In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

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  To Nina’s mother, Julia Khrushcheva, who vehemently opposed our plan to travel across Russia and then became a passionate supporter of the project, but didn’t live to see the publication of this book

  PROLOGUE

  SOLOVKI, THE SOUL OF RUSSIA

  We will drive humanity to happiness with an iron hand!

  —Soviet slogan from the Stalin era

  At dusk, a forty-seat propeller plane from the 1970s circles around the islands, pale masses in an indigo sea. One circle, two, and then three. A flight that should take forty minutes has now dragged on for an hour and a half. We can’t land.

  The pilot announces over the speakerphone: “It’s the wind. The Solovetsky Islands’ landing strip is too short. With such a wind, we’d be blown right into the White Sea.” He pauses, and then requests, in all seriousness, “Pray to the Solovetsky Islands that they accept you.”

  It is a few nights before Christmas—the Russian Orthodox Christmas, that is, which falls in early January. The plane is filled with religious tourists and nuns in black habits, with their hair hidden beneath black kerchiefs, and shod in, surprisingly, posh black hiking boots. Nowadays it is cool to be Orthodox Christian in Russia.

  Everyone lowers their eyes and prays.

  Ten minutes later the plane, wobbling in the fierce erratic winds, manages to touch down.

  Welcome to Solovki (as the Solovetsky Islands are called, in Russian, for short)—an archipelago in the White Sea about a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. The remote abode of a monastery and a colony of exiles under the czars, a forced labor camp and military barracks under the Soviets, the Solovetsky Islands these days are a Kremlin-patronized religious sanctuary where the past and the present collide.

  The landing field terminates by a single-story, gable-roofed blue brick airport waiting hall that abuts a white, onion-domed chapel (converted into an outhouse during the early part of the Soviet era) topped with a gilt Russian Orthodox cross. Waiting is a crowd of bearded, black-clad monks who greet the arriving passengers.

  It is three in the afternoon, and the pale orange sun is setting, the violet sky darkening, the cross losing its glint and luster. Mid-winter days last just five hours at this subarctic latitude. (Summer days, in contrast, linger endlessly, with several weeks of sublime “white nights” ending with the sun rising obliquely, infusing the pale firmament with golden light that eventually gives way to the softest of azures.) Ahead of us the monastery’s domes, towers, and crosses—lots of crosses—rise, almost black against the sky, composing an image fit for a postcard. A postcard, as it happens, from both heaven and hell. For much of the past century, communist red stars topped these Christian domes—a violent juxtaposition, a clash between God and Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks murdered, among other political outcasts, scores of monks, nuns, and priests and smashed the bronze bells. The bells chiming here so regularly are in fact of more recent provenance.

  Solovki once held the prototypical labor camp—the first of, eventually, many that formed a sweeping crescent of outposts of toil and misery across the most inclement parts of the Soviet lands. The Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn would dub them, collectively, the Gulag Archipelago, in his eponymous magnum opus on prison life during the Stalin decades. Solzhenitsyn served his time in Ekibastuz, now in Kazakhstan, and wrote his semiautobiographical documentary masterpiece in the 1970s. But the metaphor for The Gulag Archipelago title came from the arch of labor camp sites established in these northerly latitudes in the 1920s. The new Soviet government opened the first forced labor camp of its Gulag—the grim acronym standing for the USSR’s Chief Administration of Labor Camps—on these islands where, since the 1500s, the czars had already held their first religious and political prisoners.

  “Zheleznoi rukoi zagonim chelovechestvo k schastyu” (We will drive humanity to happiness with an iron hand) was the Soviet slogan emblazoned on banners once festooning the dirt lanes of the main settlement, Solovetsky. The brutal saying accorded with the violent legend of how humans came to settle the islands in the 1430s. Two angels are said to have beaten to death a fisherman’s wife because she landed on the islands’ holy terrain, which God, supposedly, had reserved only for the devout. A legend most likely created by monks, who first came here to establish their refuge for prayer and meditation. What is this legend if not a precursor to communism, with its mix of millennial, quasireligious belief in a dogma and the violence used to enforce it?

  Surrounding us is the barren landscape of winter—frozen lakes become vast snowfields, exuding a glowing whiteness in the crepuscular evening light; dark, brooding pine forests; and, above all this, gold crosses, glinting with the faint rays of the dying sun. Yet in summer the sun awakens the sleeping land, invigorating life in the forests and bogs and raising clouds of giant mosquitos that torment all warm-blooded creatures. These creatures used to threaten the sanity and the lives of humans wandering the wilds here unprotected, turning their days into merciless crucibles. They still do.

  The locals say, nevertheless, that “Cold is the primordial state of Solovki, the islands of utopia and dystopia, both blessed and cursed.”

  They might as well be talking about all of Russia.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN PUTIN’S FOOTSTEPS

  The Kremlin warned that if the West further expands the sanctions, the Kremlin will further increase Putin’s ratings.

