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SOVIET RUSSIA THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS, 1917-1991
(Interview with David Hopkins, Special Exhibition Manager at the Imperial War Museum North, dedicated to the exhibition 'Soviet Times: Highlights of the RIA Novosti Archive')
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Since I came to England, I have been trying to track my observations and reflections on what English people know and think about Russia and the Russians. The same thing an Englishman would do in Russia. Obviously, a lot of things were the cliches. Now and again a random person will ask me – quite seriously – if it really snows in Russia all year long. So, I have to explain that it only snows in winter (something England doesn’t experience regularly, if at all).
Thanks to the media fascination with Mr Putin's enigmatic persona, certain people even believe that my country is still behind the iron curtain. ‘There was this totalitarianism, wasn’t it?’ they ask me. It’s banal to blame the media alone, of course. But I did meet people in whose minds Russian leadership of the Soviet period consisted of but two people – Stalin and Gorbachev, with virtually nobody in between. When a friend of mine at the BBC in Manchester tells me with gusto about the book on Khrushchev, my heart warms. The only problem is that the friend is in his 50s and possesses a keen interest in contemporary history. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect anything like this from someone my age, unless they were studying, or were particularly fascinated by, Russia.
Nevertheless, there are people who fill the gap in knowledge, and I was most pleased to interview one of them. David Hopkins, Special Exhibition Manager at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, has put together an exhibition representing ‘Soviet Times’. The IWM North became the UK venue for a showcase of what is only a tiny part of the RIA Novosti archive in London. David collaborated with Ralph Gibson from the RIA Novosti, and together they chose 30 photographs that represented Soviet Russia throughout her controversial, fascinating and glorious history.
Soviet photographs have been exhibited in England before; however, the IWM selection is different in many ways. For example, it contains no single photo of any of the Soviet leaders. To my question, whether this was done deliberately, David nods: indeed, the aim of the organisers was to divert the visitors’ attention from familiar faces and to show them the ‘real’ Soviet Russia and her people, as much as this was possible.
As a result, all headings like ‘The Civil War’ or ‘The Cold War’ have been reserved for a booklet. The visitors are invited to walk in a small light corridor, observing images that are located on its walls chronologically, from February 1917 until December 1991. No guidelines are given, except for a usual caption to each photograph. The images vary from scenes in Petrograd in summer 1917, through the glorious and somewhat familiar depictions from the Industrialisation period, to the Great Patriotic War and the whole of the post-war period, including the pictures of Yuri Gagarin and of Chernobyl.
For an untrained or an unprepared visitor it may be difficult to absorb the selection, let alone to estimate its importance. But for a Russian visiting the exhibition it is very easy to pick up on how the Great Patriotic War is represented. It is no secret that in the West the Russian effort and contribution to the decisive victory over Hitler is at times hugely underestimated, to say the least. Admittedly, after the perestroika people began to learn more about the Russian part, but it does take time to change stereotypes and to get one’s head round the influx of information. David and Ralph, I guess, decided to apply the perestroika method in preparing this part of exhibition, - they used shock therapy. The section on the Great Patriotic War includes not only a well-known portrait of political instructor Yeremenko leading an attack, but also a post-execution scene in one of the Russian towns that shocks the viewers and fills them with grief and compassion. And – perhaps, most surprisingly – visitors can see one of the images of the elevation of the Soviet flag above the Reichstag.
Quiet honestly, I was stunned to see the Reichstag photo, as surely this was the most blatant defiance of the above-mentioned take on Soviet part during the Second World War. It was this photo that featured in the article in a newspaper in January 2006, introducing the exhibition that was about to open; this photo was also on the exhibition’s page on the IWM North website. But to hear that this defiance was also the aim of the organisers is perhaps most unexpected. And while there is nothing too extraordinary in this, the political importance of the Reichstag photograph well exceeds a mere manifestation of ‘who won the war’ and even transgresses the time boundaries, being rather topical for today’s Russian political stance.
After discussing some photos and speaking about the aims of the organisers, one of the questions I asked David was how different Soviet photographs of the war period were from those taken by the Western photojournalists. We arrive to the conclusion that the Soviet cameramen went much further in documenting the atrocities of war. As he remarks, there could be two reasons behind their explicit shots, and both would stem from ideology. The London office of the RIA Novosti began to work almost immediately after the war had started, and the graphic images would serve the purpose of alarming the West, particularly England and the USA, at the necessity to open the second front. But, strikingly, the war seems to have also been offering a degree of creative liberation to the Soviet photographers. However wild it may sound, this was probably the time when no distressing images of dystrophic children and prisoners of the concentration camps would be censored because they showed the side of war that the Hitler’s gang would be trying to conceal.
The story of Soviet Russia that emerges from this showcase of the RIA Novosti archive is stupefying. At the beginning of the exhibition there are images of simple Russian peasants gazing at an electric bulb or arriving to build Magnitogorsk, poorly dressed. These are changed by war photos that commemorate misery, losses, effort, patriotism and strength. Who would think that after decades of famine, wars and reconstruction the country and its nation would forever enter the history by sending the first man to space? Inconceivable? Yet this is exactly what Soviet Russia had done – it seems, only to sacrifice her whole experience for the obscure desire for freedom in 1991.
The exhibition attracted a lot of interest from national press and media. After speaking to David, I managed to interview a few visitors. For the war veterans, one of whom was liberated from the Nazi camp by the Russian soldiers, the showcase was more of a reminder and an opportunity to revive some experiences. But for three men, of 16, 28 and 36, from Hastings, Leeds and Newcastle, respectively, the exhibition did make a difference. As a 16-year-old from Hastings admitted, at school they mostly study the Second World War period, mostly Hitler’s policy, and rarely, if at all, speak about the Russian role in war. And while it is too naive to think that just one exhibition is enough to change the minds, the hope remains that at least few people began to look at Soviet Russia differently, having seen it through the photographs from the RIA Novosti archive.
The exhibition 'Soviet Times' is open at the Imperial War Museum North in The Quays in Manchester until 4 June 2006.
© Julia Shuvalova, 2006.
If you want to exchange your views of the exhibition, to ask a question, or are otherwise interested, you can email the author of this article. Translation and reproduction in the press or across the internet are not allowed without the author’s permission.
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