‘In the 1980s the only way to visit Russia was through their government agency ‘Intourist’, Neil Martinson explains. ‘The Cold War had gone into the freezer when America placed nuclear missiles on Greenham Common, Berkshire... Through Intourist, he went to Moscow, Leningrad (now St Petersberg) for New Year 1984. This photobook contains some of those photos.   Neil recalled staying in a ‘brutal, ugly tower block with acres of dull, smelly carpet’. His description of the visit in his foreword is as vivid as the photos he took. ‘All the signs were in Cyrillic and utterly incomprehensible, But there were other signs, not least the queues that were everywhere. The predictable ones in Red Square, others for telephone boxes, outside shops for the precious few goods on sale, for buses, for scraggly bits of meat’. 

36 pages
printed in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm