The Matchbox was created in the mid-2000s.
It was a time when the vibe of freedom that emerged in the nineties was still thick in the air. A conservative change of wind was already obvious, but nobody anticipated that it could ever come to repressions again. Fifteen years after the USSR fell apart, the country still hadn’t reflected on its traumas from the Soviet era. Russia needed to come to terms with the truth about the Red Terror, the Stalinist crimes and the persecution of dissidents. But the KGB archives were only partially declassified; the real history of the Soviet Union was never widely discussed, and a public consensus on the nation’s past was never formed. And the past, whenever ignored, tends to repeat itself.
The Matchbox does not reconstruct the past; it constructs an imaginary future. The events unfold near the Moscow Kremlin where the red Soviet banner had already been replaced with the white-blue-red flag of the Russian Federation. Then, suddenly, an uninvited dog wanders into the scene and becomes a link between imagination and reality.