A Journey Through Two Russias

The farther you travel from Moscow or St. Petersburg, the closer you come to the real Russia. Yet every journey offers a choice — to understand something about your country, or to lose your bearings completely.

For the slow contemplation of this immense homeland, our yacht was perfect: an ordinary sailboat, rare in model, with a tiny toy-like engine. We drifted quietly along the water, observing every detail, covering in a day little more than one could ride on a bicycle along a good road. Despite her graceful appearance, our beautiful boat was ten years older than me — which, perhaps, explained her unhurried grace.

We were in no rush. Only sometimes, when the nearest village shop was about to close, did we push the little engine harder — fuel, after all, is not only for ships, even small ones. Moving south at a calm, almost Buddhist pace, we thought we were traveling through space. But as it turned out, we were moving through time. Over two years of the expedition, without crossing any border, we passed through two different countries. We launched Freelancer in one Russia and arrived in another entirely.

An American friend from Crimea once said, after the events of 2014:

“I’ve been lucky all my life — without ever leaving my couch, I’ve managed to travel from one country to another.”

During the first stage of our From the White to the Black Sea expedition in 2013, Freelancer still belonged to the surrounding empire. She sailed under the Russian flag — though next to it, we raised a small one of our own: Liberty.SU, with the blood-red silhouette of the country. A taxi driver in Pudozh once remarked that the name on our hull was written “in NATO letters.” Still, our yacht fit easily into the provincial landscape. Her white hull and deck seemed almost symbolic.

Freelancer carried us through villages whose main streets were named after secret police officers, along canals holding the ghosts of “great construction projects,” and through hero cities. The boat not only moved us forward but also opened doors. People welcomed us when they learned that documentary photographers were traveling by yacht. They let us into their homes, spoke freely, allowed us to photograph and film. In most yacht clubs, we were met warmly — sometimes even docked for free, staying several days at a time.

We went on shooting, unaware that this first part of the voyage was only the climb to the ridge. What lay beyond, we couldn’t yet see. The first year passed beautifully — a few storms aside, and some curious encounters along the White Sea Canal. That wasn’t surprising: most locals were descendants of the VOHR guards, people shaped by a certain mindset. They even sent FSB officers to inspect the yacht because its name “sounded foreign.” They checked the vessel, phoned the captain (while cpt. Klimov and I were filming in Nadvoitsy), and, having found no trace of espionage, left us alone.

Even then, I felt no sign of the madness to come. The television showed one world; our eyes saw another. Still, by some silent pact between the people and the state, the contradictions were accepted as normal. At least, I didn’t yet hear the bolts being tightened again.

Then came the winter and spring of 2014. Our yacht was wintering in Zelenodolsk; we were in Ukraine, documenting events. When I realized that the end of the Maidan uprising and Yanukovych’s flight coincided almost exactly with the end of the Sochi Olympics, an obvious question arose:

“What will the Russian dictator do to stop freedom from spreading?”

I expected anything — except the annexation of Crimea. That moment changed everything — the country, and me.

It was then that the true meaning of our project revealed itself. We had unwittingly become witnesses to a fracture in time. The country had been slapped backward into its past. People — some silently, others with loud delight — welcomed the peninsula’s return to a USSR that still carried the faint scent of fascism. You couldn’t really photograph it; apart from portraits of the leader, slogans on car windows, and St. George ribbons tied to every part of the body, little had visibly changed. Yet the air was filled with the smell of collective delirium.

Amid the deepening poverty of an already struggling population, the shouts of “great power” and “spiritual values” grew louder. Through those cries, down cracked roads, rushed the bloody fragments of a new lust for war. Freelancer moved through both space and time while her crew recorded the shifting reality. From a documentary and anthropological point of view, it was a remarkable moment — but for the country, this “rising from its knees” led straight into a dead end. We had climbed the mountain. How to get down, no one knew. Jumping seemed the only option — and the landing, I feared, would be painful.

Despite my distaste for television, in the second year it helped clarify the project. You’d walk into a café for a beer, glance at the news — everything looked noble and moral; only the corrupt West was trying to drag us through the mud. You’d finish your drink, step outside, and see reality — and the dissonance would hit you like a wave. That feeling of “wrongness” became sharper than ever.

It was then I understood: the television shows one version of events; we, from our little boat, show another — the one it refuses to see. Of course, it was a losing battle, and we all knew it. People, without realizing it, were rushing headlong down the path set for them by the state. You wanted to explain, to make them see that for the Kremlin they were nothing but cannon fodder and pension funds — that their country neither needed nor remembered them. But propaganda is a powerful machine.

If understanding ever comes, it will come through grief and pain. Still, I wish only that people could live in peace — with love, comfort, and without invented enemies.

Eventually, we sold the yacht. We needed the money to pay our debts.

P.S. At an exhibition in Kaliningrad’s Museum of the World Ocean, on the eve of its opening, one of the staff members looked at our photographs and asked:

“Is it really that bad in Russia?”

During the expedition, we never aimed to make photographs that “darkened reality.” We neither embellished nor exaggerated. We simply showed what we saw — and what we saw was what was happening.

Our navigator, Artyom Lezhepyokov, once remarked that despite the flood of television lies, people still feel — instinctively — that something is profoundly wrong with the country. They feel it, but can’t yet name it. Propaganda overwhelms reason.
But once you leave the city, and step beyond that mental frame, you can see everything for yourself.