Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union is the culmination of Jonas Bendiksen’s fascinating seven-year photographic journey through unrecognized countries, enclaves, and isolated communities. For decades, these outlying republics were held in orbit by the immense gravity of Moscow, the nucleus of the Soviet Empire. When the USSR dissolved, in 1991, its satellite states were sent into free space—and uncertain futures. Bendiksen, a prodigiously talented photographer, has explored six gray areas in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and far eastern Siberia, and in the process reveals that the Soviet breakup still continues today. Many of these outposts are ostensibly state-less states, places where Soviet nostalgia looms large, self-styled brands of capitalism have emerged, where cities are scarred from bloody insurrections, and entire populations have fled in search of better lives.
Transdniester is a breakaway region of Moldova that survives by functioning as a giant black market for illicit traffic in all manner of goods, from leftover Soviet munitions to bootlegged booze. Abkhazia, an unrecognized country on the Black Sea, was the natural pearl of the empire, where bellicose generals and productive factory managers came to relax. The spacecraft crash zones between Russia and Kazakhstan reveal a Soviet-inflected version of the entrepreneurial spirit. Birobidzhan, or “Soviet Zion,” was established by Stalin in far eastern Siberia, in 1928, twenty years before the founding of Israel as the first Jewish homeland—but today most traces of its Jewish past have been erased.
Hauntingly beautiful, these sixty-two arresting color photographs unsentimentally reveal the often grim circumstances in these half-forgotten regions that are uniformly poor and polluted—and often politically unstable. We may not hear much about them today, but we will certainly hear more from them in the near future as the fall of the Iron Curtain continues to reverberate throughout the region. This book is produced to accompany a traveling exhibition, which will open in July 2006 at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.
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