Moscow
Yevgeniy Fiks
Sverdlov Square with its Monument to Karl Marx, Sapunov Lane (named after the hero and martyr of the October Revolution Y.N. Sapunov) and Srtensky Boulevard (which later housed a monument to Lenin's wife N.K. Krupskaya)—captured in 3 of the 5 images you see here—are among gay cruising sites of the Soviet-era Moscow photographed in this series. Employing the style of documentary photography, "Moscow" maps the failure of the project of universal liberation, began by the Russian Revolution of 1917, but later crushed by Stalin and his henchmen starting in the early 1920s. "Moscow" is about junctions but mostly disjunctions of the "queer" and the "Communist" discourses in the 20th century narrative and about the rapture of the Soviet revolutionary promise. Photographed in the spring of 2008 at six-o-clock in the morning, after a rain, these spaces are empty, sterile, and devoid of any subjects. "Moscow" is a project of mourning and remembrance, a kaddish not only for the bygone repressed and criminalized underground on the margins of the Soviet society but for the larger Communist project of universal emancipation itself.
