By Maxim Shemetov

What did I know about Chechnya before last week? For someone who grew up in the 1990s the very word Chechnya meant a string of grainy images on TV showing people in battered camouflage outfits, shooting at each other amid destruction and ruin. Fear, wahhabis, Shamil Basayev, terrorism, mountains: these were the words that used to spring to my mind when someone mentioned Chechnya.

It still has a reputation as a frightening place where people get kidnapped and entire villages are razed. When I told my friends I was leaving for Chechnya on assignment they asked me in jest if I would need an armored vehicle. Many of then were visibly worried. But then I spoke to a colleague who had worked there for more than 15 years. He said: “You won’t find a safer place in Russia, be smart and you’ll be okay”.

I flew to Grozny, with mixed expectations. When we got there and I stepped out of Grozny’s Severny Airport, I knew this wasn’t Russia. It was a totally different, parallel world, a cross between Singapore and the Middle East, with veiled women, men in camouflage, Islamic skull caps and long beards, and armed police on every street corner. There was a mosque outside the main airport terminal. A huge portrait of Chechnya’s strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov was just across the street, and another, smaller portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin close by. The streets were spotless, a rarity in Russia where many cities are full of potholes and crumbling buildings. I got into a taxi and plunged into Grozny.

Grozny was once described as the world’s most destroyed city. I remember photographs from the 1990s depicting unthinkable destruction and suffering.

(Photo by Yannis Behrakis)

It has changed in a way I found astounding. The quiet streets are now lined with trees and marble facades, the skyscrapers of Grozny city, the center point of Kadyrov’s reconstruction efforts, soar into the sky. Locals lower their voices when describing their hard-line leader. He controls every construction site in the city. Locals say that if he doesn’t like how a project is going he often orders it to be knocked down and built anew. When his motorcade glides through the city, complete with sirens and columns of security vehicles, people freeze and stare with awe. His relatives hold key positions in government. His father, a former president, was killed in a bomb blast in 2004. Both men’s portraits glare from giant billboards. “Ramzan, thank you for Grozny!’ says a red neon light sign opposite the city’s giant central mosque.

Locals kept asking me: did I like the city? What did I think about the food, about Kadyrov? Often I didnt know what to say. Despite its friendly facade, it’s a city tightly controlled by Russian security forces. Locals know that sensitive things should not be said on the telephone. Public criticism of the government is not allowed. Journalists working for foreign media organisations are often treated with suspicion. From time to time while walking down the street I’d notice a man with a neutral facial expression shadowing me. Our eyes would meet sometimes. I smiled once, and he smiled back.

By Maxim Shemetov

One loses all bearings when faced with the shroud of white that obscures all things mid January in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. Only the traffic lights and gas pipelines overhanging the roads help you to find your way. Wrapped in frosty fog the city life seems frozen in a sleepy half-light. It is -48 C (-54 degrees Fahrenheit) outside.

Before venturing out, I put on two layers of thermal underwear, trousers, two-sweaters, pants winterized up to my waist, and huge low-temperature boots. I pull close the hood of my down jacket and fasten it so that only my eyes are exposed. Lastly, I slip on two pairs of gloves and head for the entrance hall – the airlock. Now only the ice-bound door separates me from the cold. There is Space outside and I feel like an astronaut.

However I do not have enough time to freeze today – the minibus is waiting for me at the corner and I pile in with my gear. Our routes lies along a Stalin-era road that is officially called “Kolyma Federal Highway”. Locals call it “the road on bones” after the thousands of Gulag prisoners who built it in the middle of the 20th century perished. The sights that it passes by are “terra incognita” even for the most of locals. As we travel further and further northeast towards the snowy foothills from the provincial capital of Yakustk, the signs of life appear less and less frequent. Down the road, one can travel over 200 kms (124 miles) without seeing a homestead. The cell phone coverage cuts out when we arrive at Handyga. Fifty kilometers (31 miles) later we load up on tanks of fuel at the petrol station that is the last human outpost at the edge of the vast and mountainous taiga. Only the occasional UAZ minibuses (bukhanka – bread loaf as it is called there and trucks break the monotony of the endless, empty road.

After two days on the road, we finally arrive in the Oymyakon valley – the Pole of the Cold. This is the coldest known place in the Northern hemisphere. Thermometers registered a record chill of -67.7 degrees Celsius (-88 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1933 – shortly after weather monitoring began here in the end of the 1920s.

And yet, here are schools, a post office, a bank, even an airport runway (albeit open only in the summer) – all the trappings of a civilized life in the valley’s center at Tomtor. I could not help asking local people how they carried on a normal semblance of life in such extreme conditions. What I heard as a response was an anecdote from Sergey Zverev, a smiling villager in his 40s. Class was cancelled once when he was a school boy because the air temperatures had dropped to -65C (-85F). To celebrate he and his classmates got together to play football on the icy streets. Did I need any better answer?

