John Peter Askew, Man Looking at Boy Waving on Television 1996

with an essay by John Peter Askew

As a young man reading Economics at Manchester University I was drawn to studying the Soviet Union. What absorbed me more than the workings of a command economy were my daydreams about the enchantment of snow. My first memory of Russia is sleeping in a compartment on a train slowly moving east from Moscow towards the Urals. I dreamt snow was falling upon me through the darkness. When I awoke it was to an endless white landscape sparkling in the morning sun.

It was 1996 and I was travelling to Perm where I had been invited to exhibit my photographs. The city of Perm is twinned with Oxford and an acquaintance, the artist John Goto who lived and taught in Oxford had already been working in Perm during the early 1990’s. My invitation had come came through Natasha Dubrovina, a resident of Perm, who had assisted him in his research and had become familiar with my work. Sharing the compartment with me were Natasha and her husband the poet Robert Belov who had come to Moscow to meet me. The train was overflowing with disorderly soldiers returning from the war in Chechnya and Natasha, a cautious person, was wary for my well being. Robert had other plans and on the ruse that he needed to escort me to the toilet we escaped to the restaurant car. Here we were served boiled potatoes and pickled herring washed down with vodka which Robert liberally spiked with pepper to soothe his stomach ulcer. Unscrewing the top from the pepper pot he poured all of its contents into his glass. The snow falling outside the train window was now real but as magical as any dream. I saw how the snow renders everything anew, uniting disparate things, creating harmony.

A man that I had I had never met by the name of Giorgi Chulakov, a partner in an electronics repair firm, had sponsored the exhibition. He paid for my train ticket to and from Moscow, printed the advertising posters for the show, and for much of my month in Perm invited me to stay with his family to learn about the city. There wasn’t a lot of money around then, as it was only five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I knew this was a significant gesture. It was a gesture of faith — faith in the importance of art and friendship and in what photography can promise.

Thanks to Giorgi’s ongoing support and generosity, I could return a year later, to undertake a residency at the Puppet Theatre. This time I stayed throughout with the Chulakov family. I learned about what they did and how they lived. Giorgi’s business involved buying up broken electronic telephones, printers and computers in Moscow in order to repair them and then sell them in Perm. Perm is nearly 1500 kilometres east of Moscow by car. This is almost another country. It is 1500 kilometres from London to, for example, Lisbon, Naples or Warsaw, at the far south-western or southernmost borders of Europe, or deep into Eastern Europe.

It’s only 2500 kilometres from London to Moscow — then almost the same again to Perm. The sense of scale is different of course, but what is also different is that you get a sense of being on the border of two continents. By the time you reach Perm you are almost in Asia. It’s just over the horizon, indeed at the next city. You are at the very edge of Europe and on the cusp of a different world, and one which is almost never reported in the Western news media. Perm is part of a world almost unknown but its people are hardly so different to you and me. What provided me with the impetus to immerse myself in this place and learn about it, wasn’t all the facts and figures but my burgeoning friendship with Giorgi and the people I met, alongside the affinity I felt with them.

I often know what I feel about the world but not what to think. Looking, for me, is intuitive, grounded in feeling — whereas words, a greater construction, can obscure. I found early on my inability to speak Russian, not having to think about the world in words, opened up a space for me; a freedom which I filled with looking. It allowed me to feast my eyes on the world.

On my second trip in 1997 I was met at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport by Giorgi with a van overloaded with stuff. It was deep winter. Outside Moscow, under brilliant blue skies, the roads dissolved into frozen streams of snow and ice for the long drive to Perm. It really was a dreamlike journey into the heart of a white continent. Russia makes every other European country feel small by comparison. Even though this was a journey they had undertaken many times in the past we regularly got lost. Sign posts disappeared and the road got narrower and narrower until it petered out altogether at a farmhouse or a wood and we had to retrace our tracks. You get a sense of why the great Russian novels and plays of the past are on the scale that they are, and have the scope that they have, trying to encapsulate all of life even when seen through a microcosm of a domestic drama. Anything less would fail to do justice to the sense of place into which you become immersed.

Twice, Igor, the driver lost control of the van at speed on the roads of compacted snow and both times we were saved catastrophe by soft drifts of snow lining the road. Once we were able to dig ourselves out but the second time we had to rely on the help of a farmer to pull us out with his tractor and the services of a local mechanic to repair the damage. What I remember most vividly of that journey is stopping on the outskirts of a village where women had gathered by the main road selling food. Served from gigantic thermos flasks we feasted on hot, home baked, pastry pies filled with mashed potato. I can picture the pies steaming in the cold air, the simple, perfectly seasoned delicacy warming hands before filling our eager mouths.

This photograph reminds me of another story and one which drew me to the Chulakovs. It shows Giorgi on my first visit to his home  sharing with me a video of an extraordinary family summer holiday a few years before. I recently shared this memory with Lyuba, Giorgi’s eldest daughter and she remembers my first visit  too and recalls that we were eating pine nuts that they had collected the previous summer. The video documents how Giorgi, his wife Valya and their four young children together with two other families had hired a helicopter to take them to a remote and distant region of the northern Urals inaccessible by road. Deposited at their destination they built rafts and travelled down the River Koiva for two weeks getting the helicopter to pick them up again at a pre-arranged spot.

What was most extraordinary to me about this expedition was they took their cat, Murka with them. A dainty, small, white cat. Moreover they lived on the sixth floor of an apartment block and the cat until that trip had never been outside. Not once, it was a house cat. The video shows the cat sitting independently and contentedly on an open raft with the family and their dog drifting down a river in the middle of a vast pristine natural landscape. The cat loved the trip. It loved its taste of adventure so much that upon their return it kept trying to escape from the apartment. On its first successful attempt it was found a few days later by a neighbour half a kilometre away at the local market. Murka escaped a second time and was never seen again.

Every photograph in the exhibition is surrounded by stories but I want them to exist in their own right as a stilled moment of looking. I trust the photographs to tell a truth. Whereas with words, which story do I tell?

John Peter Askew

The picture is part of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.