GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD

The vanishing world of the old Soviet Union, captured by photographer GIORGIA FIORIO

In July 1993, writes Amanda Mitchison, when the Russians were already feeling the bite of the new market economy, the Italian photographer Giorgia Fiorio set out for the former Soviet Union to photograph people's working lives before things changed beyond recognition. The result is a body of work that mysteriously manages to look as if it came from another century - not just the tatty and flyblown backdrops, but the very people themselves, workers who could grace the cover of a treatise on 19th-century oral history.

While many of Fiorio's photographs demonstrate a certain static formality, these people are still clearly quite at ease with the camera. And this, being a measure of just how close Fiorio came to her subjects, testifies to the advantages of having learned their language, and of sharing their meals and housing.

Fiorio began by concentrating on the enormous, primitive heavy industries that formed the backbone of the Soviet economy. First, she worked in the coal mines that stretch for miles under the Donbass region of the Ukraine. The miners work round the clock in six-hour shifts, but to reach the coalface they must half walk, half crawl for another hour or more down tunnels filled with water and strange, hot winds. At the face, the coal is loosened with explosives and then dug out by the men using pickaxes and spades. This is the world of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier: horrific safety standards, black lung, miners losing limbs and fingers on the coal trolleys that trundle back and forth along tracks on the floor of the mine. Relief only comes at the end of the shift, when the men emerge at the pithead black as ink and run to the showers.

The DMZ Donetz Steel Works, also in the Ukraine, employs several thousand men, most of them thin and sinewy thanks to the intense heat inside the works. The main danger is from explosions in the molten metal, and at the end of each shift the men come out covered in graphite and metal particles, rather than coal dust. But otherwise the story is much the same as in the mines and, like the miners, the steel workers are tough, stoical men who keep going on a diet of pork belly and a gut-rot spirit called koniak. Their families, meanwhile, try to offset the ravages of inflation by growing vegetables and fruit in allotments round their houses.

In these huge, heavy industries, the facts of geography and the anti- social hours encourage isolation, but Fiorio was to find that her other subjects also live and work in contained, self-encapsulated worlds - as if Russia, unable to absorb its vast dimensions, had broken down into a series of smaller bubbles slightly nearer to the measure of man. She also discovered that the Russians, such great creators of rules and institutions, are very adept at defying them. A theme running through her photographs is of individuals settling into distinctly unwelcoming environments and trying to make them their own.

This holds true as much for the middle-class Russian professionals as for the workers, as Fiorio found in Moscow and St Petersburg, where she worked with the ballet troupes for which both cities are so famous, and the old Nakymovskaya Naval Academy in St Petersburg, where the cadets, for all their military drilling and physical jerks, still achieve a crumpled, undersized appearance. She spent most time with the Boris Eifmann troupe, an impoverished outfit where the dancers earn little, work extremely hard and do everything for themselves - making their own costumes, and doing their own hair and make-up. At the end of the evening, after a gruelling performance, the dancers make their way home to flats often in the outer reaches of the city.

In April 1994, Fiorio turned her attention to a new kind of institution in St Petersburg - a shelter for the city's burgeoning population of street children. The shelter, which is makeshift and grubby, operates on a very informal basis and the small, fierce, chain-smoking kids drift in and out, sometimes just for hot water or a meal. Fiorio worked here for a month and seems to have won the children's confidence. As a leaving present, they gave her a cut-throat razor.

Her final project took her to Lager Mojaysk Borodino, a "camp of work and redemption" near Moscow. The lager, which houses several thousand young offenders, is a closed world: the inmates have no books, no newspapers - just a television room and a view over the birches and mudflats of Borodino. The prisoners are kept muzzy on a diet of gruel and mushroom juice laced with bromide. When they asked why she was taking their photographs, Fiorio replied, "It's a way of taking you out of here."