“I am very unpopular in some quarters,” Yaremenko declared, “because I don’t cheer for the European Union granting us visa-free travel and approving the full implementation of the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.” (Yanukovych’s refusal to sign this accord sparked the Euromaidan revolt.) “The government here,” he added, “thinks that the West won’t abandon Ukraine, because of the wounds Russia has inflicted on us. But before elections it will be even slower in pushing through austerity measures to improve the economy and curb corruption.”
Yet Yaremenko saw reasons for cautious optimism.
“Ukraine should be able to do better,” he said. “Even though the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had more Lenin statues than Russia, Ukrainians do not believe state power is sacred, as they do in Russia. There the Kremlin is the center of the state that people serve. Here those on top of the political ladder are just the hired hands of the people.”
This difference in how leaders are perceived, in his view, accounted for the relative restiveness of Ukrainians. “One of the reasons for our revolutions, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan revolt of 2013,” Yaremenko explained to us, “is that the authorities here upset people by thinking they can do anything with no accountability. Yanukovych managed to make a lot of people angry. Here the rich are upset about things that Russian oligarchs tend to tolerate. Yanukovych, like Putin, thought that he was the only one with any rights.”
Yaremenko added that during the Euromaidan even his usually apolitical mother was angry at how the authorities dealt with protesters and spent nights preparing Molotov cocktails for them in her apartment in central Kiev. These days, however, such revolutionary fervor has given way to apathy. Just as what happened following the Orange Revolution, politicians at the top are now squabbling with one another, leaving the people’s priorities unattended.
Two opportunities for fundamental change in ten years wasted! It all sounded hopeless. We asked Yaremenko what could be done.
“Snap elections,” he replied. “Change at the top could come though frequent snap elections. In one election, you can’t replace all the politicians from the past,” but frequent elections, called without warning, would prevent the “ossification of power” and keep everyone on their toes.
What did he think of Ukraine’s giant neighbor to the north?
“Relations with Russia will only get worse,” he said matter-of-factly. “But more than just diplomacy will come to an end. The sense of Slavic brotherhood we once shared will disappear, too. Before, of course, Moscow called the shots, and Ukraine grudgingly accepted it, and still considered the Russians ‘brothers.’” No longer.
If Ukraine ever did join the European Union, Yaremenko insisted, it would present no threat to Russia, even if it became a member of NATO. (A Kremlin strategist might beg to differ. After all, having elements of the world’s most powerful military alliance just five hundred miles from Moscow would change Russia’s strategic situation in an unprecedented way.)
The real threat, said Yaremenko, came from the example an enlightened, democratic government in Kiev would set for Russians living under the Putin model of a semiauthoritarian corporate state unfriendly to the West. For the occupants of the Kremlin, it is a matter of life and death that their former communist neighbor never present Russian citizens with an alternate, more attractive model of governance. If Ukraine successfully manages to join Europe, it may well end up sounding the death knell for Putinism—the political mythology that casts Putin as successor to all the imperial autocrats peopling Russian history, including Nicholas I and Stalin.
“Moscow,” Yaremenko added, “has more to lose with its Byzantine fantasy. If Russia doesn’t develop, it will lead to China, the new global superpower, swallowing whole the Far East and Siberia. A vastly weakened Russia will then also lose the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region to their growing Muslim populations. Kaliningrad may again become German.”
Fresh from Kaliningrad, we smiled. “There is no evidence of that.”
“Either way,” Yaremenko continued, “if Russia loses some of its eleven time zones, it would then no longer be able to position itself as the ‘Great Russia.’ The remaining lands might have no choice but to attach themselves to Ukraine. Moscow might return to its historical origins as a remote northern principality, shorn of territories to its south or east of the Urals.”
Ukraine supplanting Russia, Kiev replacing Moscow as the nexus of power for the East Slavic peoples? This, however improbable, was something to think about.
* * *
These days, Kiev functions as a hub of exile for some in the Russian opposition, who carry on their business in Ukraine without the surveillance and constraints that would bedevil them at home. One such opposition member is forty-two-year-old Ilya Ponomarev, formerly a State Duma deputy of the social democratic party Spravedlivaya Rossiya (Just Russia) and a member of the Left Front. The son of longtime Communist Party functionaries, Ponomarev hails from the Novosibirsk Oblast—arguably the most advanced part of Siberia, owing to the world-class scientific community it has in Akademgorodok, a town specifically dedicated to advanced research. A charismatic communist with a spotty reputation in opposition circles, he alone among the State Duma’s 450 deputies voted against the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. After this, he sojourned in the United States for two years, and then moved to Kiev, where he was enjoying a lifestyle free of the responsibilities with which his former position in the Duma saddled him.
