Photo: © Barry Lewis

“Journeys through the USSR 1982-91, from Moscow and Leningrad to a journey Into the the darkness of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps” – Barry Lewis

Moscow

I arrived alone in Moscow, December 1982, on a short but surreal visit after the USSR had experienced its worst economic performance since World War II. I went as part of a tourist group, speaking no Russian – I couldn’t even read Cyrillic script so I often didn’t know where I was. Nervous of what the trip would be like, my imagination having been fed by spy fiction, I was lucky enough to meet a couple of Australian Russian speakers who helped me daily. The arrivals lounge of the Soviet airport greeted me with the distinct and powerful smell of the ubiquitous cardboard-tipped Papirosy cigarettes. The weather and city were suitably grey during the few hours of winter daylight as we travelled to our hotel in the suburbs. I found the ‘otherness’ of the city compelling especially because the aesthetic of the USSR was dominated for me by the absence of consumer advertising. Instead, huge posters celebrated the towering intellects of Marx, Engels and Lenin; the victories of the Red Army plus the achievements of whichever five-year plan was in motion. On each floor of our hotel was the dezhurnaya, always female, who kept an eagle eye on all the guests, and was the person with the power to give you soap, toilet paper or a bath plug. Each day we had a fixed and obligatory programme, visiting museums, galleries and churches. I needed to avoid these trips in order to take everyday life pictures. Escaping from the compulsory organised trips led by our enthusiastic but controlling Intourist guide over the course of the nine days was tricky but successful: I was followed a lot but often never knew if my paranoia was real or imagined. I quickly developed a covert style of photographing with my camera tucked away under a voluminous sheepskin coat that also served to protect the camera from the sub-zero temperatures. I stayed mainly on the streets: there were few cafes to shelter in and people were curious rather than hostile but without any Russian our conversations were brief and limited. Though if ever I walked the street without a hat on, the babushkas would come up and slap my head to tell me I would die if I didn’t put it straight back on! Photographing in the USSR in the early 1980s was a tricky business. It was the height of the cold war: in October 1983, just five months after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, President Reagan was beating the American drum and denouncing Russia as the “Evil Empire”. Brezhnev was replaced by an ailing 69-year-old Yuri Andropov, who had manoeuvred his way to power through the support of the KGB and military in a Kremlin power struggle. Western photographers were not trusted and on my first visit, in 1982, to photograph Moscow, I often felt I was being followed. I was never certain whether my paranoia was real or imagined, though with twenty percent of the population employed by the military-industrial complex, it was best to assume the worst. Despite these Kremlin tensions, people on the street were getting on with life. New Year’s Day is their equivalent of Christmas and the shops, despite the limited goods available, were packed. As the bells rang out for the New Year in the middle of Red Square, the snow started falling, as if by magic. A man stepped forward playing an accordion and spontaneously the crowd started dancing and drinking the night away.

GULAG – A journey into the darkness of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps

 “We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months – after that we don’t need him anymore.”    Camp commander Naftaly Frenkel, The Gulag Archipelago

I was a founder member of Network Photographers and originally worked with Geo magazine on the story documenting Stalin’s Gulag, a Soviet network of forced labour camps. In the winter of 1991, during the openness of Gorbachev’s perestroika I travelled through Siberia with a writer for Geo Magazine, documenting Stalin’s Gulag, a Soviet network of forced labour camps. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, and often the final destination of political prisoners imprisoned, usually without a trial. 18 million people are reported to have been sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953 and over 1.5 million died there as a direct result of their detention. The journey followed the routes of the prisoners on the infamous Kolyma highway, known as the “road of bones”. The remote towns of the interior were bleak centres for the mining of gold and uranium, and many of the current population were descendants of the original prisoners, who had been forbidden to leave after completion of their sentence. During the journey, by paying the KGB, I stayed in Camp AW261/4, an active prison in Uptar. The hard labour was still brutal, with men working outside, pouring concrete, at temperatures of -30° C. My final destination, and the hardest to reach, was the abandoned settlement of Butugychag labour camp where gold and uranium had been mined until 1955. This secret settlement, not listed among the abandoned camps, was a chamber of horrors, surrounded by shallow graves. Finally, I travelled across Russia interviewing survivors through an organization called Memorial. Watching the unfolding of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and his rewriting of Soviet history, with critics sent to camps or simply murdered I felt my work had a special relevance during this dark period of Putin’s Russia echoing Stalin. I spent a lot of time talking to ‘Memorial’, a group of survivors dedicated to revealing facts about the Gulag – and was horrified when, in 2021, were outlawed as a ‘terrorist’ organization. When I started this journey, the internet did not exist. In the last 20 years it has been possible to discover so much more information which has enabled making this book, full of painful truths but essential for a perspective on current Russian realities.

BARRY LEWIS

Barry Lewis started as a chemistry teacher with photography as a hobby. Barry stopped teaching in 1974 when he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he studied under Bill Brandt. In 1976 he won the Vogue award and worked for a year with the magazine. In 1977 he received an arts council grant to photograph commuting in London, which was exhibited in the Museum of London and the Southbank. In 1981 & 83 he was exhibited in the Photographers Gallery, for ‘New Work on Britain’ and a solo show, ‘A Week in Moscow’ Working mainly for magazines, in 1999 he was a co-founder of the photo agency Network which played an important role in British Photojournalism for over 20 years. A regular contributor to Life Magazine, National Geographic, and the Sunday Times, Barry has worked globally until 2014 and made over 20 books. He has exhibited throughout the world and received several awards including the Leica medal for humanitarian photography. From 2015 for 5 years Barry worked mainly on documentary films but has returned to photography in 2021 when he started his current work, “Intersections”: a study of London through portraits and words of the people.