Adam Hinton photographs Ukraine after independence in the early 1990s.

Adam Hinton was a 26-year-old recent graduate of England’s Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University) at the time, and he wanted to see what life in a new nation was like, particularly in industrial areas whose working class had been romanticized during Soviet rule. He’d never been to the country before and he knew he’d have trouble communicating there, but he’d studied Soviet politics in school and was eager to witness history.