In 1991, the Soviet Union – and so the centripetal force that had bound together its assorted republics – collapsed. The peripheral states found themselves suddenly cut loose and communities had to redefine their identities and draw new borders. For many, the withdrawal of the dominant Soviet influence created new problems and old ethnic, religious and ideological fault lines reopened; disputes led to civil wars and unrecognised states; economies faltered. Nearly 10 years later, Jonas Bendiksen, a young Norwegian photographer, was kicked out of Russia for a “bureaucratic misstep”, and set out on a five-year journey through these lost worlds strung around Russia's margins. From a Siberian Jewish homeland without any Jews to an apocalyptic near-future strewn with space junk, his pictures, saturated and heavy with drama, open onto scenes played out on the very edges of reality – in-between places, outside time.

20 years before the creation of Israel, Stalin set about manufacturing his own "Soviet Zion" in far eastern Siberia, an inhospitable chunk of land that became the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. The Birobidzhan region had no history of Jewry; rather, the scheme was a response to strategic concerns – settling the eastern border regions and negating the growing Zionist movement. The idea was that a Jewish proletariat could have some degree of cultural autonomy, but within a primarily socialist rather than religious system. This artificial homeland was quick to flourish – idealistic Jews arrived from the US, Argentina and France, and there was a flurry of Yiddish theatre, literature and local newspapers. Then, in 1936, came the Great Purge. After that, waves of anti-Semitic persecution swept through the region, and by 1948 the Jewish institutions were closed and the leaders dead. In the Nineties, when Bendiksen visited, many of the remaining Jews were leaving, emigrating to Israel in an exodus sponsored by the Jewish Agency. His photos record the near-deserted streets and towerblocks, ruins marking out the emptiness: a woman sews in her flat, still watched over by Stalin, his face filling her TV screen; others queue for a plane to Israel, chasing a new, warmer dream.

The 'Riviera of the Caucasus' is another broken shell of a once hopeful, animated land. Abkhazia, on the mountainous eastern coast of the Black Sea, was once a favourite beach resort of the Soviet elite, and Bendiksen's pictures linger in the eloquent gulf between the natural splendour and tourist-brochure ideal, the infrastructure constructed for an annual influx of hundreds of thousands of holidaying apparatchiks, and today's bombed-out, barren wasteland. Abkhazia's de facto independence has come at a ruinous price: during its war with Georgia in 1992-93 thousands were killed and cities laid waste; after Abkhazia's secession the several hundred thousand ethnic Georgians fled or were deported. Recovery has been slow due to the continuing Russo-Georgian rivalry for influence, as well as the region’s sense of instability, decimated economy and unrecognized status. In a photo burnished orange as if the fires burn on, Babushka 'Tanya' continues with her daily chores, one of the last few inhabitants of her block, taking on some of the character of this scarred, abandoned, purposeless landscape. Still, the fantasy lives on – on the road to the beach, a man waits with his stuffed bear in a tropically-coloured idyll waiting for the buses of tourists who'll pay 10 roubles each to take a picture; at the sea, kids leap off rusting hulks into the water.

Also toppled into conflict by the post-Soviet power vaccuum, Nagorno-Karabakh is a moutainous region in south-western Azerbaijan, from which it declared its independence in 1991. The predominantly Armenian Nargorno-Karabakh Regions were established within Azerbaijan by the Soviets in the early 1920s as part of their divide and rule policy, exploiting an ancient rivalry between Christian Armenians and Turkic Azeris. With the dissolution of the USSR, Armenian unhappiness with the arrangement erupted, and though a ceasefire was brokered in 1994 there are still sporadic outbreaks of violence; a frozen conflict in a frozen land. This landlocked region with its closed borders is isolated, unrecognised, its future unresolved – a state of limbo caught in Bendiksen’s photos, where a man wanders the icy street, alone; army cadets hang from an exercise bar leprous with peeling paint; a lumpen woman dances in an imitation of beauty and grace at a stolid party with one balloon and the heaviness of a waiting room.

The fertile Ferghana Valley, a Muslim Khanate until Russia invaded in the nineteenth century, was chopped up and parcelled out by Stalin to undermine nationalist movements. This has led to a confusion of identities and religious antagonisms – a man in a basement shaves to avoid suspicion, the women of a house whose male members have all been imprisoned for religious activities sit chatting. The natural abundance of the valley has not translated into universal prosperity: addicts hang out in a flat in Osh, where heroin is cheaper than a beer, while over in breakaway Transdniester the former Soviet nomenklatura seem to be doing pretty well for themselves – it is commonly believed that they orchestrated secession (unrecognised) from Moldova in order that they might keep control of the heavy industries concentrated in the area. Corruption and organised crime flourish, and there's a seedy, time-capsule feel to the republic, as if still mired in the Brezhnev Stagnation; Soviet nostalgia runs high, with pictures of past Communist leaders proudly displayed on the walls of a bar in the capital, Tiraspol, and a statue of Lenin in front of the government building.

The most strikingly otherworldly piece in Satellites captures two men stood atop a used rocket carcass in a field in the Altai Mountains smothered in butterflies. They live in the flight path of Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the Kazakh steppes, built by the USSR in the 1950s and now the largest operational launch facility in the world, popular among Western corporations as a cheap alternative to launching from the US. As the spent rocket stages fall flaming out of the sky, scrap metal dealers roar across the grasslands like Mad Max extras, racing to strip them of their titanium and high-grade aluminium. For many of the region's former collective farmers, this space junk seems an answer to desperate prayers, yet it’s not all valuable metals; highly toxic rocket fuel seeps into the soil and water, and villagers complain of diseases and cancers; Bendikson finds dead cows in a lush, verdant field.

Despite their extreme idiosyncracies, these places share a sense of having been forgotten, cut adrift. Jonas Bendiksen opens the rabbit hole. Satellites is showing at the PM Gallery & House, London W5 5EQ until 9 August. A book of the photos is also available.