This friendly Babushka (grandmother) is originally from Poland. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the country’s east was annexed by the Soviets and in 1940 her family was deported somewhere to the north of Russia. Her father was a singer and suffered terribly as he was missing Poland. Later she married a…
Category: Faces of the East
Tamara is a pensioner from the North Caucasus with Kabardinian and Russian roots. She worked many years in the gas industry in the far north of Western Siberia in the cities of Nadym and Noviy Urengoy, where during winter, temperatures fall below -40 and there is hardly any daylight at…
Boris (right) was out with his friends playing chess on Lenin square in the centre of Elista, the capital Kalmykia. The Republic in the south of Russia is mainly inhabited by the Kalmyk people, a nation of Mongol origin that have settled in the region in the early 17th century.…
Maria Sergeevna (left) came to visit her daughter Irina and her family in Pyatigorsk, where they are living as refugees. They are all from the war-torn Donbas region in Ukraine. Irina (right) left with her son in the summer of 2014, when Donetsk started to get seriously shelled. When people…