more common and palatable term used in Russia is “political repression,” a phrase that is not only milder but also amorphous. It makes the deaths and arrests of millions sound like something akin to a natural disaster or perhaps a pandemic—a tragedy beyond human control. But Memorial, Zhemkova said, has always asked, “How did it happen that state structures, paid for by the people, came to kill the people? This is a relevant question today.”
 
Putin’s government may prefer that the history of Soviet terror not be remembered at all, but, thanks in large part to the work Memorial has done, this is not an option. So the government is waging a battle over who controls this history. In recent years, the state has unveiled a monument to the victims of the Gulag, in central Moscow, and opened a modest museum of the Gulag, on an out-of-the-way street in the city. Although these projects lack the texture and complexity of Memorial’s work, they are positive developments, Zhemkova said. “These are reference points for the state’s memory work,” she said. “Civil society cannot do its own memory work without the state.” But the Russian state would apparently prefer to do the memory work without civil society.

 
“We just don’t fit in today’s landscape,” Alexander Cherkasov, the board chairman of Memorial Human Rights Center, said. The Kremlin aims to establish control everywhere. It even has its own organizations that claim to be independent of the government and to defend human rights. “So they look at organizations like ours and think, If they don’t serve us, whom do they serve? If they are not our agents, they must be someone else’s agents.” As a student of twentieth-century dictatorships, Cherkasov said, he knows that structures created by tyrants quickly take on lives of their own and start destroying, because that’s what they are designed to do.
 
When Memorial went to court, its leaders and its lawyers knew that they’d lose. Still, for two days, in two different courts, they made their case. Speaking on December 29th, the defense attorney Ilya Novikov said, “People ask me why I agreed to work on this case, knowing that it’s hopeless…. This ship is going down with its flag flying high.”
 
Outside the courthouse, a crowd of several dozen supporters, journalists, and Memorial staff waited in the bracing cold, stomping their feet on the snow to keep warm. Memorial staff members waited with flowers—red and white roses for each member of their legal team. Each of the lawyers spoke briefly on the steps of the courthouse. Attorney Grigory Vaypan, the last to speak, compared the decision to Soviet political prosecutions. “There is no doubt that sooner or later—I hope sooner rather than later—this decision too will be deemed unjust and illegal.” The crowd applauded. Behind me, one of a small group of teen-agers said, “We will live that long.” “We will live that long,” his friends echoed. “Now could we please go someplace warm?”
 
It’s not clear what happens to Memorial next. The organizations will appeal the decisions. They will probably lose the appeal and face the requirement to shut down sometime in the spring. At that point, they will be in uncharted territory. The archives may be saved and stored elsewhere, but, Zhemkova said, “an archive is only alive as long as it’s used.” No one knows what can or will happen to a building owned by an organization that the state has ordered closed.
 
Within hours of the second ruling, the European Court of Human Rights ordered a stay of the decisions to shut down Memorial. Although Russia is obligated by treaty to observe the E.C.H.R. decisions, its actual record is spotty. Cherkasov, however, was optimistic. “It’s like an ambulance that arrived just as we were losing the patient,” he said. “It turns out there is life after death, and it’s interesting.”
 
That night, Memorial was scheduled to have its annual New Year’s party. The staff rallied and decorated the large, dramatic space designed for lectures and film screenings. (The last screening, in October, was interrupted when a mob of unidentified thugs stormed the place.) All day, people had been coming to bring presents. A baker sent over sixty fruitcakes for staff members. A man came in with a giant package. “We found his grandfather in the archives years ago,” Scherbakova told me, “and he has brought presents every year since.”
 
Zhemkova and several others gave toasts, straining to find notes of happiness amid grief. “As often happens, tragic days are also days of unity, love, new friendships, and laughter,” Maria Eismont, one of the defense attorneys, said. “The last thing we should be doing now is cry, because this is the state’s main goal—to make us all sad and separate from one another.”

 
The crowd honored people who had suffered for trying to defend Memorial. Aleksei Belenkin, who was arrested for holding up a sign in front of the courthouse during a preliminary hearing, was recently released from jail, after serving twenty-five days. A young man who was arrested for the same thing on December 28th had faced a court on the 29th and was sentenced to only a fine—practically a New Year’s present from the Russian state. The man’s sign had said, “We will live forever,” which is a quote from a song by popular alt-rock singer Vasya Oblomovl. The music video that Oblomov had made for Memorial now played on the screen: photos of victims of Stalinist terror, engulfed in fire, one after another reduced to ashes. “We will live forever” was the refrain. One of the lawyers who had represented Memorial in court that morning, Tatyana Glushkova, looked at the screen with tears in her eyes and sang along.
 
