TERRITORY OF BROKEN DREAMS (Russia, 2007)
For many of the residents of Russian metropolises like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the country-side simply doesn’t exist. Yet you do not have to travel far outside the cities to find half-wrecked villages where primarily older people live in bitter poverty. They are former labourers on state farms, the elderly and unemployed, stranded in once lively villages. You hardly see any children; services have been withdrawn, and community spirit has been replaced by loneliness, alcoholism and crime. Demenkova’s austere and sombre black and white photographs show not only the legacy of modern urbanisation, but also of Soviet policies, which focused on the appropriation of agricul-tural land for collective farming.
