Sergey Shestakov / Journey into the future. Stop #2. Gudym

Curator: Olga Sviblova

Two years ago I began a research project on what modern civilisation is leaving behind for future generations. My 2010 photographs of the town of Pripyat at Chernobyl suggested a name for the project — ‘Journey into the Future’. That was the title of one of the partially decayed children’s books left in a kindergarten after the horrific accident. Chernobyl was ‘Journey into the Future. Stop #1’.

On my first visit to the tiny settlement in Chukotka that the locals call Gudym (the story goes that a certain Colonel Gudymov was head of construction — he shot himself the day after work began to build the facility, after receiving a congratulatory telegram from the Pentagon), there was a strange feeling that I had seen all this before — in Chernobyl, in the Norwegian town of Pyramiden and Famagusta in Cyprus... Different towns, different countries, different reasons why people were forced to leave their homes...

In Pripyat the only living soul was an old lady who lived generally on mushrooms and berries. In Gudym the only inhabitant of a settlement where several thousand people once served is Tatyana Georgievna. Above an icon in her small room, there is a scrap of paper with words written in ballpoint: ‘Everything will be fine, just different...’ God knows how she manages to exist without the elementary comforts of life and still retain her optimism and genuine goodwill. This woman and the words that became an epigraph for my work make us believe that one day we will cease to live only for the present, exploiting the environment before letting it go to waste. We will think about the future and what we leave for our descendants.

Everything will be fine, not different!..

Sergey Shestakov

Historical Information

Facility C, Anadyr-1 — military unit 75414 NMU (nuclear military unit).

Built in 1958 by order of Nikita Khrushchev as part of the USSR Northern Nuclear Defence project. This unit directed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) launches aimed at the USA. The facility located ten kilometres from the aerodrome included the military town Anadyr-1, an ICBM base and underground railway for transporting cargo. To comply with the signed agreement for SRBM and MRBM (short- and medium-range ballistic missiles) the USSR had to destroy all its SS-20s in 1991. The facility was deactivated between 1992 and 1998, and in 2002 the military abandoned it altogether. Residents of the military town were resettled in Engels and Saratov.