(Signed) Stig Stasig: Retrograd

From the Baltic States and Ukraine in the west, to Siberia far to the east, Georgia, Armenia and the Caucasus in the south. In the years 1988 and 1993, photographer Stig Stasig travelled around the core regions and peripheries of the Soviet Union, photographing life on the streets with his Leica camera. On April 20, the photographs will be published in the photo book Retrograde, and although the subjects are 30 years old, the book is a commentary on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the photographer explains.

'Today's Russia is a product of its past: the Tsarist era, the revolution and the Soviet regime and, not least, the chaotic upheaval around 1990. The only way we can hope to understand Russia's actions today is to familiarize ourselves with history and the completely different reality to which the Russian people are and have been subject,' says Stig Stasig and continues: 'We tend to try to understand Russia's and Putin's actions from our own perception of freedom and democracy. What seems absurd from our point of view can often be understood very differently when you look at the same problem from the Russian side.'

While some of Stig Stasig's photographs from the Soviet Union were published in 1990 in the book The Experiment: Images from the Soviet Union, the majority, more than 100 of the 129 black and white photographs, have gathered dust in the archive.

'Just as today we must not equate the average Russian with Vladimir Putin's henchmen, the people who inhabited the Soviet Union were not equal to the agents of the communist Politburo and KGB. They lived their lives in conditions that were often harsh and difficult, and which shaped their behavior and understanding of the world,' says Stig Stasig, who hopes Retrograde will give the reader a new look at the old — and new — Cold War adversary. In addition to the photographs, the book contains text by Sergei Lebedev, one of the young promising Russian writers in exile who, in his tales of the present, draws threads to the past.

Photographs by Stig Stasig. Book Lab Skanderborg, Denmark 2023. 175 pages, 129 black and white photographs, 9½x13".