«Vodka Bar» («Рюмочная»)

A community that took Soviet memory apart and rebuilt it on its own terms. Three generations, one room — musicians, artists, regulars. This is their twelfth and final season.

A space in Moscow’s Zyuzino district became a gathering point for people bound by punk and underground culture. No one planned it. By summer 2026, the building will be demolished.
My father spent years here. When he died, I came looking for what mattered to him. I found musicians, artists, regulars spanning three generations. Some in their sixties, coming here for decades. Others barely out of university. His memory opened the door.
Bands that once filled concert halls play here now for fifty to two hundred people. The photographs show the present filtered through a post-Soviet sensibility — not state iconography but something personal: a photograph of Gagarin brought in by someone from the Zyuzinskie collective, around which someone hung flowers for Cosmonautics Day. The Soviet past here was never preserved. Punk culture of the 1990s took it apart and reassembled it into something else in that place.
The photographs document interiors, atmosphere, the energy of people who look and act unlike anyone outside this room. What grassroots culture looks like when it ages. When founders are in their sixties. When some have died. When the young arrive because they recognize in this lived-in space something more solid than anything built for them.
The demolition is not the subject. It is what makes the work urgent. A community that was always there, photographed before it loses its address.