“A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union”, by Rick Smolan and John Burdick

236 pages, Smithmark Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-0002179720

In 1987, fifty Western and fifty Soviet photographers spread out across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union in order to captured on film a day in a country as it celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the October Revolution…and just two years later it would all crumble into dust. And a good thing it did, too. When the Cold War started the USSR was ruled by Stalin and the grim memory of the Terror still lingered in people’s minds: the midnight knock, the denunciations and disappearances, the show trials and the gulags, which held more than three million prisoners at their height (by the way, no gulags are photographed in this book). There were vivid recollections of the Great Famine of 1932-33 when millions of Soviet citizens starved to death and millions more tried to migrate internally. The situation was nothing this bad during the Cold War, but shortages of all kinds and long queues of people waiting for goods to arrive in the shops remained commonplace. This is just a little background, as none of these facts are displayed in this book, which is a beautifully prepared whitewashing of one of the world’s most brutal regimes. Oh, as a record of a dead nation it is brilliant, with photographs that speak for themselves…but what is really interesting is what this book represented at the time; namely, unprecedented access to a closed, paranoid society; the struggle to create the book; the little vignettes the photographers told about their day and their experience; the cooperation (or lack thereof) between two very different societies taught through decades of propaganda to distrust each other (for good reason); and the knowledge (though only through hindsight) that the Soviet Union was on its deathbed. The USSR is now, thankfully, long gone now, but the book, I think, retains its relevancy as a historical record of a country that no longer exists.