This work was made during two trips to Russia. Combining documentary content with an author's gaze, Laure Vasconi proposes another reading of a difficult reality without subscribing to the spectacular. In everyday situations staging men and women who are the actors of a Russia in the making, she deciphers the traces of the difficulty of living and the signs of hope of an uncertain tomorrow. For this trip she had no commission from a newspaper and no obligation to report; freed from the weight of constraint, she tells more simply of her encounter with Russia and some of its inhabitants, or rather its female inhabitants. In a context similar to that of a press photographer, she speaks of the Russian woman as one speaks of an alter ego, without discourse or presuppositions. Women are everywhere present, young and beautiful for the Miss Russia casting, proud and stoic for a portrait that speaks of memory, in work overalls as a reminder of the time when the woman worker was indistinguishable from the man. E.P.