Russians today: 25 years after Soviet Union's collapse

Lawyer and HIV activist Lyudmila Vins in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on Nov. 24.

Roman Galimov, left, and an unidentified man, show off their tattoos in Kazan, Russia, on Nov. 22.

Isabelle Magkoeva, a former political activist, is now a Thai kickboxing champion in Russia. Photo: Nov. 18, in Moscow.

Alexander Nemenko holds five-month-old son Vsevolod — 'Seva' for short, after the Black Sea port city Sevastopol — in Crimea. Photo date: Nov. 26.

Yekaterinburg Mayor Yevgeny Roizman in his office on Nov. 25. Roizman is an independent politician in Russia, a relative rarity.

Alexander Andreev, a retired oil worker, in the stairwell of his apartment building in Kazan, central Russia, on Nov. 22.

A boy looks through a display featuring a Russian warship in Balaklava, Crimea, on Nov. 27.

A man prays in a mosque in Kazan, in Russia's Republic of Tatarstan, on Nov. 22. Sunni Islam is the most common faith in Tatarstan, where 55% of the estimated 3.8 million population is Muslim.

Viktor Averkievich, a World War II veteran from Saint Petersburg, in his apartment on Nov. 15.

A survivor of Josef Stalin's Soviet-era Gulag labor camps Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan in her apartment in Moscow on Nov. 21.

An unidentified man holds a Russian flag near the Kremlin in Moscow on Nov. 19. He is holding a continuous vigil in the spot where Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician, was murdered in February 2015.

Alexander Stakhanov, the founder of the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, where people who grew up in the Soviet Union go to play games from that time.

A woman walks near the water's edge in Sevastopol, Crimea, on Nov. 23.

Oleg Fogel in Saint Petersburg on Nov. 15. He works for a technology company in Moscow. He often spends his free time 'clowning' in hospitals and orphanages.