The Russian Memory Project That Became an Enemy of the State. By Masha Gessen. The New Yorker, January 6, 2022. 

The closure of Memorial, one of the oldest civil rights groups in Russia, caused an outcry in the country and around the world. It had been prominent in uncovering the crimes of the Stalinist regime and remembering the victims of the Gulag. But the authorities accused the organisation of trying to undermine the state order.
 
Here, BBC Russian looks at what made Memorial so important.
 

For over 30 years, Memorial worked on uncovering the fates of the victims of Soviet political repressions. It also exposed human rights abuses in present-day Russia.
 
Its work never sat comfortably with the authorities. It was initially cautioned in 2006, and in 2014 it was added to the list of "foreign agents" - a roster of organisations and individuals the government claims receive funding from abroad.
 
The label is a poignant reminder of the 1930s mass repressions in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Then, many victims were wrongfully accused of being foreign agents, traitors and enemies of the people.
 
It is ironic that Memorial, an organisation finding out what happened to those accused of being foreign agents nearly a century ago, ended up with the same label.
 
A pretext for closing the group was its failure to mark some of its social media posts with a "foreign agent" disclaimer, which it is legally required to do.
 
Memorial's lawyer Tatyana Glushkova stresses the group marked most of its posts and online pages as required and paid fines when it failed to do so.
 
The group and its supporters say the accusation was just a formal excuse to close down an organisation voicing uncomfortable truths.
 
Sakharov's legacy
 
Memorial was set up in 1987 - at the time of reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika - and initially led by Andrei Sakharov, a famous Soviet dissident scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
 
Sakharov and those in his circle wanted to focus on uncovering the true scale of the repression which took place under Josef Stalin - Soviet leader between 1929 and 1953. During this period tens of millions of people are believed to have perished in the Gulag forced labour camps.
 
In 1990, a Memorial team travelled to the Solovky camp in the north of Russia - formerly one of the most notorious in the Gulag. They brought back a memorial stone to be placed in central Moscow.

 
The Solovetsky stone now sits in the Lubyanka square, opposite the imposing building of the Russian security service, the FSB, (formerly NKVD and later the KGB). It is meant to serve as a reminder of Russia's grim history.
 
Memorial also investigated more recent human rights abuses in Russia and other post-Soviet countries. A centre for human rights was created as a separate arm of the organisation in 1991. It has been providing legal and other assistance to those considered to be political prisoners and their families.
 
Yan Rachinskiy, the chairman of Memorial, says it's ironic that the organisation is being liquidated in the year of Andrei Sakharov's centenary.
 
What was the Gulag?
 
A state network of prison camps in the Soviet Union, the name Gulag derives from a Russian acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, or chief administration of camps.
 
Initially set up under the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, it grew under Josef Stalin before being abolished by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, in 1960.
 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago shone a light on life inside the Soviet prison system. It estimated that around 50 million people had gone through the labour camps between 1918 and 1956.
 
Underground copies of the book by the former political prisoner and Nobel prize winner were disseminated in the USSR from the late 1960s onwards.

 
 
Memorial, my great-grandfather and I
 
Sasha Lavut, 15, is one of the youngest Memorial volunteers. He started two years ago, handing out flyers and candles in the street at the annual commemoration for victims of the Soviet repressions. Later he began to look after the group's Tik Tok account and other social media platforms.
 
Sasha is named after his great grandfather, Alexander Lavut, a former political prisoner and one of the editors of A chronicle of Current Events, a prominent Soviet underground publication, which detailed human rights abuses in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Alexander spent seven years in prison and then in exile for his activism, before joining Memorial.
 
"If we haven't achieved what he was fighting for - respect for human rights in Russia - then we have to keep going with what was started under far more difficult circumstances," says his great grandson. "I see Memorial as a part of my great grandfather and therefore a part of me."
 
'The best job I ever had'
 
Roman Petrishchev, 29, who had dreamed of working in a human rights group since university, joined Memorial in 2020 as a member of staff and calls it "a dream job".
 
