In 1999, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I spent a month on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. I went there to explore one of the Soviet Union’s lesser-known legacies, the sprawling network of sanatoria that had once been an integral part of the country’s healthcare system. Traveling between Odessa and Yalta, and armed with my large format camera, my 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.

In places such as the Magnolia Prophylactorium (previously the Buildings, Roads and Machinery Prophylactorium) or the Valery Tchkalov Sanatorium (named after a Soviet aviator hero) I found myself confronted by the remnants of a worldview at once recognisable and yet totally alien. Hydrotherapy treatment corridors. Relaxation rooms. Armless statues of heroic peasant women. Rickety ultra-violet treatment lamps. Posters exhorting you to watch out for spies. At almost every turn the strange textures and inescapable symmetries of these at times functioning, at times ruined showcases for the benefits of communism, made me feel as though I was stumbling around the set of a Tarkovsky film.

Over twenty years on with Ukraine front and centre in the news and 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 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 recast as Homo Putinus, it would appear that in Russian annexed Crimea at least, this work never ended. The sanatoria still acting as ideological prisms where taking a cure always also means imbibing the injunctions of power.