We are the champions!

The Russian TV channel «Россия 24» had a brilliant idea to show support to the Russian sportsmen at the olympics in Beijing and Vancouver: they made video clips with folklore groups from various Russian republics performing covers of Queen's We Are the Champions ...

Here are my favourites:

Tatarstan:



Sakha:



Bashkortostan:



Altai:

Sergey Maximishin, photojournalist

Let's just say this is "Professional photographer week". I've been browsing the LiveJournals of Russian photographers lately, and found plenty of exciting works.

Sergey Maximishin, born in 1964, grew up in Kerch in the Crimea. He served in the Soviet army as a photographer the Soviet Military Force Group on Cuba from 1985 to 1987.
After the army, he studied physics and worked in the laboratory of scientific and technical expertise in the Hermitage Museum. In 1998, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Faculty of photojournalism. For the next five years he was a staff photographer for the newspaper Izvestia, and since 2003 he has been working with the German agency Focus.

One of Maximishin's recent reportages is about Oymyakon in the Sakha (Yakut) republic, one of the coldest places in the world. "Here the petrol freezes, and the milk is stored in slabs in the basement", as the lead paragraph in Stern magazine says.


A cowboy rides one of his livestock. Maximishin's photos from Oymyakon were featured in German Stern magazine, Russian Русский Репортер and Polish Przekroj. He shares scans of the articles on his blog.


A fisherman on lake Sevan, Armenia.

Below are a couple of photographs from the Allaihovsk region in Sakha. Maximishin writes: "500 kilometers north of Murmansk. Yearly average temperature is -15 degrees centigrade. The surface of the region is slightly bigger than Bulgaria. The inhabitants number 3200 people. 33 square meters per person. Or 0,03 people per square kilometer."


A reindeer herder plays with his doggie.





Reindeer herding, hunting and fishing are some of the main occupations in the region.



See more of Maximishin's photos from the Allaihovsk region.

Many more wonderful photos can be found on Sergey Maximishin's website - maximishin.com (in English) - as well as his blog - remetalk.livejournal.com (in Russian)!

Fyodor Okhlopkov - one of the greatest Soviet snipers

Fyodor Matveyevitch Okhlopkov was born 1908 in the remote village of Krest-Khaldzhay of what is now Tomponskiy Ulus of the Sakha Republic. He worked at a Kolkhoz farm, as a machine-operator, hunter and gold miner. In 1941, when the war against Fascist Germany broke out, Okhlopkov and his brother joined the army, and his brother was soon killed. Okhlopkov was at first a machine-gunner, then commander of a sub-machine gun company, and in October 1942 he became a sniper.

Okhlopkov is officially credited with 429 kills. For comparison, the far more famous Vasily Zaitsev is estimated to have killed "about 400" people (242 of them verified), Ivan Sidorenko "about 500", and Lyudmila Pavlichenko is credited with 309 kills. Okhlopkov is regarded as the #7 greatest sniper of all WWII (#1 is Finnish Simo "Белая Смерть" Häyhä with 542 confirmed kills).
Of course, it's difficult to compare snipers like this, since their main interest was not to keep tally of exactly how many enemy soldiers they killed, and it would have been suicidal to go check each fallen body to see if they had really died. So sniper tallies are more of a propaganda thing.

In any case, Okhlopkov was regarded as one of the greatest snipers in the Soviet army. The army newspaper Defender of the Fatherland wrote about him during the war: "He has the keen eye of a hunter, the hard hand of a miner, and a big, warm heart."
However, commanders didn't pay much attention to the contributions of indigenous people from remote republics. After the war, Okhlopkov quietly went back to Yakutia to work at a Sovkhos.

But a veterans group petitioned the government, and in 1965 Okhlopkov was finally made Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded an Order of Lenin, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the war.

Only two years later, Okhlopkov died at the age of 59 years. He had been weakened by the many injuries he had sustained in the war.

An article about Fyodor Okhlopkov by Carter W Park, who travelled to Sakha in business, discovered Okhlopkov at a local military museum, and tried to find out more about him through reluctant relatives.
The top photo is from gazetayakutia.ru.
The bottom photo, where the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Yakut ASSR, A.Y. Ovchinnikova, hands Okhlopkov the Star of the Hero in 1965, is from the archives of the Sakha administration, found on sakha.gov.ru.

Siberian Life

Evenk reindeer herder in Kusur, Yakutia.


Sergei, Yakut horse herder. (If you think he looks cute, wait till you see the kind of horses he is herding...)

Misha Moldanov, Khanty of Siberia. The above photo was taken by Scott S. Warren, who has written several articles about everyday life among the Khanty people. For more quality photos see: Report From Siberia: Life In A Khanty Reindeer Camp and Report From Siberia: Making A Living. Moldanov is quite a popular photo model: here's a colour shot at Brian & Cherry Alexander Photography. The latter website has many interesting galleries of various native peoples of the Arctic region, from Inuit and Saami to Nenets, Yakut and Cree. Especially the people's interaction with their dogs is interesting - they are dependent on them for survival and treat them as companions, yet not pets. You can see how many of the dogs enjoy being with their human families, even though their life is hard.