I was a passenger on a bus driving through the middle of a blizzard when we slid off the road into a snowy ditch. Rather than radio for help, the driver made an announcement: "Everyone who wants to reach their destination is welcome to get out and push." This was one of my first impressions of Kolsky.

The Kola Peninsula, or Kolsky as the locals call it, is a region in the far north of Russia bordering Finland and Norway. For Russia, Kolsky is not only strategic militarily, but also acts as a gateway to Russia's ambitions in the Arctic, where fishing, oil, gas and mineral extraction play a critical role in the national economy. Since the Soviet era, nuclear submarines have been stationed on the peninsula, leveraging the region's ice-free port access to the Atlantic.

I first visited Kolsky in 2019 with the intent of creating a diary-like documentation of the region. Kolsky is over 2000 kilometres from Moscow and I assumed that, because of its remoteness, the influence of politics there would be less perceptible.

I was wrong.

When I started the project nothing felt unusual about the daily rhythm of life in Kolsky. Then in February 2022 that all changed. The invasion of Ukraine laid bare the extent to which totalitarianism has become entangled in the every-day, even in the farthest reaches of the modern Russian state. It also revealed the degree to which Russians are subjected to militaristic state propaganda, with few viable alternatives to counter those narratives in the court of public opinion. The Russia most affected by this messaging isn't places like Moscow or St. Petersburg, it's greater Russia. It's places like the Kola Peninsula, where a new Russia is increasingly reliant on a familiar playbook of total allegiance to the state.

This project seeks to document a shift in Russian society by focusing on one region's transformation. It is a reflection on how a country that fought against an aggressor in the Second World War became an aggressor in the war with Ukraine.