Although “The Bronze Horseman” depicts Peter’s vision for the city as a “window on the West,” Pushkin didn’t invent the metaphor. As the Harvard literary scholar Julie Buckler has argued, a nobleman first used it in a 1739 letter in which he described St. Petersburg as something very different from a conduit to Europe: a shop window. With the city representing all of Europe inside Russia, according to that logic, Russians had no need to go to the West. There it was, on display for them in St. Petersburg.
The earlier understanding of “window” lies closer to another metaphor that later came to describe the city: a theatrical stage. The Marquis de Custine, among others, described St. Petersburgers as actors. “I do not blame the Russians for being what they are,” he wrote.
I blame them for pretending what we are… In Petersburg everything has an air of opulence, grandeur, magnificence; but if you judge reality by this appearance, you will find yourself strangely deceived. Ordinarily the first effect of civilization is to make material life easy; here everything is difficult; crafty indifference is the secret of the life of the great majority.2
St. Petersburg’s deceptive image reflects the importance of fiction for running the huge empire that could barely keep an infrastructure in place. The need to maintain an appearance of order enhanced the perception of theatricality and artifice. In that way, in the primacy of its facade, the city that is usually seen as a foreign plant on Russian soil is actually quintessentially Russian. Ironically, the new capital’s perception as alien to Russia’s true nature became integral to its culture. Moscow continued to represent Russia’s big heart: a sprawling, seething, overgrown village that Gogol compared to an old housewife cooking blini. By contrast, St. Petersburg was German—meticulous and narcissistic.3
Cracks in its facade—seedy dark alleys, grinding poverty and the hyper-obsession with rank and groveling outward obedience against which Dostoevsky’s protagonist rails in his seminal Notes from Underground—also undermined its grandeur. Petersburg, a 1913 Symbolist novel by a highly intellectual writer named Andrei Bely, provided one of the ultimate expressions of those dark themes. It follows a wealthy young revolutionary ordered to assassinate his father, a high tsarist official. An assemblage of fragments and references that describes a surreal city of double agents, chaos and paranoia, the book portrays the wrenching social changes brought about by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the early twentieth century. Apocalyptic visions from the St. Petersburg tradition appear on almost every page, including historical and fictional characters from “The Bronze Horseman,” Dostoevsky’s underground man, and Gogolian overcoats and noses.
After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks transformed St. Petersburg’s symbolic role by returning the capital to Moscow. Deprived of its official function, the theatrical stage became a museum. After more than a million inhabitants died during the Nazi blockade in World War II, mostly from starvation, the city was rebuilt, then saved from the ruin of Soviet development largely by neglect. The poet Joseph Brodsky saw his native city as a cultural vessel.
I must say that from these façades and porticoes—classical, modern, eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic animals or people—from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the balconies, from the torsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned more about the history of our world than I have subsequently from any book.4
Crime-ridden and very poor compared to Moscow—roughly a quarter of the population stills inhabits communal apartments—St. Petersburg remains very different in its core and spirit. Rarely able to fully relax in the seething capital, I took the overnight train as often as I could for therapeutic strolls along St. Petersburg’s stunning canals and in its down-at-the-heels gardens. It was especially appealing during the white nights season in late June, when the sun never fully sets and the glee of young residents carousing on the streets until early dawn becomes infectious.
Finally, however, New Russia’s oil money began trickling down to the former capital, threatening its architectural unity with Kremlin plans to relocate various state agencies there. Poorly regulated new construction by developers who began pushing residents from the city center in order to illegally rebuild or simply raze old homes has been more destructive. Although many buildings are protected by law, a prominent historian and preservationist named Alexander Margolis believes few are safe. “Under our style of capitalism,” Margolis said to me in despair, “developers bribe officials to condemn sound buildings and allow them to build whatever they want. It’s not clear how much of the old St. Petersburg will survive.” Meanwhile, the city retains its old role in the national consciousness, at least for now. The head of the Moscow Architectural Institute, a scholar named Vyacheslav Glazychev, told me it has helped preserve a “natural Europeanism” that remains a strong antithesis to the rest of Russia. “I always talk about a binary pattern,” he said. “That means two capitals of Russia, not just Moscow.”
If St. Petersburg is the product of a unified vision, Moscow is a cacophony of conflicting, unfinished projects. As Muscovites themselves like to point out, their city, despite its estimated thirteen million residents, retains the feel of a provincial village whose various parts reflect different priorities and ideologies. Large swaths of Moscow’s mostly nineteenth-century neighborhoods were bulldozed as part of the communist aim of building a model socialist metropolis with broad avenues of totalitarian grandiosity. The seven so-called Stalin skyscrapers, massive neo-Gothic edifices looming over their districts, are the most visible fruits of that effort. But the project progressed in fits and starts. Stalin’s tastes fluctuated and war interrupted construction before his death in 1953. While the heavy neoclassical Stalinist structures, with their austere pillars and spires, still dominate a number of thoroughfares—including Tverskaya Street, a kind of main drag—pre-Revolutionary Art Nouveau and baroque buildings still provide welcome contrasts.
