Richard Schofield Photography

Everyday life in the Soviet Union spied through the amateur lens

One characteristic all totalitarian regimes share is a lack of press freedom. During the 69-year existence of the Soviet Union for example, the combined effects of censorship, a policy advocating the collective in favour of the individual and miscellaneous campaigns against the USSR's 'Bourgeois Nationalists' and 'Rootless Cosmopolitans' ensured that almost no photography depicting the everyday lives of the immense diversity of people living within its borders was ever published within the public domain. There does however exist a vast and to date almost entirely untapped resource of uncensored Soviet-era photography illustrating the extraordinary and little known area of everyday life inside the USSR, the great majority of it hidden away inside countless private and family photo albums throughout the former Soviet Union and beyond. Analysed and collected into a coherent digital collection, these pictures would function as both a long overdue counterbalance to the clichéd and generally misleading images of propaganda that have become the Soviet legacy as well as a historical archive of unquestionable international importance.

Snapshot Citizens is an ambitious project to digitally archive, exhibit and publish a wide range of snapshot, amateur and previously unpublished photography taken in the Soviet Union between the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev 50 years later.