Exploring Borders

Photographer Maria Gruzdeva’s book BORDER has just been published by Amsterdam-based Schilt Publishing. It is a monumental documentary project that took her five years to complete. We asked her to tell us a bit about the book and share a favorite excerpt and some photos.

BORDER: A journey along the edges of Russia is the outcome of a nearly 70,000 kilometer, five-year trek exploring the most distant and often undiscovered areas of Russia. Border areas were chosen for a reason, because they are so innately complex. The question of emotional and physical belonging is connected with the notion of territory, which is so earthy and solid, yet at the same time abstract, like the borders themselves. The borders exist, yet they are not material or tangible.

I am very interested in contemporary Russian identity and the elements that shape it: collective memory, iconography, local traditions and industries, people, and the history embodied in the surrounding landscape.

The borders and their surrounding areas bear witness to historical events that once took place there; these are territories where past meets present. One doesn’t have to be a historian to understand that. Sometimes when traveling in borderlands, one is overcome by a strange feeling of history come alive, as if you were suddenly immersed in a time capsule. It seems as if history has become physical – you can almost touch it.

A good example of this is Kaliningrad Oblast – an exclave of Russia that borders Poland and Lithuania. Kaliningrad was previously known as Königsberg and, before the end of World War II, the surrounding areas were part of East Prussia.

Here is an excerpt regarding Kaliningrad Oblast from one of my travel notebooks, which also became part of the project:

In Baltiysk, we caught the ferry across the eponymous Strait to the Vistula Spit. Minutes away from the dock stood the hangars of the now-abandoned Neutief air base, formerly used by the Luftwaffe. The construction of the base began in 1937 and was completed two years later. Neutief was inaccessible by road, meaning that all the construction materials had to be brought in by ferry. Despite being one of the best-equipped German airfields during the war, Pillau-Neutief played a role in only two campaigns – the occupations of Norway (1940) and the Baltic states (1941-1942). The airbase fell into Soviet hands in 1945 and remained the westernmost base in Russia until its decommissioning in the 1990s. To enable winter-time use of the base, its concrete runway – 3.5km long and still fairly smooth – was equipped with a heating system to melt the ice and snow.

Further along, our road lay through a forest. As part of the frontier zone, this forest was partly off-limits, even to locals – which might be why it’s so remarkably well-preserved. The war’s physical residue was still all too visible: preserved trenches and dugouts, as well as crooked-growing trees riddled with fragments of exploded ordnance.

We stopped. I got out my tripod and camera and had started looking for a good spot to shoot when suddenly I tripped on something. Barbed wire, and next to it, lightly dusted with snow, a German helmet – punctured by what looked like a small, rust-edged bullet hole.

BORDER is available for $40 in bookstores and online from November.

bit.ly/borders-gruzdeva