Tajammu Al-Ezza brigade fighters react while firing a Grad shell towards forces of Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad stationed in Salhab village, Hama countryside, May 7, 2015. (Photo by Mohamad Bayoush/Reuters)

A man holds a cow at the cattle market in Maiduguri, Nigeria, March 9, 2016. A Nigerian government push to strangle the Boko Haram insurgency has shut down the cattle trade that sustained the city of Maiduguri, leaving many residents with no livelihood, including many of the two million people displaced by the war. In recent months the army has taken back much of the territory lost to the jihadists during the five-year insurgency. (Photo by Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

In modern Russia there are no free elections, therefore the political elite is almost constant.

Photo: Valentina Matvienko, Mayor of St. Petersburg, attends the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on June 17, 2011 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Global business leaders have gathered in Russia for the three-day conference. (Photo by Alexander Aleshkin/Epsilon/Getty Images)

A rescue worker holds an injured boy after what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in Idlib city, Syria December 20, 2015. (Photo by Ammar Abdullah/Reuters)

“A topless women's rights activist hacked down a Christian cross in the Ukrainian capital Kiev with a chain saw on Friday in protest at the prosecution of the Russian feminist punk band, p*ssy Riot”. – Reuters. (Photo by FEMEN)

A store staff walks past other staffs dressed up as Stormtrooper and Death Star Gunner (R) from the film “Star Wars” before launching the film's new toys at Loft Variety Store in Shibuya shopping district in Tokyo, September 3, 2015. New “Star Wars” toys and other merchandise were released in stores across Japan just after midnight local time during a global rollout of the popular products. (Photo by Toru Hanai/Reuters)

Since Rodrigo Duterte became president last year, his brutal campaign against drugs has claimed thousands of lives. Human rights groups say he is guilty of crimes against humanity, yet that is scant comfort to those mourning loved ones. Here: Constantino de Juan’s seven children sit on a sofa that still bears the bullet hole from their father’s shooting. Juan was preparing a spaghetti dinner on his daughter’s birthday when he was killed. (Photo by James Whitlow Delano/Funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting/The Guardian)