I spent a few days in Moscow in late June, 1993. My journey began in Kobe, Japan and a ferry ride to Shanghai, China. After that I made my way to Beijing where I caught the Trans-Siberian to Moscow. I had been working in Japan and decided to return to Canada heading westward across Asia and Europe, rather than the usual flight to Toronto.
My impressions of post-Soviet Russia were that it was generally run down and in disrepair. People in Moscow were quite friendly and welcoming, though some of them were suspicious of my picture taking. Shelves at the supermarkets were quite bare and my morning breakfast was lard on bread. I felt sorry for the women selling dogs and cats outside the train station, trying to earn a living. The economy was in rough shape and American dollars were preferred over Rubles. I got a drive across the city in an ambulance; the driver was earning extra money using it as a taxi. It seemed that the free enterprise system had yet to catch on. It also seemed to me like the wild west.
At the same time there was a great sense of art and history everywhere–amazing architecture and museums. The Moscow metro has some extravagantly designed stations such as Electrozavodskaya that resembles a museum rather than a subway station. In 1993 a metro fare was the equivalent of one cent. There were lots of buskers and street performers on the tourist filled Arbat Street. Some young people were playing American blues songs–a sense of the pervasiveness of American pop culture. I did some street photography there, as well as around the Kremlin.
1993 was the year of the Russian constitutional crisis— a political stand-off between the Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament that was resolved by military force. This took place in early October. The ten-day conflict became the deadliest single event of street fighting in Moscow’s history since the Russian Revolution–147 people were killed and 437 wounded. The country was in a state of drastic change.
Perhaps my photos don’t capture this sense of unrest and transition, but they serve as a document of life in Moscow a few years after the the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
More photos this series are in the Moscow 1993 menu. I will be posting colour photos from this series at a later date.
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