In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  Much, but not all. One drizzly morning, we took a taxi to the cathedral, passing by older women selling flowers, fruits, and vegetables from little stands on the sidewalks, and noting scruffy men of all ages bundled up against the weather, fishing for pike in the canal’s pewter-colored waters. We walked around the massive redbrick structure, where, despite ten years of restoration, many of its windows still sported shoddy slabs of cardboard instead of the original stained glass. Approaching Kant’s tomb, we heard a Russian guide addressing a group of fifteen Russian tourists. After informing her guests that Kant lay buried in front of them, she added, with a schoolmarm’s imperiousness, “And now I invite you to honor the memory of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant with a moment of silence.”

  The group fell silent, and so did we—out of shock. After all, who honors a philosopher, a thinker whose legacy consists of words, with silence? Such a practice was eerily familiar from Soviet days, when it was common to observe “moments of silence” for the memory of Lenin, Stalin, or Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev after his ouster in 1964. We half-expected her to refer to Kant as “our Soviet comrade.”

  After some seventy years of communism, during which the state told its citizens not only how to think about politics, but what to make of history, philosophy, and pretty much everything else, Soviet bureaucratic jargon still has a grip on the Russian psyche. When czarist-era peasants became post-1917 proletarian revolutionaries, they adopted this officialese to convince themselves and others of their new status, affirming their transformation from peasant to urbanite. One of Bulgakov’s satirical masterpieces, The Heart of a Dog, recounts just such a phenomenon. The writer had a Russian scientist transmogrify a lovable mutt into a despicable communist functionary spouting militantly officious lingo to humorous effect. After the Soviet Union’s collapse such language still permeates the interactions between citizens and state employees—and even those in the private sector.

  We found evidence of this at the cathedral’s elaborate lavatory, where a sign outside indicated its rezhim raboty, or “work regime.” “Regime” is a holdover from the Soviet past, when all sorts of institutions, from airports to factories to local bakeries to corner cobblers, were governmental entities serving the nation in accordance with criteria laid out in five-year plans. The economy was planned, and everything was ready for potential militarization. (Twenty-five years since the end of communism, a good number of cafés and restaurants—and not only in Kaliningrad—still present themselves to the public as if they were national security installations.) Inside the lavatory, the middle-age female attendant, when we complimented her on the lush, even exotic, potted flowers gracing the atrium between the men’s and women’s rooms, replied gruffly that they exist “po rasporyazheniyu administratsii.” She meant that the flowers were arranged according to the instructions of the church’s administration. State planning has not only failed to fade away, it has extended to public toilets.

  The cathedral opens every day starting at ten in the morning. Much more than a church, it now hosts, on its upper stories, a museum devoted to Kant. On the ground floor it houses a spectacular music hall staging concerts in the evenings and featuring a Baroque organ dating back to the 1800s; two chapels are in operation just inside the entrance portals. Yet here, even religious faith bears traces of history and politics: one chapel is Lutheran, a tribute to the Protestantism of its builders; the other, Russian Orthodox.

  We were among the first to walk in that morning. By the ticket office we immediately found ourselves witness to a conversation reflecting Russia’s internal tensions—between its history and its ideology, its geography, and its identity.

  An elderly cleaning woman saluted the uniformed guard on duty and wished him a pleasant Border Guard Day. In fact she was a month early; Border Guard Day falls on May 28. No matter: in Russia, holidays honoring members of various professions—journalists, teachers, postmen, the armed forces, and so on—sprinkle the calendar.

  The man replied, “I’m guarding the cathedral, not the border.”

  “No,” the woman said, “we’re surrounded by borders. We must be vigilant! We’re all border guards here!”

  A passing Lutheran priest, stern and silver-haired, jumped into the conversation. “Why do they even bother to worship God when the only person they truly worship is Stalin?”

  The cleaner answered, “Well, we have to pray to someone, and Stalin is the worthiest. He instilled the fear of God in everyone.” The incongruity of describing an atheist tyrant—in the 1930s alone almost 200,000 priests were arrested,6 and half were shot to death—as capable of arousing piety eluded her, as it eludes many increasingly patriotic Russians. She then turned to an icon of Christ above the entrance to the Orthodox chapel and crossed herself.

