Odessa Sanatorium, Odessa, Ukraine, 1999

In 1999, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Oddy spent a month exploring one of the Soviet Union’s lesser-known legacies - the sprawling network of some 2500 sanatoria that had once been an integral part of the country’s healthcare system.

Armed with his large format camera, Oddy traveled between Odessa and Yalta. His aim was to coax these institutions - that had been the Eastern bloc’s equivalent of spas - into revealing something about the obsolete political system that had led to their creation.

Dzhemyet Sanatorium, nr. Yalta, Ukraine, 1999

Valery Tchakalov Sanatorium, Odessa, Ukraine, 1999

Livadia Sanatorium, nr. Yalta, Ukraine, 1999

Magnolia Prophylactorium I, Odessa, Ukraine, 1999

Inside places such as the Magnolia Prophylactorium (previously the Buildings, Roads and Machinery Prophylactorium), or the Valery Tchkalov Sanatorium (named after a Soviet aviator hero), Oddy found himself confronted by the remnants of a worldview at once recognisable, and yet totally alien.

Armless statues of heroic peasant women. Rickety ultra-violet treatment lamps. Hydrotherapy treatment corridors. Relaxation rooms.

All perfectly normal in a state where collectivisation and surveillance must have seemed inescapable, and where holidays took place beneath an undying communist sun.

Livadia Sanatorium, Livadia, nr. Yalta, Ukraine, 1999

Mishkor Sanatorium, nr. Yalta, Ukraine, 1999

“Twenty years on with Ukraine front and centre in the news, and with a sense that the old Soviet order perhaps never went away, these pictures have taken on a new resonance. A glimpse into a way of thinking in which the state would control everything. Actions. Thoughts. Even every least moment of convalescence or leisure time represented an opportunity to shape bodies and minds. It was an assembly line designed to manufacture model citizens whose ideas and ambitions would align with those of the state.

Today, with Homo Sovieticus turned into Homo Putinus, it would appear that this work never ended. The sanatoria still acts as ideological prisms where taking a cure also means imbibing the injunctions of power.”

Jason Oddy, 2022