A boy stands with his horse along the Amur M58 Highway near the village Chernyshevsky, close to the border of Mongolia and China.
All Photographs by Louisa Marie Summer

A Photographer’s Road Trip Through the Russian Far East

ByBecky Harlan
August 05, 2015
10 min read

The Russian Far East isn’t exactly known as a classic road trip destination, and for good reason. Until recently, there wasn’t really a road to trip on, at least not one that was finished.

an oriental rug hanging in front of an apartment complex in Shimanovsk in Russia
An oriental carpet hangs on a clothesline in front of an apartment complex in Shimanovsk in the Amur region.

The creation of a highway known as the M58 Federal Highway Amur, which covers an approximately 1,300-mile stretch from Chita to Khabarovsk, was begun as part of the Trans-Siberian Highway in 1966. For many years it was barely passable, and while it was symbolically opened by Putin in 2004, it wasn’t completely paved and ready for road-trippers until 2010.

a woman sitting at a cash register in a small cafe rest stop along the Amur Highway in Russia
A woman works the cash register at a recently opened café and rest stop along the Amur highway. Traffic is slow and only a few customers stop by.

One such traveler was German photographer Louisa Marie Summer. She hit the freshly paved road in July 2013 accompanied by her fixer, Leonid, a native to the area whom she met through a Russian news agency. He helped Summer prepare for all the things that could go wrong. “It’s easy to run out of gas or water, for example. Or even get stranded because there are so few places to stay along the way. We would drive for hours and see no other cars.”

two twin girls with blonde hair and bangs in checkered and floral dresses
Twins Ekatarina and Aljona live with their parents and brother in the village of Mukhinskaya, Oblast Amur, Siberia. Like most families in the area, they keep a few animals and grow food on a small piece of land behind their house. Their father works at the nearby Trans-Siberian Railway.

“We drove 1,312 miles in seven days,” says Summer. She describes the trip as unexpectedly hot, mosquito-ridden, and “beautiful, though not particularly special,” citing prairie and open lands punctuated by some forests and groves of birch.

In spite of all that, Summer was drawn to the highway both because of its newness and its isolation. “It was pretty interesting to see this ‘fancy’ highway in the middle of nowhere, with dirt roads branching off,” she says. “The road felt like a foreign body in the landscape.”

a boy about to dive into an indoor swimming pool in a small village in the Russian Far East
Putin personally endorsed the construction of a swimming pool in the village of Aksenovo-Zilovskoye, which is about ten miles off the highway, in order to promote the Far East region.

“The idea was to drive the road and see how much it affects the people who live there—if prosperity will reach those villages or just pass them by,” says Summer. “I wanted to explore a remote area that doesn’t get much coverage … The road is supposed to bring prosperity to the eastern part of the country, which has been very isolated for a long time.”

a girl standing in smoke in front of her house in Kundur, Russia
A young girl stands in front of her house in Kundur, approximately 230 miles before the end of the Amur highway in Kharbarovsk. In this swampy area, villagers burn sawdust to chase away mosquitoes so they can sit outside and enjoy the fresh evening air.

The travelers weren’t able to pick up radio stations when driving through more remote areas, so to keep themselves entertained they talked and listened to CDs. “We kept listening to ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ by Queen,” says Summer. That song was playing when they experienced a strange phenomenon. “The extreme weather—the severe cold in the winter, the heat in the summer—affects the asphalt. The highway becomes wavy. So we were listening to the lyrics ‘ … forever,’ and we hit one big wave, and then we hit another, and the whole car lifted up … all four wheels!”

a bus stop with a solar light panel on top of it sits alongside the Amur Federal Highway 58
A bus stop with one modern solar panel light sits along the Federal Highway Amur M58.

With no designated appointments or agenda other than to keep moving and meeting people, Summer followed her instincts on the road. “I stopped whenever I got inspired. Sometimes it just takes getting out of the car and putting yourself into a situation. Things will happen.”

Two hunters watch the news at a Buryat cafe along the road east of Chernishevsk in the Amur region. They are returning home to Yakutia from their hunting vacation in the Altai region about 3,000 miles away.
Two hunters watch the news at a Buryat café along the road east of Chernishevsk in the Amur region. They are returning home to Yakutia from their hunting vacation in the Altai region, about 3,000 miles away.

But she couldn’t have shared Amur’s story without one thing: the goodwill of strangers. “It was often about getting to know one person, and they would lead you around town,” she says. “There are not many strangers at all who pass through. But when they lost their initial shyness the people were really open and friendly. I was invited into many homes and heard many stories. Imagine a stranger with a camera asking you if a new road has changed your life!”

the inside of a motel room made inside the metal wagon near a gas station on the Amur Highway in Russia
The inside of a metal wagon serves as a motel room next to a gas station near the village of Shimanovsky. Along the Amur highway there are not many lodging options, and sometimes the next bed will be hours away.

She says some people she met along Amur dreamt of life in big cities like Moscow or in Japan. The harshness of the landscape, she thinks, can be hard for people. “They grow a lot of their own food. Many people work for the railroad—that’s the main income. And then if it’s a town they have a butcher, they have a supermarket, they have what they need to live. But they don’t have many choices.”

FREE BONUS ISSUE

And although there isn’t a lot of industry or economic variety, there is a lot of diversity in the groups of people who live along this route. She lists Russians Orthodox, Cossacks, Chinese, Mongolians, and Armenians among the people she met.

children playing around a water feature in Chita, Russia
Children play at a Soviet fountain on a hot summer day in Chita, the administrative center of Zabaykalsky Krai and the beginning of the Amur highway.

“Most people have lived there for generations. But there are also some who have settled there more recently.” New residents, she says, are one of the goals of the highway. “The government has built new houses in some areas and encouraged people to move east, giving them cheap housing or financing to start a business. The road is supposed to bring more people there but I could not tell if it had. Most people said the road hasn’t changed their life. It makes things a little bit easier—it’s easier to go to the next village. But most people don’t have a car. Only a few have a business. It’s really for the through traffic. People who have a hostel or restaurant or gas station benefit.”

an old school bus with the lights turned on inside at night on the Amur Highway in eastern Russia
A platoon of old school busses is driven approximately 4,500 miles from Nizhny Novgorod to Blagoveshchensk, a city on the Amur highway halfway between Chita and Khabarovsk.

It’s probably too early to officially tell how Amur will affect the Russian Far East, but Summer, at least, found what she was looking for. “I was curious if there was really nothing, but I found there are people there and stories to find.”

This project was commissioned by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti on the occasion of the 2013 G20 Summit in St.Petersburg. Twenty Photographers from the G20 member states were invited to work on an independent photo project about contemporary Russia.

To see more of Louisa Marie Summer’s work, visit her website.

Go Further

Animals

Environment

History & Culture

Science

Travel