In truth, when temperatures dropped to -55 a few days after my arrival, I stopped noticing the cold. With no wind chill and the air sapped of moisture, a day like that here is comparable to Moscow at -25 degrees Celsius. I even stripped down to a fleece jacket to chop firewood outside for a half an hour.

Hard to say what is the main aspect here: the great people who could survive and settle down under severe and constant natural pressure or the breathtaking vibe itself. Yakutian urban style is far different from those in Russian big cities. Here where people dwell side by side with unimaginable living circumstances everything seems real and tougher. When you grab a knife, it cuts frozen meat like butter. If you notice a car, I bet it would be an off-road vehicle. When it is freezing, it is freezing much harder (as you would assume). But the vibe is not made by nature – people create it; pensive, tough and willing to help a stranger.

Will I come back? Oh yeah.

Photographing a soccer match for the first time, I realized that shooting the fans can be more interesting than covering the game itself.

We all keep up with the destinies of football clubs and the careers of soccer players. There are many parts to soccer life, however, that rarely appear on TV and on the front pages of newspapers. It’s the life of people absorbed by the game – those inspiring exciting games, TV translations, as well as the construction of new stadiums.

Fan life is inseparable from the game itself, but there are certain aspects to soccer-fan culture that are rarely talked about. It’s a quiet closed-off world with its own unwritten rules and laws, concepts of respect and dignity. The community is very picky about who it lets inside. The fan culture is aggressive and resembles that of medieval knights at first sight. Physical power, fighting skills and determination in battle are often attributes of soccer fans.

The world of fans, outside of ordinary team supporters, can be divided into two main categories: “ultras” (those arranging performances and focused on supporting the team in the dedicated area in the stadium) and “hooligans” (those fighting for their club with fans of other soccer teams). As a rule, the fan movement consists of a combination of such groups, competing against each other for authority.

The life of every diligent fan revolves around the number of trips to the matches of his or her team. Those trips are different for Russian and European fans. For Europeans, it is usually a comfortable daily trip by car or by train. Whereas for the Russian fans (usually younger and poorer) such a trip can be an adventurous and risky journey, as many travel ticketless by multiple trains or hitchhike. There are stories about fans, who traveled from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Tomsk (about 3,500km, 2174 miles) by local electric train with no tickets.

The Russian soccer fan movement emerged in the mid-70s and today is blossoming. With big money reaching Russian regions, provincial clubs have started to develop their own fan movements, although Moscow and St Petersburg are still the most developed.

When I was a little boy, I adored the books of Jack London. The Nature of the North – that was the thing that captivated me. The White Silence; a chilling title, words that are hard to appreciate for a city dweller used to the din of cars and neon lights. The majority of Russians seldom leave cities further than to go to the dacha, the country houses that most people own just outside the city limits. Some might travel to some mountains or woodlands. Only a few will visit such a godforsaken place as the Russian North. The land where The White Silence reigns.

The North is a cruel place. Here, where the population density reaches one person per ten square kilometers, there is no transport links, there is nobody to ask the way, there is nobody to ask for a light or hot food, and there is little chance that anybody can help you if something happens. You can count on yourself only. The White Silence is a jingling calm when you can’t hear any sound around, it’s a thin line of a low northern wood on the horizon between two halves of the white nothing, it’s a blizzard when the boundless white Tundra flows together with the overhanging northern sky, it’s a half-strewed snowmobile track which you follow to reach the light and warm of a human dwelling.

It’s hard to imagine that somebody can survive in this cruel land except wild animals but there are some people who live there – the northern tribes people of Nenets, Khanti, Komi, Dolgany, Chukchy; the owners of The White Silence. These people arrived in the far north more than a thousand years ago, when the Roman age was finishing in Europe, and they became the owners of this severe land. They pasture reindeer and catch fish as their ancestors did for tens and hundreds of generations.

Free people, they need almost nothing from the world outside the tundra. The tundra gives them almost everything they need: furs to wear and for covering of dwellings, reindeer bones are good for harnesses, stunted tundra trees are for their sledges. Some of them have snowmobiles and satellite television and phones but in general these things are the little good trifles of the cities’ civilization and they don’t influence their way of life.

I arrived to this land to make a story about early voting in the reindeer farmers settlements. I arrived there for this, but came back with quite different material. It’s because the events and the news of the Big Land, as they call the other world outside the tundra, don’t concern them at all. The great distances that the electoral officials travel on snowmobiles to reach them don’t bother them at all, and they are similarly indifferent to the presidential candidates whom they need to vote for. Nothing will change in their lives because someone will become a president. Nothing will change and they will live in the boundless spaces of the tundra under the enormous northern sky as their ancestors did.