  Once inside the Lutheran chapel, we looked to the priest—also a tour guide, as it happened—for an explanation. Why would Stalin be so openly worshipped in such a “Western” city? Moreover, in a cathedral the Bolsheviks might have leveled, had they governed the oblast in their first decades in power? Even in Moscow, adoration for the tyrant—many Russians do hold him in high regard and his rating as the “most outstanding” Russian tops everyone’s list, including Putin’s—finds expression in subtler ways.7

  The priest shrugged. “She’s a drill sergeant,” he said sarcastically. “So is everyone here.”

  He had a point. A base, Soviet mind-set survives in much of Russia, even in a place as un-Soviet as a cathedral. We soon encountered further evidence of this. We sat down on a bench in front of the music hall to check the concert schedule, only to be ordered by an elegantly dressed attendant to get up and move—now!

  “You can’t sit here!” she barked.

  “Why not?”

  “You just can’t!”

  We could hear music—musicians rehearsing for their evening concert?—coming from behind the door to the concert hall. Perhaps, we thought, she didn’t want us to listen for free. Still, there were polite ways of asking us to leave. The underlying assumption of Soviet life, and much of Russian life, too, is that things are forbidden—unless you are advised otherwise.

  The Lutheran priest, who turned out to be ethnically German, informed us that he’s “here because of my German roots.” His mien displayed the arrogance of a Westerner certain that his right to reside in Kaliningrad trumped that of the presumably “inferior” Russian usurpers surrounding him. He went on to tell us that he descended from Germans who, some 250 years ago, heeded the call of the Prussian-born empress Catherine the Great to her former countrymen to come to Russia and establish orderly, German-style farming amid disorderly Russian peasants, mostly along the Volga River. (His family ended up in Kaliningrad after the war, possibly uprooted by Stalin’s forced transfer of potentially “treasonous” populations.) Catherine the Great’s invitation marked the beginning of the country’s Russo-German history, and thereby set up a dichotomy within Russia itself—enlightened European Russia versus ignorant Russian Russia—the very Russia embodied, at least for this priest, by the “drill sergeant” janitor.

  We ascended the stairs to the cathedral’s Kant museum, walking in past a table where a vendor sold Kant chocolate, Kant kitchen magnets, and Kant mugs, alongside Putin portraits, Putin mugs, and a variety of badges and paraphernalia bearing the eagle. Inside the museum proper, we examined Kant busts, Kant sculptures, and books by and about Kant in many languages. Soon we came upon a diorama of old Königsberg, with its miniature brick buildings and cobbled streets laid out in perfect order beneath churches with soaring spires—all in all, a placid, quaint depiction of a past era.

  The blind arrogance of such a display here was cynical indeed; after all, it was the Russians who reduced the city to rubble in 1945 to stamp out traces of its German past.

  And Stalin’s vision of rebuilding the city was a far more complicated affair than the display let on; it involved cultural nuances, propaganda, and ethnic cleansing.

  It is important to remem
ber that as the Russian peasantry rebuilt their new city, Stalin was effectively convincing Soviet citizens that the biggest enemy facing the Soviet Union often came from within the country—and particularly from ethnic minorities such as Germans, Chechens and Dagestanis in the Caucasus, and others elsewhere. Ultimately, both the Soviet Union and the newly relocated Russian peasants of Kaliningrad blamed ethnic Germans for the war. By that time, many people, and not just the Soviets in fact, had come to believe that Germans were inherently fascist. So the Germans had to be blamed for difficulties suffered in Kaliningrad’s struggle to become the New Soviet City.

  Through locally taken decisions the Russian peasants occupying the city began removing traces of Germanness: the boulevards were widened, the German-like facades of buildings were removed, the ruins of castles were destroyed, and monuments were taken down. The final step was the expulsion of 100,000 Germans from Kaliningrad. Some were either expelled to East Germany; others became forced laborers or starved.

