Tony Wood

A huddle of elderly people trudge through ankle-deep snow, pushing a wooden freight car along a barely visible set of tracks. The women are wrapped in headscarves, the men wear fur hats and thick gloves. These are the last remaining inhabitants of Workers’ Settlement No. 3, and the subjects of Sergei Dvortsevoy’s remarkable 1998 documentary Bread Day; the freight car is bringing...

Since the mid-1980s, Edward Burtynsky has been photographing landscapes that have been transformed by human intervention. In his early work – a series on mines and one on railway cuttings from 1985; one on quarries from the early 1990s – the human presence took the form of a geometric intrusion into the natural world: regular slabs cut from granite, rail-tracks slicing across a...

In the closing weeks of 2011, the wave of protest that had spread to dozens of cities since the start of the year – from Tunis to Cairo, Madrid to Athens, New York to Oakland – reached some unlikely places. On 10 December, as many as sixty thousand people turned out in Moscow to demonstrate against the falsification of parliamentary election results the previous week; five...

Architecture had a shifting status within Russian modernism: first younger sibling, then domineering older brother. The riot of avant-garde experimentation and iconoclasm began in painting and literature in the years before the First World War; many totemic works date from this period – Malevich’s Black Square, Bely’s Petersburg, Goncharova’s Cyclist. The Revolution...

In Vladimir Sorokin’s novel The Queue, one of the protagonists is struggling with a crossword: ‘1 Across – Russian Soviet writer.’ Suggestions come from people next to him in the long line that is the book’s setting and subject – Sholokhov, Mayakovsky? – but are rejected, because neither fits both adjectives at the same time. When Sorokin wrote The Queue in the 1980s, these adjectives – always in tension – could still sit together in a handful of cases (the answer settled on is Gorky); but since then, they have been severed from each other by the watershed of 1991, and now represent distinct historical epochs, as well as two separate literary cultures.