Denis Sinyakov
2006–2012
Single Photos
On the cover: U.S. Army medic SSG Quincy Northern from “Dustoff” team, C Company, 1-214 Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade walks toward his medevac helicopter as it casts a shadow on a hospital wall at Camp Dwyer in Helmand province, Afghanistan. 2011
© 2012 Photos: Denis Sinyakov
A policeman looks out from the frost-covered window of a police bus during a demonstration for fair elections in central Moscow. 2012
Designer: Ludwig Bistronovsky Translator: Nastassia Astrasheuskaya Printed in Treemedia Publishing House
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A man plays accordion as a street dog and a horse stand by during a celebration of ‘Maslenitsa’ in Russia’s ancient town of Suzdal. 2007
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A vendor eats sugar candy while standing next to her goods at a market during celebrations for Maslenitsa, or Pancake Week, in the Russia ancient town of Suzdal. 2009
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Worshippers and their children attend an Orthodox Easter night mass in a church in the village of Roshcha. 2010
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Israeli soldiers pray next to a Merkava tank at a military camp on Israel-Lebanon border. 2006
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People attend a religious service, asking God for rains to prevent new wildfires, in the village of Kriusha, which is shrouded in heavy smog. 2010
A helicopter carries water before releasing it over a forest fire near the settlement of Kustarevka in Ryazan region. 2010
The burnt root of a tree is seen outside the town of Elektrogorsk. 2010
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U.S. Army crew chief SFC Vinle Farrell (L) and medic SGT Darrell Mckinstry from “Dustoff� team, C Company, 1-214 Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade try to keep alive an Afghan boy supposedly suffering anemia aboard a medevac helicopter on their way to a hospital in Camp Dwyer in Helmand province, Afghanistan. 2011
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A wounded man is helped by a medic in a hospital shelter in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali. 2008
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A man walks through a walkway under scaffolding on a street in central Moscow. 2012
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A Nenets tribesman stands outside his tent in a forest-tundra in Russia. 2011
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A communist supporter holds portraits of Vladimir Lenin (C) and Joseph Stalin during a rally to celebrate International Workers’ Day in Moscow. 2012
Russian police surround an opposition supporter while detaining him during a protest rally in central Moscow. Supporters of various opposition parties gather for a rally to defend Article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which says ‘Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets.’ 2010 Activists of the youth wing of the opposition ‘People’s Democratic Union’, hold portraits of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during a protest in Moscow. The activists were denouncing what they call a Putin personality cult. 2007
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Opposition supporters take part in a protest rally called ‘The White Ring’ by forming a human chain along the Garden Ring road in Moscow. Thousands of Russians joined hands to form a ring around Moscow city centre in protest against Vladimir Putin’s likely return as president in an election next week. 2012
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An opposition activist looks out from a police bus after being detained near a protest camp, demonstrating against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidency. 2012
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A driver, representing the Interior Ministry, is reflected in a police bus mirror as he watches riot police detaining ‘Left Front’ movement leader Sergei Udaltsov during a demonstration for fair elections in Moscow. 2012
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Jailed Russian former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky stands in the defendants’ cage during a court session. 2010
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Members of the radical feminist punk group ‘Pussy Riot’ stage a protest against Vladimir Putin’s policies at the so-called Lobnoye Mesto (Forehead Place), long before used for announcing Russian tsars’ decrees and occasionally for carrying out public executions, in Red Square in Moscow. 2012
Activists of Ukrainian group ‘Femen’ rehearse in a hostel as they prepare for an action at the presidential election in Moscow. 2012
A lone picket stands during a protest in support of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a leader of the feminist punk group ‘Pussy Riot’ in Moscow. 2012
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Ballet soloist dancer Margarita Rudina (R) performs “Le Corsaire”, by Adolphe Adam, at the Yekaterinburg Theatre of Opera and Ballet. 2007
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Bolshoi ballet dancer is seen backstage during a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ at the reopened Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. 2012
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2011
Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
The Nenets tribespeople on Russia’s frozen Yamal peninsula have survived the era of the Tsars, the Bolshevik revolution and the chaotic 1990s. Yet today, they face their biggest challenge gas poisoning from the activity of energy companies that came to develop the wild northern lands. The fur-bundled feet of some 42,000 Nenets, who fetishize animals and are entirely dependent on reindeer living on the Yamal region’s crest, walk on gas volumes that could heat the world for five years.
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Nenets’ traditional tents are seen in Tundra, north of the polar circle
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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A Nenets tribesman sits in front of a herd of reindeers on the Yamal peninsula, north of the polar circle 30
Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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Their strict code of traditions, superstitions and gender divisions has been virtually untouched for at least a millennium. Nenets migrate over 150 km north to south every year, spending only a few days in one place, living off reindeer meat and fish and lugging their “chums�, or tents, petrol-lamps and wood-fired stoves on reindeer-pulled sleighs. 32
Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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Upset with oil and gas companies ruining their habitat by gas-pumping pipes, which inevitably pollute nearby soil and waters, the Nenets are forced to seek new migration routes in the Tundra, whose flat marshy terrain switches from marigold russets in summer to thick winter snow and is peppered with disc-like thermokarst lakes and crystal blue – at least for now – waterways.
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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A sunset is pictured in the Tundra with sledges ready for the road, north of the polar circle
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Gas-Ousted Northern Tribes
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2012
Russia Changes Face
The collapse of the Soviet empire, followed by the 90s’ political and economic chaos in Russia, and people’s uncertainty of the future, has grown into a large crack in the country’s demographics. Two decades after the fall of the iron curtain, Russia has faced decreasing native population and a one-way, west-oriented, migration – with Central Asian citizens replacing the native Russians who migrate to Europe and the United States. The changes have created national and cultural gaps, which move the rich and the poor, the white and the darker skinned, further apart.
