This series developed as I visited small suburban towns and villages of Russia. It shows the lives of people, their relationships with each other and the places they live. I take photographs of province places during the several years now. This is my main topic, I would say. I live close to Moscow, but don’t really take pictures there and take every single opportunity to go somewhere far from it, to some small town or village. This is where I try to find some points of interest for my photographs. There is some charm, peculiar to the province life that big cities do not have. In Russia one can feel the difference between the capital and the province, the middle and the periphery like nowhere else. Even the word “province” itself has some special meaning in modern Russian language: it means “all the country, except its capital”. Moscow, the great capital, the only center that dominates, while everything else just depends on it. Moscow is self-contained, focused on itself, has nothing to do with what happens outside it’s borders. This is a city of great opportunities, the major life events happen here, while the province just looks as faceless and inferior from this point of view. When you leave Moscow for province you feel like crossing the border between two different worlds, the feeling of space changes so the feeling of time does. In the capital the space is closed, limited by the buildings walls, time is concentrated, it is always not enough. The space of province appears to be endless, it spreads towards the horizon, and the time runs slow, almost by itself. In province you feel you want to walk. The more space, the more your feet can cross. The slower time flows the less you hurry. The regular life goes slow. One can find it gray and boring; other can find there something the capital does not have: the feeling of the ground and nature, the escape from city bustle. Different space means different people. Yes, they can be not as smart as those who live in the cities, the demand much less, but at the same time they are much more real and open-minded, their honesty is what you want to believe in.

For me this project started in 2014 and I'm still working on it. I went on several expeditions to Kolyma in Magadan Region – one of the most remote regions of the Russian Far East. The early images within this body of work were shot on black and white film, then I decided to explore the project in color. The project title quotes Varlam Shalamov's poem. Shalamov is the author of "Kolyma Tales”, a prisoner of Dalstroy*, who could both convey the majesty of Kolyma’s wilderness and the horror of Stalin’s Gulag. How did Kolyma change since Shalamov’s time, in more than 50 years; what hides “in the shadow of time”? The first thing we think of when we hear “Kolyma” is the years of the Stalin’s repressions. It still bears some scars of the past, the age of brutal development, costing the lives of thousands of Gulag prisoners. Though most of the camps and mines left almost no trace to be seen today, the nature still vividly remembers the history and those hundreds of thousands of souls who worked here and also those who never came back. Today not many locals can still remember the Dalstroy period, the majority of Kolyma residents were born and grew up in a new reality. Today’s Kolyma suffers mainly from disrepair and abandonment, as not only the Gulag’s remnants are fading away but also the infrastructure built in the 60’s and 70’s is gradually coming to ruin. Settlements and towns fade away one by one. A typical for Kolyma story: factories close, people first lose their jobs, then the lights go dark, next central heating runs cold, forcing them into conditions impossible for normal life. People are left with no choice but to leave their homes. The population of Magadan Region shrank by two thirds, since the 90’s. But in spite of all the social shocks of the 20’th century, in spite of all the scars that Kolyma still bears, Kolyma lives, but lives its own life, in the shadow of time. * Dalstroy (Russian: Дальстрой) was an organization set up in 1931 by the Soviet NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) in order to manage road construction and the mining of gold in Kolyma using forced labor of prisoners. Over the years, Dalstroy created about 80 Gulag camps across the Kolyma region.

Greshny Cheloveche (a sinning man or sinner in old Russian notation). I started this project in 2006, when I went on my first several-day trip to a Cross Procession organized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Since then for several years I went to Cross Processions in Kirov, Yaroslavl and Vologda regions. The Cross Procession (Russian: krestny khod) is a very interesting phenomenon in Russian religious life. It's an ancient tradition, it's been here for several centuries. Even in the times of soviet authorities, despite the official ban, the faithful would secretly gather and head with a prayer to the places, where as the legends said were the most revered shrines. In the 1990's the tradition of Cross Processions started to resume and become more crowded each year. Participating in a Cross Procession I can spend time with the pilgrims watch them, to see the man not only in church praying, but also while he rests and to almost talk to him. I'm interested in what people do, their emotions, specific details, little situations. Everything that can truthfully tell a story about a person or depict his inner state. I think that it's important to go deeper than the religious side of the event that lies on the surface, to try to show the person outside of the crowd. To depict the conversation with God, while not going into extremes: without cynicism on one hand and avoiding being pious on the other. Based on first impressions, one can see that different people have a different relationship with religion. Some are content with just performing rituals, some are keeping their fathers traditions and for some (the minority) are trying to find God. Allot are asking for God's help, seeking to find answers to many of life's questions, maybe it's their last hope. Someone sinned, someone has problems with his or his children's health, someone faces family problems or someone's husband is an alcoholic. And there are yet some are not asking for anything, who come happily, to celebrate and to thank God.

Up river Pinega that flows in the Arkhangelsk region the villages form so called "bushes" - 15-20 villages around a central larger town. Mainly characterised by their remoteness and distance from traveled routs. 8 hours drive to the regional center through the taiga via logger roads. And that is if the road is in shape, some times, mostly in Spring or Fall, there could be weeks of full isolation. The villages are slowly dieing out, some are already completely abandoned. There is no industry, no agriculture. But there were times of state farms, lumber camps and even an airport. Now the young folk is moving to the cities in search of a better life, leaving only the elderly as the permanent residents. Those of the working men who are not drunk yet go on "shifts" (working in the city for weeks at a time). Most of the rest live off unemployment benefits, or even their parents pensions. And there are still times when food and alcohol are acquired with nothing but a promise to pay back sometime.

Moscow State Puppet Theatre named after Sergey Obraztsov, 2006.