Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Near Gimry, the village of Balakhani was home to a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher named Mariam Sharipova, who came to national attention in 2010 as one of two suicide bombers who killed forty people in the Moscow metro. Inside the modest house clinging to a mountainside where Sharipova had lived with her parents, her father, a devout, bearded teacher named Rasul Magomedov, said he couldn’t explain why his daughter blew herself up. But he told me the Kremlin encourages such actions by using the threat of terrorism to consolidate its power. “Moscow pours all its blame for everything wrong into the Caucasus, to justify its actions and failures before average working people,” he explained.

  It was difficult not to be moved by Magomedov’s stoic manner. Describing his daughter as a hard worker who had earned a degree in psychology and planned to study for a doctorate, he said the authorities should have heeded her act as a wake-up call. “Change your attitude toward us Dagestanis,” he concluded, predicting there will be more such attacks in the future. “Don’t think we’re stupid people,” he added. Magomedov disappeared without a trace a month later, the apparent victim of a kidnapping.

  Three days before I spoke to him, twin explosions killed a police officer and injured sixty civilians outside a liquor shop in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, a hundred miles east on the shore of the Caspian Sea. In a hospital a short walk from the street’s mangled buildings, people wounded in the blast lay bandaged on cots in a hot, crowded room. Among them was a young man named Magomed Getinov, who told me he was leaving a friend’s apartment when the blast went off, sending shrapnel into his side. Although he called the bombers monsters, he blamed the region’s massive unemployment for prompting many young men with little to do to turn to violence. “They’re confused,” he told me. “They lose their morals, start turning into religious extremists and blow up innocent people because they believe they’re going to take over the world.”

  Despite its poverty, Makhachkala’s society is cosmopolitan and open in comparison to much of the North Caucasus. At a dinner with the gregarious head of the official journalists’ union, a veteran political operator named Ali Kamalov, he raised his first shot of vodka to Allah. A typical representative of older generations, Kamalov had the benevolent manner of a patriarch from the North Caucasus—part tough guy, part Jewish mother—and insisted I not leave the table before stuffing myself with at least three servings of kebabs. He told me the root of the region’s problem was the pervasive corruption choking the economy. Huge funds for developing agriculture, infrastructure and social services were being pilfered by officials in Moscow and Makhachkala. Some of the money was spent on luxury cars and an expanding ring of suburban brick houses going up outside the capital. Distributing the Kremlin’s largesse enabled the powerful former Mayor Said Amirov—who is confined to a wheelchair after having survived more than a dozen assassination attempts—to build a patronage system so entrenched that when the Kremlin recently decided to oust him after fifteen years, it sent a team of special-forces commandos in armored personnel carriers to bundle him onto a helicopter bound for Moscow, where he faced murder charges. His fate, after having twice earned the title of best Russian mayor, is reminiscent of powerful Communist Party bosses such as Uzbekistan’s Rashid Rashidov, whom the Kremlin was able to unseat only by using satellites to photograph cotton fields, then estimating how much he was faking production figures.

  Across town in an outlying, concrete-block neighborhood, Svetlana Isayeva runs the group Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights from a tiny ground-floor office. She started the organization after her twenty-five-year-old son disappeared from the street outside her home in 2008. Stoic, dark-haired Isayeva told me many young men detained by security forces had been forced to confess to terrorism, after which some were killed. “Law enforcers burn them alive in their cars,” she said. “Then they’re accused of blowing themselves up by accident.” She said the abductions began taking place regularly when troops were moved to Dagestan from Chechnya in 2007, after the war there wound down. “All that equipment, all those soldiers. What was the military supposed to do?” she said. “They need conflict to continue surviving. That’s the only way I can explain it.”

  Half a day’s drive west through Chechnya lies the region of Ingushetia, which is also crippled by corruption and bears the country’s highest official unemployment rate, a staggering 57 percent of the able-bodied population. During one of my trips there, in 2011, the threat of violence hung heavily over the dusty main town of Nazran, which was little more than a chaotic crossroads near a market and a bus station. Years of shootings and explosions by Islamist militants convinced most restaurants to close soon after dark, and it was nearly impossible to find alcohol served anywhere. Young people drank tea in a popular café near the market, one of the few such places where I saw women spending leisure time in public. Marina, a quick young medical student who declined to give her last name, told me that although she didn’t go out after nightfall, she’d grown inured to violence. “The first time a friend is killed, you grieve for maybe a year or more,” she said. “But after twenty times, you get used to death. We hear explosions one day and forget about them the next.”

  Locals say although only some two hundred militants remain active in the region, the military stokes the conflict because soldiers get extra pay for combat and officers get promotions and special powers to control local life. Moscow-based Memorial still keeps extensive records about human rights abuses in Nazran. In its cramped, bare-bones office there, along a row of shops selling clothes, housing supplies and mobile phones, researcher Abubakar Sechayev told me that many young men disappear because the slightest suspicion of knowing a militant is enough to get them arrested or worse. “A person can be suspected today and easily killed tomorrow, and his house burned down,” Sechayev told me. “If the security services had any real proof, they’d go through the courts.”

