The country has embraced capitalism and flung its door wide open to all the luxuries money can buy. Yet dark forces remain, and democracy is dead. This series looks at the winners and losers of Russia’s resurgence and asks why people are willing to support Putinism, exchange freedom for wealth, and participate in modern empire-building.

Moscow sees the Arctic as strategic, targeting massive investment. It sent a submarine to plant a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, symbolically claiming its energy deposits to bully gas-hungry European countries.

At the same time, the North is dying. The present communities were created by Stalin, who sent prisoners all over USSR to the northern gulags to mine the resources. When Stalin died, the prisoners were freed but many stayed on to work at the pits and factories. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia no longer supported these remote Arctic settlements, and many of the gulag descendents now languish in poverty as factories, schools and hospitals close.

My work focuses on the Arctic people, their aspirations, their love and their survival in a landscape of bleak, haunting beauty.

The machines they use — to create the vintage look — send into the air lung-clogging blue dust. For each pair of jeans they scrub, workers earn one euro cent. In an adjacent part of town, their boss sits among fellow factory owners in a street restaurant, ready for another toast: “To the millionaires of Zhongshan!”

Today, most people do not wear jeans for hard physical work, but they still want to affect an air of ruggedness. This wear-and-tear process is outsourced to countries such as China, where cheap wages and lax environmental control allowed the rapid growth of a labour-intensive industry drenched in toxic chemicals.

An portrait series of famous and lesser-known Russians.

So they saddle up and take an incredible journey with their five-year-old Rowan across the Mongolian grassland on a quest for a miracle cure.

Since the days of the Tsars, territorial disputes have flared between Russia
and China, pitting the world’s largest country by landmass against its most
populous nation.

Until two decades ago, the Chinese were a welcome flow of low-wage workers
willing to do the menial construction and farming jobs. Today, with the
Chinese economy soaring and Moscow too weak to mind its Far East six time
zones away, the Chinese have been cutting down Siberian forests to fuel its
construction boom. The Russians who once hired them now find themselves as
subordinates, with their economy heavily dependent on the Chinese trade.

The Russians are scared and resentful. Inhabiting the vast richness of
Siberia are only six million Russians, many drunk and unemployed, while
across their southern border live 1.3 billion increasingly confident
Chinese.

From humble beginnings fifty years ago, when men from Pakistan and India arrived to take up factory jobs in England, the Muslim community has grown to become a significant force in the British society.

Today, generations of Muslims live happily as British citizens, study and working side-by-side with the whites. Yet harmony is being eroded by terrorism and a growing siege mentality. In the impoverished north, where crumbled textile factories stand as stark reminders of better days, Muslims confine themselves to bleak, isolated quarters.

Commissioned by M Magazine of Holland.

For several months each year Baikal – the world’s largest body of fresh water, more voluminous than all the North American Great Lakes combined – freezes so solidly that locals drive their cars and lorries over it to reach towns that are only accessible by boats in summer.

We trek 90 km from the eastern bank to the west, taking in the fabled Olkhon Island on the way. We waited until March because February would be too cold; but rising temperatures have already opened a web of cracks underfoot that regularly kill those who fall through.

Sophie’s parents got divorced when she was one and she was raised by her mother. At fourteen she ran away and stayed at various addresses.

Hakan, 16, was born in the Netherlands but feels more Turkish than Dutch.

Roderick, 15, comes from an affluent family. At school he gets good grades, though his teachers complain of his attitude.

Commissioned by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the NRC newspaper, this exhibition project looks at youngsters growing up in the Netherlands.

Western Europe is seen by many as a beacon of liberty. But many immigrants who enter illegally are shunned, prosecuted and stripped of basic rights. Forced to live in the underworld, they scrape for food, shelter, work and dignity — and find that, whatever they do or not do, they are always on the wrong side of the law.

Co-produced or commissioned in parts by Spiegel Reporter, Agentur Focus, M Magazine.