First published in 2005 by the imprint that would become Treemedia, and one of the earliest attempts to publish an author's photobook in Russia at all, Born in the USSR has since become something close to a cult object. Unlike photobooks built around a single concept, it follows the shape of a classical photo album; the pictures are preceded by two critical essays, one by the art historian Ekaterina Degot on the relationship between an artist and their time, the other a critical analysis of Mukhin's method by the American artist, curator and essayist Steve Yates. Not everyone gets to be born in a country that no longer exists: the book stands as visual testimony to an epochal rupture, the roaring nineties with their intoxication of new freedom, new capitalism, ideological conflict, and the splitting apart of a social community once called the USSR.