Article printed in TheGuide, February 2003.

Samizdat!

Natasha in St Petersburg

Natasha Hull is a Russian music photographer who for 20 years photographed Soviet life as it really was. Now in Lewisham, she has published Maxim and Fyodor in English, one of the most important books of the late Soviet era. By Ed Ewing.

The first thing Vladimir Shinkarev tells me is he can't speak English. We then laugh about talking simply. I joke: let us talk about food and drink, I bet you like vodka!

He is very tall and hangs his head to one side, smiling, with his eyes closed almost to slits, and says, "You know, I am an alcoholic. And the last stages of alcoholic is abstinence. Abstinence or death. I have been abstaining now for 10 years."

Oh.

Vladimir Shinkarev is a very famous Russian writer and artist, he is the founding father of a group of artists in St Petersburg called Mitki. In the 1980s and early 90s Mitki was seen as anti-state by the Soviet government. Exhibitions held outdoors for want of a venue were flattened by bulldozers, artists were arrested by the KGB and meetings were banned, and when they couldn't be banned they were controlled. The existence of the group created a philosophy and that philosophy was also called Mitki. One observer from Leningrad University, writing in 1988, described Mitki as "hippies of the Russian variety".

Vladimir Shinkarev was the writer who captured the spirit of Mitki, embodying it in two books, The Mitki and Maxim and Fyodor. Maxim and Fyodor, is a collection of writing that loosely follows the adventures of two great friends. Their main activity is drinking. Drinking vodka, vermouth, beer, port and even kerosene dominates their lives and in some strange way is a protest against the suffocating regime that was Soviet Russia in the 1970s.

The book was banned in Russia from when it was written in 1980 until the Soviet Union's collapse, but before then the manuscript was typed up samizdat style; four copies at a time using carbon paper. "The speed was incredible," Shinkarev says, "In a month I saw one being read on the train".

Twenty two years later it has finally made it to Britain.

Natasha Hull's cat pads across the kitchen table and pushes its nose into my face. "Kesha!" says Natasha, "Don't be so rude!"
"She is named after our cat in Russia," she says, making tea. Natasha lives just off Belmont Hill between Lewisham and Blackheath, prime territory for cats, not the typical habitat of a famous Russian photographer turned publisher.

Working from her home office, Natasha set up Seagull Publishing in October 2001 with the single aim of publishing Shinkarev's classic book. A year later, in November 2002, she held the launch party at St Peter's Church near Oxford Street and Maxim and Fyodor, in English, was published to great critical acclaim. Much to her professed amazement, the Daily Telegraph published a rave review across half a page and she was launched.

Natasha, now in her late 40s, is originally from St Petersburg in Russia, and although not part of Mitki the group, she says, "We were in the same city at the same time and doing basically the same things". And what was that? "Oh, we had been trying to do what we wanted, independently of what the government thought we should."

In 1973, aged 19, in Soviet Russia, Natasha picked up a camera and started photographing her friends who were part of the nascent music scene at the time. Parties held in kitchens or underground concerts where, "your ticket was either a bottle of wine or a little bit of marijuana…"
It was a time of immense repression in Russia, and music as ever was a rebellion, although not at the time a conscious one: "Oh you see, when you are young you don't mind do you?" Natasha says about that time. "I didn't care. About all the communism. We just lived as we wanted and we did not know that that can be considered a threat to the regime."

From 2003 it seems odd, but it was The Beatles, says Natasha, that inspired the music scene in St Petersburg and the USSR. "We learnt about the Beatles very early, because we are near the sea. The sailors, the Russian fleet, they came in and they… they bring the LP. And that was what broke the Iron Curtain. Because as soon as we heard this music we realised that everything we'd been told for so many years about the west was," she pauses to emphasise, and whispers it, like it must have been whispered back then, "booll-sheet!"

Natasha worked in a succession of jobs, first as a translator of technical texts - her mother, a language tutor at the university taught her English from aged five - then as a kindergarten teacher, then as a technical photographer in a factory. "Using their fixer, their developer, their paper!" she says, "This is where I worked, this is where I printed my photos".

It was in this lab, aged 25, developing pictures of a rock concert that she thought, "this is what I want to do". Already married at 19 - "He was the first man to kiss me... and here I am alive!" - and with a young daughter often at her side, she spent the 80s and 90s photographing the burgeoning rock music scene; in particular a band called Aquarium, who she followed from kitchens in the 70s to stadiums in the 90s.

She made her money, not by publishing her pictures, as there was no outlet for them, but by selling them at the concerts. In her 20-year career she was interrogated by the KGB, arrested often and constantly harassed by the police. Eventually, in the late 80s, St Petersburg banned the sale of photographs at concerts and she went hungry, "Perestroika or not," she says, "I was starving".

In 1995 Natasha came to Britain to work for a new Russian music magazine. She photographed everyone, including the Rolling Stones. "They were so happy to give me accreditation," she remembers, "A rock photographer from Russia! Well, welcome!" She took the photos of Mick Jagger back to Russia two years ago when her father was ill, and showed them to her Russian buddies, now huge stadium acts. "I have been taking photos of them in such conditions, KGB, we would run from the backstage door … so Mick Jagger!" Her eyes twinkle with delight.

The magazine failed but she stayed, marrying again, and settling in Lewisham. She slowly gave up photography - "It's not that interesting any more … photography was just the method to express my protest against what I hated" she says, adding with a smile, "Blur is very good band, but they are younger than my daughter now!" - then trained as an aromatherapist and after a two year attempt to import Russian rock music to the UK - "im-possible!" - a friend held an exhibition of Mitki artists in London and she approached Shinkarev. "I spoke to the author, I asked him 'Do you want me to publish your book?' … he said, 'Of course I do!'"

Since New Year she has already signed a second Russian writer, a writer she knows from her university syllabus, something she almost can't quite believe herself; "he is… pfew!" she waves her hand towards the intellectual heavens, lost for words.

Natasha first read Maxim and Fyodor when it was typed up and passed from hand to hand. Her own manuscript has long gone but the spirit of it stays with her. I ask her what samizdat actually means. "Samizdat means self publishing, sam is self and izdat means publishing." So that's what you're doing now, I say. She bursts out laughing, real peals of laughter, "Yes!" she is enchanted by the thought, "in a way, yes!"

One of the rusting hulks that lies in the River Neva, with the Hermitage in the background.	Natasha spent most of her time photographing bands, but some of her most compelling images are of the crowds as in Waiting for the concert.	Natasha with the recently signed contract for her second writer.

Maxim and Fyodor by Vladimir Shinkarev is published by Seagull Publishing, price £9.95, ISBN 0-9543368-0-1.
As part of St Petersburg's 300th anniversary this year, Natasha Hull will be holding an exhibition of her photographs at the
Menier Gallery, 51-53 Southwark Street SE1 from 9-14 June.