We met Ponomarev in a café by our hotel, taking seats before picture windows offering unobstructed views of the ever-busy Khreshchatyk. His neat beard and red cardigan added maturity to his youthful looks. As a Duma deputy in Moscow he earned the nickname “butcher of the internet” among his critics—in 2012 Ponomarev controversially voted for strengthening state control of the web to prevent the dissemination of “content that may harm children’s development.”5 That law gave way to the following year’s ban on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations around minors”—colloquially known as the “gay propaganda” law,6 the Kremlin’s socially conservative project meant to endear it to the Orthodox Church. This time Ponomarev abstained from the vote, but the damage to his reputation had been done.
However, in Kiev Ponomarev insisted that with access to information comes democracy. Despite being, as it were, a declared enemy of the Russia-wide popular annexation of Crimea, he was at ease. He objected, he said, because the annexation would bring animosity, even bloodshed (he was right, as the war in eastern Ukraine had demonstrated), and eventually dislodge Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence (as indeed it has). It would give the West a reason to ceaselessly criticize Russia and, moreover, justify plans to expand NATO further eastward.
“Before Crimea,” Ponomarev stated grandly, “our country was an example to the world. Now Russia acts just like the United States—aggressively interfering in other countries’ affairs when they disagree with those countries’ politics.” In his criticism of the United States he differed dramatically from views espoused by most in Ukraine and the majority of the Russian opposition.
In philosophical terms, he argued that Russia’s “problem is one of an ideological construct—an undiversified, large-scale vertical economy.” Unlike Yaremenko, however, Ponomarev told us that geography is not Russia’s handicap.
“Isn’t Russia too big to function coherently?” we asked.
“Obviously,” Ponomarev replied with a laugh, “Russia has two afflictions: plokhiye dorogi i duraki”—bad roads and morons. He was reprising an apocryphal saying (often attributed to Nicholas I and Russian writer Nikolai Gogol) that is routinely used to lament Russia’s poor highways and infamously capricious bureaucrats. “But even though its regions are not well connected to each other, it does not change the reality that a country can be both big and prosperous.”
He went on. Russia’s borders would disintegrate not because of the country’s size, but because the vertikal v
lasti, or “power vertical”—the highly centralized system of government Putin managed to institute—robs the country of its potential. Disintegration would originate not with those opposing Putin, but from Putin himself, because he does not allow politicians to develop.
“If you have the right technological ‘know-how,’ you can make Russia work,” he stated, tossing in a bit of English. “Surely, it’s tough to govern a country with territory stretched out all the way to Kamchatka, but if the setup is horizontal with local governments working to full capacity, then the problem of communication between the regions could be resolved.” Something similar to America’s electoral college might help people in sparsely populated outlying regions—and in Russia, these are many—defend their rights against the center.
We told Ponomarev that, for our book, we were looking at Russia through the prism of its geography. “Does Russia need to give up its empire to develop further?” we asked. In such a gigantic, sprawling country effective local governance has rarely been possible, whether under the Soviets or post-1991, because of the strongly centralized nature of the state.
According to Ponomarev, this centralization developed from the way Russia took shape, with cities, especially in Siberia, beginning as military and trade outposts of the empire. Then under Stalin they became industrial centers, with forced labor through the detention camps system, the Gulag, making up for a shortage of manpower. Russia’s hinterland regions are sparsely populated and ill served by transport; picture a spiderweb, with almost all threads leading to the Kremlin.
Even today one gets a sense of this while traveling around the land. From the Ural Mountains to the Far East, relatively few population centers spot the vast, often unvarying landscape of forest, rivers, and steppe. After the Soviet collapse, Russia’s regions acquired a good deal of autonomy, taking it at President Boris Yeltsin’s urging, but Putin has managed to reimpose a degree of centralization. He divided the country into eight federal districts and eighty-five smaller federal subjects, with the local authorities once again primarily serving the center and loyalty to Putin a necessary attribute for regional leaders.
To help put an end to this centralization, Ponomarev suggested designating cities in remoter areas as regional capitals. For example, West Siberia’s de facto capital could be switched from Tyumen to the much smaller city of Khanty-Mansiysk. Both are oil boomtowns, but the undersize Khanty-Mansiysk needs more state support to draw visitors and capital. That’s one way, said Ponomarev, for a big country such as Russia to democratize its expanses and make people feel at home there, with a stake in their development. Better roads and communications would follow.
Well, yes. But Ponomarev’s ideas sounded somewhat Leninist; his communist predecessors have already tried them. It was Bolshevik policy to populate as much Soviet territory as possible. Just as in a classless “dictatorship of proletariat,” no one group of people would enjoy privileges others did not, and in theory all regions of the country would be equal. By this logic, living in Tyumen should be as wonderful as living in Moscow. But the problem with such grand theoretical visions is that they rarely survive real-life implementation.
“And what about Crimea?” we asked. “Should it be Russian?”
“Yes,” he replied, “even though it was annexed illegally.”