  Effectively, within five years, the city had wiped out the greater part of its historical legacy.

  The diorama in the cathedral’s museum appeared designed to tout Russia’s ability to bridge the old and the new, as if Russia had nothing to do with the death of the past. That death was evident as soon as one stepped outside the cathedral. As the contrast between the idyllic diorama of the museum and the roughshod cement cityscape demonstrated, Russia was neither at ease with its history nor capable of entirely rejecting it. Despite all the efforts made—by both the state and its people—the idea of a new Soviet Kaliningrad was never fully realized, nor did the city fully erase its German roots.

  And yet nowhere was this visible in the idyllic diorama. Nor, of course, was Kaliningrad’s most prominent present-day feature: the gigantic twenty-one-story House of Soviets. The building calls to mind a shoddily designed modernist office chair built in the 1970s. Built during Brezhnev’s time, it is the embodiment of an era once known as “developed socialism.” So developed, in fact, that it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the building never completed as a result.

  Kaliningradians joke that the House of Soviets is their most prominent landmark. At least, we learned, it is a useful one. For a reasonable price, they told us, you can bribe a guard to enter it at night for wall climbing or to throw a drinking party with a view of the city and the sea.

  After sifting through two floors of the museum’s Kant memorabilia, we mounted a steep staircase leading up to a half-empty chamber where the philosopher’s openmouthed plaster death mask, so fragile and delicate, lay under glass. The mask left us with the impression that we had come across a more refined version of Lenin embalmed in his mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square. Indeed, Kant’s iconic presence here and throughout the museum and town, is almost Lenin-like, appearing when least expected, yet almost omnipresent. To paraphrase an old Russian saying—first it was the nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin who was nashe vse (our everything); then it was Lenin; and here in Kaliningrad it is Kant.

  Our stay in Kaliningrad drew to a close. Early on the first sunny afternoon we had experienced since landing, we arrived at the city’s airport to find its departure hall in chaos. Unruly lines of passengers shifted between registration counters—inexplicably, check-ins for flights were first announced at one counter but then switched to others without warning. No one could say why. Loud gaggles of Chinese students showed up and barged in, pressing around us, leaving us little hope of making our flight. We managed to reach a counter only by cutting into lines, as did everyone else. So much about traveling in Russia has become easier, but the Russians’ behavior made sense here, and was a reversion to historical norms: in the past, the Russian version of standing in line was akin to storming a cattle wagon. Putin’s stern gaze set in amber fixed us from the souvenir stands as, just barely, we managed to check in and head for the gate to board our flight. Even in the city Putin once hoped to transform into a tiny “Europe within Russia,” chaos Russian style was still, at least in places, a fact of life.

  We flew out over the sea, circled around, and turned east. From high above we saw the land beyond Kaliningrad’s concrete bounds sweep away into rain-drenched countryside—the Baltic Plain, a band of sandy-soiled terrain and pine forests stretching from Germany in the west across Poland all the way to Saint Petersburg in the east. Seen from the sky, the plain offered somnolent vistas promising a tranquility that surely helped men of letters, including Kant and Hoffmann, in their meditation and creative labors. We even spotted the resort town of Svetlogorsk that we had visited earlier with Maxim in his Audi. There, we had found the facades of new shops and markets copying the old, resembling Disney-like re-creations of the prewar Prussian buildings surrounded by drab Soviet suburbs; for us, the scene stood for the spirit of Putin’s country, a country often in contradiction with itself.

  2

  KIEV

  THE MOTHER OF ALL RUSSIAN CITIES OR THE THREAT TO MOTHER RUSSIA?

  TIME ZONE: MSK-1 FROM NOVEMBER TO MARCH AND MSK FROM MARCH TO OCTOBER; UCT+2

  The brightest light of all [in Kiev] was the white cross held by the gigantic statue of St. Vladimir atop Vladimir Hill. It could be seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier-beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves.