He was distraught to learn the organisation would have to close.
 
His colleague Natasha Sekretareva, also 29, has been at Memorial since February and feels the same: "It's the best job I've ever had, with the best people. I have finally found my community."
 
Both Roman and Natasha work for the human rights arm of the organisation, which means that they don't research past repressions but help those it describes as Russia's current political prisoners.
 
Natasha looks after the cases Memorial takes to the European Court of Human Rights.
 
Patriotic narrative
 
Amnesty International's Marie Struthers described the decision to shut down Memorial as "a grave insult to victims of the Gulag".
 
"Memorial was created at the time of Perestroika when it seemed that the Soviet Union would never return, the arrests would never return," Zoya Svetova, a human rights activist and publicist, told BBC Russian. "But now there is a feeling that all these things might come back into our life."
 
History and nostalgia play a key part in Vladimir Putin's presidency. In December he lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of what he described as "historical Russia".
 
"What had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," he said.
 
Russia's role in World War Two has been recently included in the country's constitution and "spreading falsehoods about the activities of the USSR" in the war can be punished with fines or even imprisonment.
 
Yet, repressions of the Soviet era, while not openly condoned, have not been officially examined.
 
Memorial's supporters say that the organisation has been uncovering parts of Russian history which current authorities don't want exposed as they don't fit into the patriotic narrative.
 
"Those who have studied the past of their families and have seen the Soviet archives, are likely to continue to be resistant to the myths of the 'lost Soviet paradise'," says lawyer Daniil Petrov.
 
He believes the work of Memorial has provided "an inoculation against propaganda".
 
Olga is one of those who came to support Memorial during the final court hearing and was heartbroken to find out that it would have to close.
 
"My grandfather was executed in 1937. I was never able to find out exactly what he was accused of. Memorial would have been the only place which could have helped me. Now that hope is gone."
 
Memorial: Russia’s civil rights group uncovering an uncomfortable past. BBC, January 3, 2022. 

The Solovetsky Islands in northern Russia’s White Sea have played a unique role in the country’s history. Almost 600 years ago its fortified monastery was founded and quickly became a stronghold of the Russian Orthodox Church. Following the Bolshevik victory after the 1917 revolution, the monastery was closed down and many of its buildings were turned into a forced labour camp, a prototype of Stalin’s Gulag system. More than one million prisoners died in this camp, said by historians to have the hardest regime of all.
 
Twenty nine years ago I made the first of several visits to the Solovetsky Islands to witness the re-opening of the monastery. The walk through the dark deserted rooms, many still festooned with shackles, sent shivers down my spine, even though it was peak summer and the venomous mosquitoes, whose bites literally killed tethered and naked prisoners all those years before, were using my follically-challenged head as a landing strip. In winter the temperatures hover around -20 degrees C, (the lowest recorded is -36 degrees C). Solovetsky prisoners who weren’t bitten to death in the summer, froze to death in winter.
 
With so much suffering and death in the gulags, it’s no wonder that those Russians who wanted to keep the memory of the victims alive, chose to transport a huge granite boulder from the Solovetsky islands to Moscow, where it is set in the middle of Lubyanka Square, opposite the infamous KGB (now FSB) building. The Solovetsky stone was one of the first and perhaps the most important monument of its kind in the former Soviet Union. The inscription at the foot of the pedestal reads: “This stone is delivered by the ‘Memorial’ members from the Solovetsky Camp and established in memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime”. Some wanted to use the word “Stalinist”, as the dictator was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of some 20 million victims.

 
Memorial is Russia’s oldest civil rights group and was established in the late 1980s by dissidents, including the famous physicist Andrei Sakharov. It has spent decades cataloguing atrocities committed in the Soviet Union, building up a huge archive of Soviet-era crimes and campaigning tirelessly for human rights in Russia. This activity has so annoyed President Putin that two weeks ago, prosecutors were instructed to ask the Kremlin-controlled courts to dissolve Memorial for allegedly violating Russia’s controversial law on “foreign agents”. This comes in a year that has seen an unprecedented crackdown on Putin’s opponents, including the jailing of chief Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and the banning of his organisation as “foreign agents”.
 
