Anastasia Shvachko: Do svidaniya, mama

Do svidaniya, mama.

Anastasia Shvachko explores her home country of Russia, her family and the war in her final project.

Photo: Anastasia Shvachko

With the annexation of Crimea and the attack on the Donbas in Ukraine in 2014, Russia paved the way for its invasion of neighbouring Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The war between the two nations has also become a harrowing conflict between friends, between parents and children – and a test of identity for Russian citizens. Photographer Anastasia Shvachko left Russia in 2014, just as today’s war was taking root, to discover a world that had always seemed out of reach from distant Siberia. The distance from her homeland increasingly became a distance from her ideological roots. The pro-Russian stance of some of her friends and of her own family towards the war against Ukraine shakes her deeply. The photobook ‘Do svidaniya, mama’ traces the journey the photographer began at the age of 23; ten years on, she lives in a liberal society marked by widespread scepticism towards Russians. She searches for certainties that the war suddenly destroyed – certainties about her homeland, about her friends and, not least, about her own mother, in whose eyes she is a traitor to the motherland.

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