  —Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

  A hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, so well described by the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov in his classic 1924 novel (quoted in the epigraph), Kiev’s prince Vladimir the Great has only grown in stature and symbolism. Ruling from 980 to 1015, the prince brought Christianity to his land, Kievan Rus, importing it from the Byzantine Greeks. He has now come to personify the current rift between Russia and Ukraine, two countries locked in a conflict over territory and asserting primacy in their shared Slavic heritage.

  Who is senior, the Ukrainians or the Russians? Prince Vladimir ruled over the regional proto-Slavic state, Kievan Rus—a name bespeaking this historical dilemma. It’s worth noting that at the time Rus was a voluntary conglomeration of independent city-states with elements of nascent democracy—a democracy laid waste by Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century and eventually stamped out entirely by Russian rulers in Moscow.

  A city of some three million, Kiev shares a time zone with Moscow from March to October (during daylight savings time, which, since 2014, Russia has not observed). This one-hour time difference lasting just half a year connotes both the connection between these once brotherly nations and Ukraine’s revolt against control by the dominant imperial Russia. Spring is the best time to visit Kiev, so we chose to arrive in April—and pay our respects. And respects were due: Kiev is, after all, mat gorodov russkikh—the mother of all Russian cities. Given the critical role Ukraine has played in Russia’s history—and especially the dilemmas with which it presents Russia in the present—it cannot be ignored.

  One needs to be fit to make even an unhurried ascent to the summit of Vladimir’s Hill from Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s broad, chestnut-tree-lined central avenue, which the Soviet authorities—under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev—transformed into the capital’s main thoroughfare after the Great Patriotic War. From Khreshchatyk’s Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti—the famed Maidan from which Ukrainians launched their Euromaidan protest movement in late 2013—it takes thirty minutes to mount the hill to the station from which an oft-crowded funicular car spirits passengers up to Kiev’s highest terrain. Once having disembarked atop Vladimir’s Hill, though, visitors may survey the Dnieper River bisecting the city below and enjoy a magnificent view of the age-old waterway so vital to Ukraine’s history.

  Fresh off the funicular, we walked out onto Mikhailov Square, noting the tony restaurants and posh hotels that have sprung up around it in recent years. The square, dating from the twelfth cen
tury—even if known by several other names since then—was once the site of demonstrations and uprisings. It is a host of contradictions: it has both the gray, imposing, oddly concave Soviet-style Ministry of Foreign Affairs; an incongruous, ornately decorated, yet entirely empty children’s carousel; an angel-shaped monument to the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Kiev has a number of these sculptures); and Saint Michael’s Monastery, with its white-trimmed lapis lazuli facades and soaring, cross-topped golden domes.

  Just outside the monastery’s portals, along its western wall, a long, glass-encased pictorial memorial stands honoring the Ukrainians who have died fighting for their country in its east against the rebel troops of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk—officially, the single Confederate Republic of Novorossiya (“New Russia”). The Confederate Republic’s founders resurrected the czarist-era name Novorossiya for these territories, which have ethnic Russian majorities and a strong sense of Russian, as opposed to Ukrainian, identity.

  In Moscow, one hears a good deal about the war for Novorossiya, which has allied itself with the Kremlin. However, so far away in the Russian capital, the conflict seems almost imagined—little more than conjured-up fodder for patriotic propaganda. Ukraine’s break with Russia in 2014 has been, nevertheless, very real and wrenching both for those in the Kremlin nostalgic for control over the large Slavic state on Russia’s southern flank, and also for a good number of ordinary Russians, who view Ukraine as Malorossiya (“Little Russia,” a subordinate Slavic “little brother”). All Russians, though, understand that the land Ukraine occupies was the wellspring of Russian civilization, the hallowed locus of the Kreshcheniye Rusi (the Baptism of Rus) that Prince Vladimir brought about more than a thousand years ago.

  The Orange Revolution of 2004, which after rigged presidential elections overturned the victory of the Kremlin-compliant Viktor Yanukovych (who hailed from the Donetsk Oblast, now part of Novorossiya), ended with installing in power two pro-Western politicians: President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Although eventually doubts grew about the two leaders’ commitment to democracy, the pro-European Union Euromaidan uprising still proved that the independent Ukraine is no longer Malorossiya.