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Most low-paid heavy work on building sites, in markets, or on the streets, is now done by workers from Central Asia – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan – places whose economies have never managed to get up and stand firm on their own feet after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
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Russia Changes Face
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Russia Changes Face
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A migrant worker butchers a slaughtered sheep during Eid-al-Adha outside Moscow
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Russia Changes Face
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Russia Changes Face
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A migrant worker wearing a Russian cartoon hero ‘Luntik’ costume takes a break from his work of distributing advertising leaflets at metro station 52
Russia Changes Face
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Official statistics put the total number of such immigrants to Russia at just under 1 million, although unofficial estimates say there are several million, mostly in and around Moscow.
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Russia Changes Face
Illegal migrant workers are seen in a police bus after being detained after arriving in Red Square to celebrate the New Year
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Despised by most natives, immigrants keep coming, supported by the flourishing corruption in the country, which has made work permits easy to obtain online or through bribes. First, they come alone, and then with wives and children, only a few of whom manage to learn Russian, get education and use it. 56
Russia Changes Face
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An abandoned four day-old Tajik baby lies in an intensive care unit in a Moscow hospital. Maintaining a traditional central Asian family structure is difficult for the constantly moving migrants. For the many women migrants, a child born in Moscow can mean the end of employment. To return home risks being an outcast since the children are often born out of wedlock, unforgivable in local custom, so abandonment is frequent.
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Russia Changes Face
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2008
08.08.08 Russia-Georgia conflict
In the early morning of August 8, 2008, after weeks of low-level hostilities, Russian and Georgian military forces clashed in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia, marking the start of the conflict that became known as the Five-Day War.
Russian military vehicles roll through the northern part of breakaway South Ossetia 60
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Georgia declared that it intended to restore constitutional order and launched a large-scale military offensive. Russia sent additional troops to South Ossetia, saying they were reinforcements to Russian peacekeepers who are in the area to monitor a 1992 ceasefire between Georgian and South Ossetian forces.
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08.08.08 Russia-Georgia conflict
Chechen special forces soldiers from Vostok army unit arrest suspected Georgian artillery gunners after a battle in the Georgian village of Zemo Nikozi
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South Ossitia and Abkhazia threw off Georgian rule in wars after the collapse of the Soviet Union and rely on Russia for financial and military support. The Georgians escape from a house set on fire by South Ossetian militia in the Georgian village of Kvemo-Achebeti
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08.08.08 Russia-Georgia conflict
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A dead Georgian soldier is seen at a street in the South Ossetian capital
Wounded South Ossetians stay in a hospital shelter in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinval
A wounded Russian soldier is helped by a doctor in a hospital at the South Ossetian settlement Dzhava
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08.08.08 Russia-Georgia conflict
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Coffins containing the remains of Georgian soldiers are seen near a dead Georgian soldier in Tshinvali
After winning the war, Moscow, which had considered South Ossetia its own territory and granted Russian passports to much of the population, recognised the small mountainous region across its southern border as an independent nation.
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08.08.08 Russia-Georgia conflict
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South Ossetian Inga Tsahilova is reflected in a broken window of her flat in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali
2010
Ghost Town: Irradiated Muslyumovo
The residents of Muslyumovo village in Russia’s Urals are convinced that they were “lab rats.” Their village on the Techa River to be exposed to radiation waste from a nearby nuclear plant three times in the last 60 years bringing radiation levels to 500 times above global safety limits. The residents had never been offered a resettlement option until six years ago.
A sign forbidding the gathering of mushrooms, picking berries and fishing is seen in front of an abandoned school in the village of Muslyumovo
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Between 1949 and 1956, a Soviet undercover Mayak nuclear complex, 30 km away from Muslyumovo, dumped 76 million cubic metres of highly radioactive waste into the river, where residents got their drinking water from.
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Ghost Town
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Alik Nuryshev suffering from childhood disability including epilepsy and cerebral palsy poses for a picture in house
The latest major emission was registered in 1967, when the Karachai waste reservoir partially evaporated after a dry hot summer, letting strong winds disperse clouds of radioactive dust over a vast area.
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Ghost Town
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Mayak, which means “lighthouse” in Russian, continues to operate today, reprocessing foreign irradiated fuel and releasing volumes of radioactive Strontium-90, which lives a 30-year half life.
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Ghost Town
Khamatov disassembles his old house to move it under a relocation programme to the new place just around two km away from his village of Muslyumovo
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Gainiyamal Fazylova, a renowned livestock industry worker in the Soviet Union lies in a bed in her daughter house. Fazylova spent most of her life herding and milking cows in the flood plain of the Techa River, clueless of the radiation in the water. Both of her daughters are handicapped and have a number of illnesses, including cancer, asthma and lung problems. Fazylova herself was in critical health condition during the shoot in 2010. Soviet and modern-day awards and medals earned by Fazylova
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Ghost Town
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Gelani Dombayev, Chechen. His house stands closest to the river and next to an abandoned school. He was forced to stay in the irradiated Muslyumovo during the evacuation because he failed to prove ownership of the house and get compensation for it. His home in Urus-Martan, Chechnya, had been demolished during the first military campaign.
Several villages along the river were resettled in the 1950s, but the evacuation of the mainly Tatar village of Muslyumovo did not begin until 2006. The government has selectively granted new homes to residents 2 kilometres away from their own homes, leaving dozens behind to face possible health dysfunctions and genetic deformations. 82
Ghost Town
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A portrait on a tomb stone is pictured at the one of three Muslyumovo cemeteries
A stray dog runs outside abandoned houses in Muslyumovo
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Ghost Town
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An abandoned glue factory is reflected in Techa river
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