  —A contemporary Russian joke

  On New Year’s Eve, 1999, journalists in the Russian president’s press pool had a feeling that things were going to change. They were right: the feeble and aging Boris Yeltsin, who could barely board a plane or stand for a fifteen-minute press conference, was about to deliver his End of the Year Address, in which he resigned and ceded power to his prime minister and handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin. Once head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-communist “democratic” version of the dreaded KGB, Putin was indeed an unusual choice, having served as the head of the government for only a few months. But the forty-eight-year-old ex-spy, who would become the youngest Kremlin leader since the Soviet Union’s founders, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, had a quiet energy that seemed boundless. As boundless as the geographic expanses contained within Russia’s eleven—yes, eleven—time zones.

  After taking over from Yeltsin as acting president on the first day of the new millennium, and after winning, by a landslide, presidential elections three months later, Putin, in the year to come, held over a dozen press conferences and traveled to almost two dozen countries and at least a quarter of Russia’s eighty-nine regions, which are spread out over eleven time zones. Altogether, he was seen in public and on television more often than Yeltsin during most of his eight-year presidency.

  Suddenly the press had something to report. The new stories we
re no longer those of Yeltsin’s Russia, which was perceived, both at home and abroad, as a weak, insignificant, and corrupt bogeyman reeling from its Cold War defeat. These were stories of an enigmatic young technocrat tirelessly crisscrossing the country and meeting with workers, farmers, and cultural figures, attending theater galas and factory openings.

  All that uplifting travel—Russia was starving for the Kremlin’s attention—connected Putin to ordinary people and gave him the idea of delivering a rousing New Year’s Eve televised address to the nation. Standing before the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower, just before the giant bells rang in the year 2001, under starry winter skies in front of a large, snow-dusted Christmas tree, he pledged to counter the negativity of the post-Soviet decade and set the country on a new, positive course.

  This he did. In his address, the ardent young leader looked both charming and in charge when he spoke of Russia’s great future, heroic past, and enduring spirit.

  Putin had often appeared a reserved technocrat, but soon he would demonstrate a talent for finding opportunities to impress the heartland. He knew the best way to get to people’s hearts: showing them that his priority was returning Russia to the world stage as a major power of formidable dimensions.

  Originally, he had an even bolder plan for his New Year’s address, and he had run it by journalists in his press pool during one of his trips around Russia. Without a hint of doubt in his voice, Putin told them that “Russia is an enormous country, a great country. We need to remember that our strength is our size. What if I were to travel through Russia’s limitless land in one night, through all its eleven time zones, stopping in each one at midnight local time to record the New Year’s message to show our nation’s greatness, our riches, the diversity of our Mother Russia, our unity, our worth?”1

  Even though Russia’s time zones are exaggerated in number (there should only be seven, according to generally accepted geographic markers of Greenwich Mean Time’s [GMT] twenty-four-hour cycle, also called Coordinated Universal Time and abbreviated as UTC), maintaining them is not only a political matter; it is reflective of the national identity, state power, and international influence. Russia has eleven time zones, more than any other country, and that, as Russians would have it, bespeaks its status in a way no one can deny.

  Often the time that appears on a nation’s iconic clock—Big Ben in the United Kingdom, for instance, or those daunting dials on the Spassky Tower, in Russia’s case—is a subtle way of representing where power lies. In Russia, every time zone is first referenced in relation to MSK, Moscow Standard Time, with UTC only following. Moreover, many countries don’t even adhere to the twenty-four-hour GMT-UTC’s neat meridians. China’s huge landmass should straddle five different time zones, yet operates according to just one. Inhabitants of western China, if they follow their clocks, have dark mornings and light evenings, but nobody doubts that only the Beijing time matters. When Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999, he decided to create a new time zone that would set Venezuela thirty minutes apart from neighboring countries. That was his way to let the world know that Venezuela was striking out on its own.

  But Putin’s idea of showcasing his country’s temporal and geographic diversity in just one night was certainly unique, and it accorded with his plans to return Russia to its lost great-power status. It also sprung from what Putin knew Russians expect of their leader: something close to godlike status. Keen on creating a leader’s image steeped in tradition, history, and mythology often associated with the uniqueness of the “Russian soul”—spiritual endurance, persevering patience, belief in miracles, and material sacrifice—he wanted to be seen as the Ded Moroz (“Granddad Frost,” the Russian Santa Claus) bearing gifts of renewed national importance and self-confidence.

  Capitalizing on Russia’s size—six thousand miles from east to west—Putin hoped to begin restoring his country’s grandeur, once czarist, then Soviet, and now Russian. The idea was bold and beautiful but, unfortunately, unrealizable. The young leader soon had to abandon his “across Russia in one night” plan, because covering eleven times zones in eleven hours, indeed, could only be done in a magic sleigh, not in an actual airplane.