  Despite its obvious failure, the Kremlin’s Caucasus policy isn’t likely to change soon. A recent poll showed that most Russians believe the authorities should undertake harsher measures to fight militants there, such as reviving the death penalty and punishing militants’ relatives. During my latest visit, soldiers carrying out a counterterrorist operation in a town near Nazran arrested six suspected militants. The following day, an elderly woman and her daughter told me that “federals”—interior ministry troops—had broken through their front gate and searched their house. When the mother protested, the soldiers’ response summed up the Kremlin’s attitude. “Shut up, old woman: we do what we want here!”

  A canal next to the Hermitage gallery in St. Petersburg flows into the Neva River.

  11

  Grandiosity and Bombast

  Russian maximalism, hurling us from one extreme to the other, is a sickness of spirit, a metaphysical hysteria, an inward slavery.

  —Nikolai Berdyaev, 1917

  In late 2008, the state television channel Rossiya aired “the project of the year,” a series called The Name of Russia that it said would identify the greatest Russian in history. Over the course of three months, some of the country’s best-known conservative figures appeared weekly on a slick set to debate their choices in a whittling-down that would culminate in an online vote. The future Orthodox Church patriarch, Kirill, then still a bishop, lobbied for the thirteenth-century prince Alexander Nevsky, whose legendary battlefield victories over Swedish and Germanic knights, the bishop claimed, had saved Russia from annihilation. Comparing the battles to Russia’s invasion of Georgia that year, Kirill said both military efforts had signaled the country’s rebirth as a great power. Peter the Great and Lenin also ranked among top candidates, but the loudest controversy was generated by Internet voting that temporarily pushed another name to the top of the list. The leader for a time was Joseph Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

  Although the show’s creator, a veteran television personality named Alexander Liubimov, dismissed the embarrassing development as the work of computer hackers
, the dictator came in third in the final results, behind the winner, Alexander Nevsky, and the number-two finisher, Piotr Stolypin, a reforming nineteenth-century prime minister to whom Putin would soon compare himself.

  Unfathomable as it may have been to foreigners, and unscientific as the poll was, its outcome coincided with more rigorous surveys that reflect a very sobering trend: more than half a century after his death, a majority of Russians praise Stalin’s policies. Dismissing the irony that the tyrant was Georgian, not Russian, a Muscovite in his sixties named Igor Stepanov told me the prime overseer of the Soviet purges and other mass atrocities deserved serious consideration. “Whether the consensus is that he was good or bad for Russia remains to be seen,” Stepanov reasoned. “But failing to acknowledge Stalin’s role in history wouldn’t be right.” At the same time, a thirty-four-year-old accountant named Syleia Daripova praised Stalin for his feats. “Not everyone can accumulate power like that,” she said. “People say he murdered half the country, but you can’t deny he was a unique personality.” In 2013, a Levada poll put Brezhnev at the top of a list of “most positive” leaders in the twentieth century, according to 56 percent of respondents. He was closely followed by Lenin and Stalin.

  The country’s leaders encourage such attitudes. Russian historians conservatively estimate that at least twelve and a half million people died from execution, famine and imprisonment during the seventy years of Soviet rule, although the figure of twenty million is more commonly agreed upon. But that record didn’t stop Putin from calling the communist collapse the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. Although he was referring to the trauma the event inflicted on ordinary Russians, his carefully chosen words were purposely ambiguous. In heaping praise on his old employer, the KGB—among other exercises in the exploitation of nostalgia for the stable Soviet past—he was more straightforward.

  Liubomov told me in polished English that his main purpose in producing the television series had been to excite Russians’ interest in history, whatever the results. But critics assailed his program for muddling the past by ignoring prodigious state crimes. “Can you imagine a German show debating Hitler’s merits?” asked Yan Ratchinsky of Memorial, which has done more than any other organization to document Soviet abuses. Speaking in Memorial’s old redbrick building several blocks from Moscow’s once feared police headquarters, Ratchinsky told me Liubomov’s program would have been “fine” in democratic countries, where archives are open and history’s problems are freely discussed. “But Russia’s not that kind of country,” he observed. The show helped glorify the state, he said, by perpetuating the official view of history as a string of great victories under strong leaders. Putin’s administration encouraged that line, he added, because it helped convince citizen masses that they have no influence on the will of the state. “The only thing left for them to do,” he said, “is to hope for a good tsar.”

  After dozens of years compiling files on victims of Soviet repression, Memorial’s directors estimate that completing the task will take six to eight more decades at their current rate, which official obstruction is slowing. Once a year, some of the group’s members assemble outside Lubyanka, the KGB’s forbidding old headquarters in central Moscow, to read the names of people the Soviet authorities shot. The organization’s chairman, a venerated former dissident named Arseniy Roginsky, who served four years in the Gulag in the 1980s, told me the exercise was necessary because the city that brimmed with monuments marking Soviet achievements in war and science lacked a single official memorial for victims of the communist era. Since reminders of the country’s bloody past undermined Russia’s new official identity, he said, the vast majority of Soviet archives, including informers’ names, remain secret, and only a quarter of the USSR’s mass grave sites are known.