Russia’s “foreign agent” law is Putin’s “catch-all” law designed to curtail any criticism of the Kremlin. It was introduced in July 2012 to cover “any direct or indirect interference in our internal affairs, any form of pressure on Russia”, according to the speech made by Putin to the FSB in 2013. This means that any opposition group giving Vladimir Putin a sleepless night is slapped with a “foreign-agent” order by the courts, which makes the problem go away; job done. Laden with Soviet-era connotations of treachery and espionage, the “foreign-agent” label has been used against a wide range of rights-groups and independent media in recent years.
 
But why is President Putin so paranoid about Memorial?
Putin wants to control the historical narrative in Russia, which is perhaps why his boyhood contemporary from Leningrad, Sergei Naryshkin, is not only head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, but also the head of the Russian Historical Society. The Kremlin aims to legitimise its authoritarian practices by imbuing the power of the state with an almost sacred quality. Even personal memories must be interpreted to fit a prearranged discourse, giving the state full control of Russian history.
 
Take for example the infamous Katyn massacre, when in 1940 some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the Soviet secret police. Until 1990, the Soviet Union claimed that it was the Nazis who carried out the butchery, but in that year, Boris Yeltsin released documents showing that it was indeed carried out as directed by Joseph Stalin. Articles on a state-run news agency website are now rehashing the falsified Stalinist version of the event, once again suggesting that the Poles were massacred by the Germans.
 
Putin’s regime has not openly exonerated Joseph Stalin of his crimes, but neither has it opposed the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin by many. The clear plan is to gradually remove from the public gaze any reference to the mass murders carried out by the person whom many at the time considered powerful but deranged, and focus on the war hero—Stalin, the strongman who heroically saved the nation. And it’s working. In just one year, according to the latest polling by the Levada Centre, the public’s “respect” for Stalin increased from 29% to 41%. The number of those who believe that Stalin played a positive role in the country has grown consistently to 70% in 2019, while only 19% of respondents had a negative opinion.
 
Vladimir Putin has thrived on his image of a strong leader. People remember the disastrous period following the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago; Boris Yeltsin appeared weak and the living standards fell dramatically as his regime pursued a post-communist failed economic “shock treatment”. As Russian friends said to me in Moscow while their world collapsed: “plenty of shock, but no treatment”. The perception quickly arose that only a strong leader could solve Russia’s problems. A poll last year underpinned this view when 45% of respondents even supported the idea of the concentration of power in the hands of a single person. Many Russians have set aside the terror of the Stalin period, personifying him as the model of order and Vladimir Putin has built on this image to create mutually reinforcing popularity ratings. When Putin behaves in a more authoritarian manner, Stalin becomes more popular. A more popular Stalin elevates the popularity of Putin, or so the Kremlin’s theory goes. Any organisation or person who interrupts this “virtuous cycle”, such as Memorial, must be removed.

 
Over the past decade, Memorial has survived Russia’s reactionary turn under Vladimir Putin, continuing to popularise its research into the Stalin-era atrocities as it built a database of more than 3 million of his victims. The passive measures against Memorial by the Putin regime, such as blocking primary documents from the Stalin era, have had limited success and they now appear to be turning to the nuclear option of destroying Memorial itself. “We were enthusiasts who wanted to know more about history, tell people about their history”, said historian and researcher at Memorial, Nikita Petrov. “When Russia chose to take a democratic, legal path forward, I couldn’t in my darkest dreams have imagined that everything would eventually start going into reverse. Probably I was naive then.”

Another historian, Yuri Dmitriev, who had dedicated himself to documenting Stalin’s 1937-38 Great Terror by unearthing mass graves and chronicling state repression in Russia’s north-western Karelia region, was found guilty of paedophilia last year and sentenced to a 13-year jail term in a high security penal colony. “Nonsense” said his supporters, “the outrageous charges were fabricated simply to punish him for his work with Memorial”.
 
UN officials, the Council of Europe, international rights groups and Western governments have all warned against Memorial being disbanded. Russia’s two surviving Nobel Peace Prize winners, the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and Novaya Gazeta newspaper editor, Dmitry Muratov, have urged prosecutors to drop their claims. The two said in a joint statement that Memorial was aimed not only at preserving the memory of Soviet-era repression, but at “preventing this from happening now and in the future”.
 
Many Russians would say that under Vladimir Putin, it already has.
 
Vladimir Putin is whitewashing Russia’s dark past. By John Dobson. The Sunday Guardian, December 11, 2021.