  Now, eighteen years later—it is worth recalling that he first became president when Bill Clinton sat in the White House—after last year comfortably securing his fourth presidential term with a formidable 77 percent public support,2 Putin is even more determined to present Russia as a formidable nation. In his 2017 New Year’s Address, he promised to bring all of Russia to the world stage, asserting that his country has finally “risen off its knees” and has truly become “vast, unique, and wonderful.”3 He remains firm in his conviction that his country’s geographic dimensions play a vital role in projecting power, which he has done, lately, in close-by Ukraine and as far afield as Syria.

  For the past few years the world’s eyes have set on Russia, with the same intensity as they did during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, or the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union following Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The reasons have been manifold: Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the consequent Kremlin-supported secession from Ukraine of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics; the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections; the European and American diplomatic crisis in 2018, after former GRU spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were said to be poisoned in the United Kingdom with the nerve agent Novichok.

  Putin has taken a tough stance in responding to these occurrences and allegations. He has been driving both the events and the rhetoric around them in Russia and across the globe. The very picture of a statesman, he has offered the West partnership around the world’s hot spots, be they Syria or North Korea. The more the West chastises Russia for its rogue behavior, though, the more combative Putin’s rhetoric has become.

  As have so many in many countries, we, too, wanted to know how Putin’s idea of restoring pride to his once powerful nation has been playing out across its vast expanses. The great-granddaughter of Premier Khrushchev, Nina Khrushcheva, now a New Yorker, was brought up in elite circles in Moscow and is eager to see and understand her native Russia beyond the capital’s bounds. Jeffrey Tayler, living in Moscow and married to a Russian woman, Tatyana, felt the same way, his last trans-Russia journey having taken place in 1993.

  Both of us wondered if the Kremlin had really managed to impose its writ on a hinterland traditionally impervious to change, but nevertheless having undergone three dramatic political and social upheavals in the past century alone. Determined to find out, in the spring and summer of 2017 we did something close to the sequential trans-Russia journey from which Putin found he had to desist. We followed, though in the warmer, more comfortable months, in what would have been his footsteps, visiting all of Russia’s eleven time zones in search of the factors—among them, natural resources, educational institutions, ethnic and religious diversity, and strategic assets—that define Russia and its place in the world. Do they, in fact, make the country an “indispensable nation,” to borrow a phrase former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used to describe the United States? And it was not just in Putin’s footsteps we traveled; we followed the historical footprints of other Kremlin leaders, who, too, left lasting imprints on this giant land and on the people.

  We announced our plans to our families in Moscow and upset them greatly. To those safely ensconced within the capital’s confines, traveling out into the hinterland—almost anywhere besides Moscow—seemed like a risky, grueling undertaking. The press in Russia and abroad had been reporting on cases of arrests or prosecution of those critical of Putin, and on animosity toward foreigners. In fact, even in Moscow we heard an occasional drunken outburst. On a bus one of us witnessed a young man in a T-shirt emblazoned with RUSSIA (in English) slur his words and shout at a group of unruffled Italian tourists, “Yankee, go home!”

  “At least don’t speak English to each other!” pleaded Nina’s mother, Julia, a
Muscovite. She worried that widespread Russian support for Putin’s annexation of Crimea would bring us unwanted attention. After all, it was Khrushchev who, in 1954, had transferred Crimea (Russian from 1783 until then) to Ukraine. This was at Khrushchev’s time an administrative move, which shifted control of the area from one Soviet socialist republic to another, with the aim of improving its governance—the Crimean Peninsula lies to the Ukrainian mainland’s south, without a land connection to Russia. That, of course, changed in May 2018, when the Crimea Bridge opened with pomp and circumstance over the Kerch Strait that divided the peninsula from the Russian territory.

  In his Granddad Frost–type travels, Putin had planned on moving east to west, but we would do the opposite, because despite its grandstanding as a unique power, Russia’s definition of itself begins in Europe, with the arrival, in the ninth century, of the Ruriks. The Ruriks were Nordic princes who came to rule over the eastern Slavs, the proto-Slavic people speaking Old Russian, the language from which Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian would emerge. A century later, Russia further anchored its identity in Europe by adopting Christianity from the Byzantine Greeks. Moreover, once Byzantium had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the devastating era of Tatar-Mongolian rule over Russia ended in the 1470s, the country declared itself the Byzantine Empire’s successor, the Third Rome, as the last bastion of Orthodox (that is, true, spiritual) Christianity. Russia appropriated the Byzantine Empire’s emblem—its imperial coat of arms, with the double-headed eagle. From then on, the country began expanding (both east and west) thanks to the successful efforts of the early czars. Its growth was further assisted by Europeanizing reforms of Russia’s first emperor, Peter the Great. The young sovereign undertook these reforms after visiting Europe in the late seventeenth century and encountering countries vastly more developed than his own.