Khrushchev later imposed a cut-rate, glass-and-concrete vision of modernity. The best examples—on a sprawling, impersonal street called Novy Arbat, roughly parallel to Tverskaya—were outdated even before their completion, although those efforts are luxurious compared to the brutalist concrete-panel eyesores that went up almost everywhere else. But even their construction had virtually halted in the decaying city by 1991.
The subsequent capitalist boom brought new layers of eclectic, mostly garish new office and apartment buildings built during a construction spree tightly controlled by former Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who combined free-market economics with a Soviet command-style administration that micromanaged most aspects of city life until his ouster in 2011. Luzhkov was also among the first post-Soviet politicians to begin appropriating symbols from Russia’s past to glorify his rule.
The Christ the Savior cathedral, the world’s largest Russian Orthodox church, was among his most ambitious projects. First constructed in the late nineteenth century to mark the victory over Napoleon in 1812, it was dynamited in the 1930s to make way for a colossal Palace of Soviets that was never built. The site eventually housed a giant outdoor swimming pool until Luzhkov commissioned the construction of a copy of the original cathedral. The gaudy new version, a symbol of Russia’s supposed spiritual rebirth after seventy years of communism, was decorated by Luzhkov’s “court artist,” a Georgian named Zurab Tseretelli. Luzhkov also had Tseretelli design an underground shopping mall in Manezh Square, adjacent to the more famous Red Square, where garish, cloying statuettes of characters from Russian fables decorate a set of fountains. Tseretelli’s contribution to the city’s Victory Park, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, include a gargantuan spire that can be seen for miles.
However, Tseretelli’s most controversial work is a towering statue dominating a central bend of the Moscow River. Erected to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the Russian navy, it shows Peter the Great standing on a supposedly eighteenth-century ship whose above-deck structure consists of S
t. Petersburg buildings. Whether its many levels of historical nonsense were intentionally or unwittingly ironic, the twenty-five-million-dollar structure is a mountain of bad taste. Ignoring St. Petersburg’s artificiality and the seeming contradictions of Peter’s image—paradox itself being a dominant feature of the national character—Tseretelli’s take on the Bronze Horseman sculpture was an odd choice for Moscow. Luzhkov, whose chief interest was surely underscoring his power, made nonsense of the sea, Russia’s infant navy and everything that linked Peter to St. Petersburg as few people have ever been to any city.
Around the same time, Boris Yeltsin commissioned committees of scholars for a much-derided attempt to develop a “national idea” that would help fill the ideological void left by the disappearance of communism. But it was Luzhkov who set the tone for what would come later by harking back to tsarist history, including by occasionally dressing himself up in a knight’s costume to portray Yuri Dolgoruki, Moscow’s supposed twelfth-century founder. It’s no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that Stalin erected a statue to the same warrior outside what is now the city hall. The Soviet dictator often appealed to Russia’s sense of patriotism by way of its history, especially after the onset of World War II. Trying to do the same, Luzhkov later provoked controversy during a failed attempt to erect billboards depicting Stalin in honor of the Soviet victory over the Nazis.
Putin has since taken the lead in adopting symbols from pre-Revolutionary and communist history to generate a nostalgia-fogged vision of Russian identity that has helped camouflage the nature of his rule. He appropriated the music for the Stalin-era Soviet anthem for Russia’s use and—a mere week after having announced that Russia had “no elements” of Stalinism—introduced a Hero of Labor award, another relic that first appeared under Stalin as the Hero of Socialist Labor. The president also likes to compare himself to earlier doers such as the ruthless Stolypin, Nicholas II’s prime minister, whom Russians remember today less for introducing his important land reforms than for inspiring “Stolypin wagons,” a type of train car that still carries inmates to Siberian penal colonies. Putin has also invoked Prince Alexander Gorchakov, one of Russia’s most respected foreign ministers, whom he quoted in the title of his 2012 election manifesto, Russia Is Concentrating, an allusion to the country’s renewal following its devastating defeat in the Crimean War in 1856. Revealing his vision of democracy in another publication, Putin said Russia had no need of “the circus of various candidates competing with each other to give more and more unrealistic promises.” Purporting to criticize his opponents, the harangue was startling for its description, again intentional or unwitting, of his own system of elaborate pretense.
We don’t need a situation where all that is left of democracy is the facade, where democracy is understood as a one-time entertaining political show and a candidates’ casting call, where substance is forgotten for the sake of shocking statements and mutual accusations, where real politics is reduced to shady deals and decisions made behind the scenes but never discussed with voters. We should avoid that blind alley.
Putin’s projects have been as remarkable for their hollowness as for anything else. As Europeans debated the EU’s future amid the euro crisis in 2011, he proposed a new alliance that would resurrect a form of the Soviet Union by bringing its former member states into a “Eurasian Union.” This one would be bound not by ideology but trade, building on an existing customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan that Putin has described as “the most important geopolitical integration in the post-Soviet space since the breakup of the Soviet Union.” Having done as much as anyone to stifle regional economic cooperation by banning goods imported from Georgia and Moldova and cutting off gas to Ukraine, Putin now voiced hope that the union would supersede the Commonwealth of Independent States, a toothless alliance of eleven of the original fifteen Soviet republics.
