Decline and fall of the Soviet empire
The decade saw upheaval on a grand scale behind the former Iron Curtain. Anthony Suau was there to document it.
by Luz Echeverri
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| The London Sunday
Times Magazine Oct. 31, 1999 |
||
A man lies dead in the middle of a desolate street in Moscow. People glance, but walk on by; murders have become common and they have grown indifferent. In the midst of the turmoil caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the population is adapting to an ever-changing existence.
Scenes from daily life, showing moments of anguish, despair and frustration are captured by the camera of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Anthony Suau, and compiled in his book, "Beyond the Fall". The result is striking imagery that will be exhibited in the Royal Festival Hall from 21 January.
The artistic beauty on one hand, and the social content on the other, combine to tell the story of immense change in Eastern Europe. Black-and-white photographs taken over the past decade show the extremes caused by the collapse of the totalitarian system and the emergence of capitalism in the former Soviet Union.
In one image, a poster for West cigarettes reads “Original International Quality”. On it, a sharply dressed man smokes contentedly while dreaming of a sunny day on the beach. Juxtaposed with this stereotype of consumerism, an old man shuffles down the street, and another one sleeps (or has already succumbed to the cold) on the concrete pavement.
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the enthusiasm and spirit of the early days has been overshadowed by disenchantment, hunger, fear and war.
In 1989, there were high hopes for an uncertain future. In 1999, many Russians think that they were better off in the old days of communism, where at least a few things worked.
The transformation has been so abrupt that people are undergoing identity crises. In Moscow, casinos, nightclubs and shops have become the playground for the new rich, the bureaucrats and the Mafia. In the countryside, impoverished workers and farmers work in primitive ways and struggle to survive. Children play in the ruins of industrial buildings and the population suffers from pollution and toxic waste related diseases.
Russia has witnessed in a short time the disintegration of an empire. This is reflected in Suau’s photographs, which show the ruins and debris of cities and towns; and illustrate the tragedies of the people caught in the crossfire of civil war.
Despite the harshness of life, people manage to get by. Some smile, others still have hope. As Suau points out, “For Russians, communism and capitalism had emerged into the same frustrating experience - a nightmare of deprivation presided over by an elite few.”
Suau’s astonishing documentary photos reveal the ambivalence of the transition. These powerful images show the contrasts of a society that is at once coming to terms with its revolutionary past and trying to determine its future.
Capitalism’s poisoned promise
Photography: Michael Blnyon is moved by an exhibition that spells out the greed and venality of post-Soviet Russia, but also the resilience of its people
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
| TIME magazine,
Atlantic edition, Jan. 24, 2000 |
|||
No one visiting the Festival Hall would envy Vladimir Putin or his job. The depths to which Russia has sunk -- the grime squalor, ruined factories, decaying hospitals and blank expressions on the sunken faces of despairing pensioners-- are on shocking display in the foyer. Can anyone govern a country that has so lost its way?
Anthony Suau’s photographic exhibition "Beyond the Fall" is a searing indictment of a transition that has gone wrong, the replacement of a failed communist system with a brutal new anarchy that has enriched the unscrupulous and made paupers of millions. We see the victims in all their ugly misery; the shriveled pensioner eating her lonely meal in a room that looks more like a prison cell; the miners in their grime and poverty; the fisherman casting his line in a river stinking with the effluent from distant factories; the fatalistic patient having a last cigarette on a grimy operating table where the dirt and indolence mix in the measure; the Chechen refugees; and the young, dead soldiers spread-eagle on the uncaring grass in Georgia.
More than 100 photographs chronicle the economic, social and political transformation of the former Soviet bloc in the ten years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suau’s Pulitzer prizewinning eye follows the emerging bandit culture against a background of impoverishment and decay. he shows deserted industrial wastelands alongside rural communities using antiquated farming equipment. Police struggling with crime invade markets, while in the countryside old superstitions mix with new religious freedom as villagers pay homage to a box believing to contain miraculous powers.
