Olexandr Glyadyelov. FAREWELL OF SLAVIANKA

“Farewell of Slavianka” – that’s the title the photographer and music lover Oleksandr Glyadyelov chose for his photo exhibition. The march with the same name was written in 1912 and quickly became one of the prominent melodies, still performed at military parades of the Russian army. Instead, from the early 1970s to the mid-2000s, trains to Moscow from various cities across the post-Soviet space, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, as well as from Simferopol and Sevastopol, departed to this music, and this tradition still exists today. To the sounds of “Farewell of Slavianka,” military echelons still depart from Russian train stations, and today this music is heard more and more frequently. Over the past 30 years, this melody has become a kind of soundtrack to the imperial ambitions of modern Russia.

Oleksandr Glyadyelov was born in 1956 in the family of a Soviet military officer in the Polish city of Legnica. Later, due to his father’s service, he moved to Kaunas, then to Belarus, and then to Ukraine, where he settled and went to school at the age of 7. The melody “Farewell of Slavianka” has fundamentally changed its meaning for the author over the past decade – from a victorious march of the Second World War era, it has turned into an accompaniment to military aggression, occupation, destruction, and mass casualties among the civilian population. For many of us, these are difficult times that require deep analysis and reconsideration of the symbols of an entire era, sometimes accompanied by internal contradictions and a struggle to accept a new reality.

The documentary photographs presented in the exhibition were taken over the past three decades during military conflicts in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, in Donbas, and during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In all these wars, the Russian army was involved directly or through hybrid methods. But besides the purely conventional war, there is also a war of symbols, where every image, every photograph, and every note carry special meaning and deep significance, often intertwining with it.