The new plan evokes Eurasianism, a hard-line nationalist movement conceived by 1920s émigrés who believed Russia to be closer to Asia than to Europe. Resurrected in the 1980s, it has recently been led by Alexander Dugin, a strident ideologue who envisions a strategic bloc that would join the former Soviet Union to Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, in order to rival the American-led Euro-Atlantic alliance. It fits well with Putin’s oft-invoked “multipolar” world order—as opposed to the “unipolar” US-led version—although rather than building international institutions, his main goal is strengthening Russian power. Whereas the communists distributed cheap oil, gas and other subsidies as a way of bribing allies and clients, Putin has engaged in hard-nosed bargaining aimed at increasing Moscow’s influence and has issued credit to countries such as Belarus, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, which have been willing to buy Russian commodities in return for ceding control over pipelines and other infrastructure.
In a 2013 apologia for Putin published in the Financial Times that had all the hallmarks of official propaganda, Dugin explained that having been abandoned by the liberal elite during the recent mass protests, the president was now following his true beliefs by becoming a Russian “conservative modernizer” who would save the homeland from a “single, encroaching world order.”5 Comparing Putin to a pantheon composed of Peter the Great, Stalin, Lenin and Ivan the Terrible, Dugin said his mandate was his appeal to the Russian masses and that his actions represented a “rethinking of what comes at the end of the transition” from communism. “Having lost the cold war,” Dugin wrote, “Russia will try to revise the status quo using all available opportunities.”
Some see Eurasianism’s rhetoric as a salve for the trauma of the communist collapse. As Richard Pipes has argued, countries such as England and France, which had created national states before forming overseas empires, found it easier to deal with the end of colonialism. The Russian nation-state, by contrast, developed concurrently with an empire it directly bordered. “As a result, the loss of empire caused confusion in the Russians’ sense of national identity,” he wrote. “They have great difficulty acknowledging that Ukraine, the cradle of their state, is now a sovereign republic and fantasize about the day when it will reunite with Mother Russia.”6
Without Ukraine, moreover, the largest market for Russian exports, Moscow can have no real hope of establishing the Eurasian Union. So when Kiev was preparing to sign major agreements with the EU—a possible step toward eventual membership—in late 2013, Moscow issued an ultimatum that it couldn’t choose both and threatened economic sanctions. Russia’s anger had the effect only of hardening Ukraine’s resolve to sign the EU deals.
Even more damaging for its interests, the Kremlin has been hard at work squandering its greatest instrument of influence, the Russian language. Picking fights with Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and other former Soviet republics—whose populations, subjected to Russification sometimes for centuries, have spoken the language as a second mother tongue—has encouraged them to want to forget Russian. Some three hundred million people spoke the language in 1990, but it’s projected that only half that number will speak it by 2025 as former colonies cement their own national identities by focusing on their native languages.
Putin’s grand visions include doubling Moscow’s size to alleviate its mind-numbing traffic jams and rebuilding Sochi for the Olympics. In that gaudy symbol of postcommunist Russia, where moneyed vacationers go to swim in the murky sea or ski in the Caucasus Mountains, prices are as high as New York’s. Like Peter the Great in his day, Putin has coerced billionaire businessmen into supporting the undertaking. One built a new airport and a seaport; another dropped two billion dollars into the nearby mountain resort.7 Putin farmed out another scheme, building a Russian Silicon Valley in a suburb called Skolkovo, to Medvedev. Dismissing those plans as fantasy, Vedomosti, a leading business daily, wrote that “the way [the authorities] speak, they are practically past accomplishments, and it would seem that Russia should share its successful experience of modernization with all backward countries still struggling to develop.”
“In the Kremlin’s
imaginary utopian world,” the paper continued with more than a little irony, “Russia is already the core of a powerful regional alliance stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. That union is a force with which the whole world must reckon, especially because the Russian military will be armed with cutting-edge technology and weapons and will overwhelm the entire world.”
Britain was only just establishing its empire when Alexis de Tocqueville famously predicted that two relatively unnoticed countries of the time would one day compete for world domination. Russia and America, he wrote in Democracy in America, published in 1835, would follow different paths to become great powers. “The principal instrument of the former is freedom,” he argued, “of the latter, servitude.” Each “seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
Almost two centuries later, Russians and Americans are often likened to each other for their informality, easy hospitality and other qualities less frequently encountered in the more stratified European societies. They are also similar for their attachment to reinvention as a cultural theme, although in very different if not opposite ways. The American dream includes escaping the past and its European roots. Russians dream of being respected in Europe if not accepted as part of it. It bears repetition that Russian culture tends to be reactive in the sense of borrowing Western ideas and transforming them to fit native patterns and conceptions. Some ideas are inventive and original, such as the culture magazine Openspace.ru and the television channel Dozhd—Internet sites that are lively reminders of the 1990s, when media outlets were raw and vital. However, most initiatives are anything but.
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