Of course disenchantment is an innate part of all revolutions, as Jacques Rupnic, a French political scientist remarks in the introduction to the exhibition’s superb accompanying catalogue. But Suau has the knack of capturing that disenchantment not simply on the faces of those people who brave new post-Soviet world, but even in the landscape of broken machinery, cracking buildings and bare, peeling walls.
“This is another world to me, but in fact it is the same world,” one visitor wrote in the exhibition’s comment book. “It is sad to see what capitalism can do,” said another. “Capitalism sucks. Hooray for communism!” But a more perceptive visitor remarked: “A heartbreaking portrayal of the betrayal of hope but also the resilience of those whose lives have been destroyed by power and greed.” For Suau has also humour, softness, beauty and humanity in his pictures -- especially those of villages, the young and the carefree: the boys going for a swim in the river at Krasnodar, the wild horse on an empty steppe, the fat goldmine owners steaming in their private sauna.
A photographer for TIME magazine, he started traveling in eastern Europe as the Wall came down and continued further east. Many of the photographs are of Romania, Hungary, Poland and other former Warsaw Pact countries. They too had their transformation, but it was less wrenching and costly of human happiness than in Russia.
In Moscow he met successful “new Russians”, and we see a world where action, adrenaline, opportunism and unscrupulous ambition can yield serious money. The rewards -- the strippers at the nightclub, the groaning tables, the fashion shows and the black-tied gambling casinos -- are evident; so too is the moral corruption of a society where only wealth now counts.
Suau divides his chronicle into three parts: Opening, Transformation and Diversity. An the big, sharp pictures in the foyer are supplemented by 400 slides that elaborate these themes. The cumulative effect is indefinitely depressing. But it is revealing in a way that no historian could describe in an essay on society in transition. Suau was shocked, fascinated, exhilarated and angered. His camera captures each emotion in turn. Does Putin know what he has inherited?
Images of a new revolution
Photographer Anthony Suau rushed to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the next 10 years he documented the mayhem that took hold of the Soviet bloc.
by Derek Bishton
It has been called the end of history. Barely more than a decade ago - in November 1989 - the world was waking up to images of Berliners storming the ugly, idiotic wall that had divided their city for more than 40 years. They were, if you remember, heroic images. A people’s army, wielding lump hammers, had done what no amount of nuclear stockpiling and cold war posturing had been able to achieve. Within months of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet bloc had imploded and the Communist system had been swept aside.
Anthony Suau was one of the scores of photographers who rushed to record this pivotal moment, and it provides the starting point for his documentary essay "Beyond the Fall" (at the Royal Festival Hall, London, until March 13), which seeks to illuminate the struggle to survive and forge new identities in the former Soviet bloc countries in the Nineties.
The initial mood was one of celebration, but it was quickly replaced by despair, confusion and a sense of loss. As Suau comments: “From the day the first slabs of the wall were removed, the East Germans were second-class citizens in their own country.”
The bleak irony of this observation - and a play on meaning of the word “fall”- permeate Suau’s vision of the decade. In essence, this is a portrait of confusion and chaos: Gorbachev sits rigid with incomprehension as a surprisingly relaxed and youthful Yeltzin dissolves the Soviet Union before his eyes, and while in Moscow housewife wanders bewilder through the impossibly expensive brave new world of towering fridge-freezers.
More poignantly, a Chechen father stands in a mass grave, searching hopelessly through the tangled mass of dead bodies for his lost sons. The landscape is littered with the incongruous signs and symbols of the late 20th century capitalism that seem to have fallen overnight into a world from a bygone era.
This sense of the past in the present is accentuated by Suau’s grainy black-and-white images and the facility with which he references work from a wide range of photographic traditions. The ever-present swirls of smoke that accompany his Moscow gangsters, for example, are pure film noir, and his keen eye for surreal juxtapositions - the Mafia victim awaiting surgery puffing away on his (possibly last) cigarette - are a delight..
Ultimately, however, this is an unfinished story. Against the relatively successful transition to parliamentary democracy in Hungary and the Czech Republic must be set the continued conflict in the Balkans. Suau’s parting shot shows an ethnic Albanian returning to his home in Kosovo to find his home burnt and his three sons dead in the rubble. There is still a long way to fall.