VOLGA SONG

In 2019, Nikita Spiridonov began work on the "Dubna series" video trilogy dedicated to the history of the Moscow Canal, Stalin's repressions and the politics of memory. 

"Volga Song" is the second part of the "Dubna series". The video was inspired by a visit to the Moscow Canal museum situated at Dedenevo village as well as a conversation with museum’s founder and director Galina Aleksandrovna Gerke. Assembled from found footage, the video overturns the  propaganda rhetoric of Soviet film production of the  Great Terror era. The description of the grand opening day of the Canal on May 1, 1937 made by Sergei Golitsyn, the former civilian builder of Dmitlag — concentration camp that curated the Сanal construction — is confronted by fragments of "Volga-Volga" film, which was shot in the midst of repressions right at the locations of the newly constructed Canal — the grandeur project of the second Soviet five-year plan.