In the summer of 2018, I found myself in the Moldovan capital Chisinau.
When I was a kid growing up in 1980s New Zealand, cities like Chisinau – or Kishinev, as it had been known from the days of the Russian Empire to the end of the USSR – might as well have been on another planet. Moldova was then part of the Soviet Union, secreted inside an Eastern Bloc hidden to most Western Eyes.
My friend Brendan and were schoolmates who both ended up in London and both have an abiding interest in post-Soviet Europe. We travelled across the Baltic States together in 2001, did the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok in 2004 and Western Ukraine and the Crimea a few years later.
After an abortive attempt to visit Moldova on a trip around Romania in 2014, we finally made it during the hot, hot summer of 2018. In Russia, a Football World Cup was on; we meet gaggles of football fans in replica kits changing planes at Chisinau Airport for the onward journey to Moscow. The brutalist buildings glowered above us through days of endless, simmering heat.
One relic of the Soviet past in city after city from the old Eastern Bloc are military museums. The Soviet Union was the world’s largest arms manufacturer during the Cold War, and it produced a dizzying number of tanks, armoured vehicles, cannons and rocket launchers. Thousands of them still paraded outside regional military museums, like the contents of some giant child’s toy box.
Blame, my Cold War Kid upbringing, but I was endlessly fascinated by Soviet aircraft in my younger years; it’s probably part of the reason I got the Soviet camera bug when I started getting into photography. I might not ever have the chance to park a rusting MiG at the bottom of my garden, but I can crowd a shelf with cameras that trundled out of factories from Leningrad to Kiev via Moscow and Minsk.
The Military History Museum in Chisinau is a sprawling two-storey complex of one of the city’s main drags. Scattered outside are a collection of Soviet-era military equipment, from archaic cannons to surface-to-air missile launchers designed to keep Western eyes from prying too far beyond the borders. Among them are a pair of Soviet MiGs.
The MiG-21 was the USSR’s first fighter plane that could fly twice the speed of sound. It’s testament to the enormous leaps and bounds in aviation in the 1940s and 50s; just a decade before its first flight in 1955, the USSR’s air forces didn’t possess a single jet aircraft. The MiG-21’s distinctive shape, with its delta wings and nose cone to stop supersonic air from wrecking the engine, would soon become a common one, too.
When production finally ended in 1986, more than 11,000 had been made in factories in the USSR, India and Czechoslovakia. If you asked the average person in the street to draw a picture of a MiG in the Cold War Years, they’d have probably drawn something that looked like a MiG-21.
In the dappled summer sunshine, I shot this resting MiG on a camera that had also been made in the former USSR: a LOMO LC-A. I picked up my first LC-A – the first of many Soviet cameras – way back in 2000, and it still soldiers on despite many bumps and scrapes along the way.
The bright sunshine, and the slightly out-of-time collection of military equipment, were a perfect excuse to use some expired slide for cross processing. Agfa Precisa VT100, Agfa’s consumer slide film aimed at holidaying photographers in the 1990s and 2000s, is one of my favourite films to cross process. Develop it in C41 chemicals and you get rich reds and gold and bold blacks, along with atmospheric grain. It’s not been made for nearly two decades, but I keep my eyes peeled for rolls on eBay and other auction sites. No wasting it on cold London days, grey with cloud – much better to use it on this Cold War warrior, resting on a plinth in dappled sunshine far beyond the old East-West border.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