  Unlike postwar Germany, the Russian government never acknowledged the previous regime’s crimes, Roginsky continued, because Communist Party officials remained in power after 1991. “After all,” he said, “Moscow wasn’t conquered by enemy forces; Yeltsin was a Politburo member. Unlike other former Soviet republics, we couldn’t blame outsiders and collaborators. We cooked up the Soviet system ourselves and we must judge it ourselves, for which our leaders simply don’t have the political will.”

  The failure to acknowledge Soviet crimes also pained the man most responsible for ending the USSR. Although Mikhail Gorbachev has steadfastly maintained that Russia would have been better off if communism hadn’t collapsed—despite his central role in the process—he worried that his place in Soviet history was being “written out” of school textbooks. Very much at ease in his role of elder statesman, the aging politician supported Putin for many years after he began systematically undermining the country’s democratic institutions—in order to preserve his status as head of his Gorbachev Foundation, some believed. However, at a conference in the organization’s late-Soviet-era brick building, he pontificated that “a new history is being created, one in which Stalin’s rule is seen as a golden age, Khrushchev’s as utopia and Brezhnev’s as a continuation of that golden age. None of that is happening accidentally.”

  But beneath the surface of Kremlin controls and its elaborate show of purpose and unity, the government has shown itself to be fragile by Western standards, as I’ve mentioned—even when its power appeared huge and menacing. Putin’s current project has undermined Russia’s stability not only by failing to draw elementary lessons from its own history but also by encouraging nationalist attitudes that have fueled racism, xenophobia and a rising wave of violence against minorities that, in the same old cycle, ultimately threaten the Kremlin’s grip on power.

  An old saying has it that while no one anywhere can divine the future, Russia is the only country with an unpredictable past. Rather than grapple with history’s difficulties, its leaders, like many of their predecessors, have attempted to forge a new ideology from a schizophrenic pastiche of symbols from tsarist as well as Soviet history that have been lifted out of context for the purpose of legitimizing their own rule. Even the most prominent Soviet critic, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is praised by the leaders who laud the great achievements of the regime he reviled. At the same time, virtually nothing is said about the immense cost of the vast projects—such as building cities from scratch and invading Afghanistan—launched at great sacrifice in the sprees of searching for The Solution to Everything: megamessianic undertakings, many of which ended in failure, destruction and death.

  Grandiose projects have played a central role in Russian history and identity since the launching of the greatest tsarist architectural feat in 1703. Built largely by forced serf labor on marshland beside the Gulf of Finland, the city of St. Petersburg represented an immense act of will. Peter the Great wanted the capital moved from Moscow to a port closer to the rest of Europe, mainly so it could serve as a bulwark against the Swedish Empire, which had dominated the Baltic Sea for centuries. By the time the Peter and Paul Fortress was completed, however, Peter had vanquished the Swedes, who no longer posed a threat to his new capital. Subsequent rulers expanded it along a plan of radial streets whose rational layout was meant to display the reach of the tsar’s empire. Up went ornate, sometimes outlandishly decorated baroque buildings, many conceived by Italian architects, most prominently Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who designed the fabulous Winter Palace.

  But if building St. Petersburg represented an all-out bid to create a European city, as many suppose, the project missed the mark in at least one telling respect. Whereas most capitals developed over centuries from small settlements to include layers of Romanesque, Gothic and baroque architecture, Russia’s new metropolis was distinctly different. It represented Europe at a single stage of its development, with a distinctly un-European uniformity that remains a monument to the Russian penchant for using foreign forms for its own purposes and characteristic creations.

  The new capital provoked extreme reactions. Alexander Herzen described it as having no history, Western or Russian—a place where no
thing was original. Myths filled the vacuum, starting with apocryphal folktales about floods and other forces of nature avenging the creation of a foreign city whose granite banks straitjacketed the water flowing through its canals. Pushkin drew on those themes to give St. Petersburg its central literary work. His 1833 epic poem “The Bronze Horseman” describes a statue of Peter on horseback by the French sculptor Étienne Falconet. Erected by Catherine the Great, it depicts his mount rearing above the snake of treason next to a malevolent Neva River.

  November’s breath of autumn cold;

  And Neva with her boisterous billow

  Splashed on her shapely bounding-wall

  And tossed in restless rise and fall

  Like a sick man upon his pillow.1

  The poem follows the story of a young clerk named Yevgeny, whose betrothed is swept away during the great flood of 1824. Driven to madness, he threatens the statue, then imagines it coming to life to pursue him through the city in a narrative that immortalized the image of Peter as a symbol of ruthless will. It established the tension between his creation’s grand facades and nature’s dark forces as a major literary theme.