So, even the one State Duma deputy who voted against Crimea’s becoming a part of Russia believes it should be Russian!
Before we left Kiev, we visited the city’s main memorial to the Holodomor. For decades, the Great Famine, in part a result of the forced collectivization of agriculture, was a state secret; estimates of its death toll—from starvation, mostly, but also from cannibalism—have ranged from three million to ten million lives. What’s known is that in 1932, at the start of the Holodomor, Ukraine’s population stood at about 33 million, but just before Khrushchev took over in 1938, the number of inhabitants had dropped to 28 million—a decrease of more than 10 percent—a literal “decimation.”7 Of course, Stalin’s infamous purges also contributed to the fatalities.
Ukraine’s Rada in 2006 passed a law recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In 2008 Kiev raised a commanding monument in Pechersk Hills, near the eleventh-century Monastery of the Pechersk Caves. The whole Holodomor complex—its park, its subterranean Hall of Memory—stands just a few yards away from another memorial—to World War II—that is filled with fresh flowers and people paying their respects. Contrary to post-Crimea nationalistic Russian assertions that the Euromaidan protests were intended to bring German rule to Ukraine and defy the victory won in the Great Patriotic War, Ukrainians do appreciate what the country, among other countries, suffered in World War II. They just no longer want to be Russian vassals.
We stood in front of the Holodomor memorial, built to resemble a church steeple with, at the top, an eternal flame fashioned out of bronze, and listened to its somber, solitary chimes—one chime for each life lost. Near its base, golden storks—rustic symbols of prosperity (Khrushchev used to say that a stork nest on your home’s roof meant good luck) spread their wings atop cast-iron grids representing prison bars. This magnificent architectural monument to the famine is perhaps the truest indicator of Ukraine’s desire to define its past and control its future—a tall order, even according to Bohdan Yaremenko, but the most laudable one imaginable.
3
ARKHANGELSK, SOLOVETSKY ISLANDS, SAINT PETERSBURG, AND MOSCOW
KREMLIN TIME, OR RUSSIA’S CLOCK OF CLOCKS
TIME ZONE: MSK; UTC+3
Those who doubt Putin’s vital role in the victory of the Great Patriotic War, simply do not understand his essential role in the Baptism of Russia.
–A contemporary Russian joke
Kiev may be the mat gorodov russkih, mother of Russian cities, but Moscow is the mother of cities in Russia. It is the principal metropolis of the former Russian Empire, then of the Soviet Empire, and now of the Russian Federation—the (Third) Rome to which all roads lead.
The Moscow time zone, the Greenwich Meridian for Russia, stretches, in the south, from the border with Ukraine north to the oft-frozen shores of the White Sea in Arkhangelsk, and beyond, all the way to the Barents Sea of the Arctic Ocean.
Arkhangelsk and Solovetsky Islands: Russia’s Utopian Dystopia
Some 760 miles from Moscow, Arkhangelsk, a city on the White Sea that owes its origins to the czar Ivan IV, popularly known as Grozny, the Terrible (better translated as Formidable or Fierce). In the 1500s, Ivan concluded the “gathering of Russian lands”—the de facto reconquest—from their local Russian rulers and Tatar-Mongolian overlords. He created the czardom of Muscovy and initiated Russia’s expansion eastward, into the Urals and Siberia. In the next century, under Peter the Great, the first Russian emperor, Arkhangelsk became Russia’s first and, at the time, only naval port. Although icebound for most of the year, it served as a key outpost against the Norwegians and Swedes competing for influence in this remote northern region. It also bestowed upon Russia Mikhail Lomonosov, who would become one of Russia’s preeminent scientists and men of letters, the founder of Moscow University in 1755. Lomonosov came from a relatively modest background, born to a family of pomory (local sea fishermen) and farmers in a village in Arkhangelsk’s vicinity.
Today Arkhangelsk is a depressed industrial city with a port that fell into disuse when Peter the Great began restricting trade along Russia’s Arctic coast to boost that of the Baltic Sea, following his construction of Saint Petersburg. In recent years, Arkhangelsk has been losing out to the Crimea’s Sevastopol, the warm-water port on the Black Sea.
Strangely enough, for a city so far-flung and beset with inclement weather, Arkhangelsk has managed to develop a modest tourist industry by touting its polar nights (and aurora borealis) in winter and its white nights in summer, and its rich historical heritage. At the time of our visit, we found a shaggy, pensive two-humped Bactrian camel welcoming tourists to an exhibition of ice sculptures celebrating the town�
��s five-hundred-year history on Lenin Square. (Only in ever-paradoxical, geographically distended Russia would one discover a Central Asian ungulate overseeing parka-clad visitors to the extreme north.) Moreover, right across the street sits the regional government headquarters, where a billboard recounts the establishment, in the 1920s, of the first labor camps in the Gulag.
The first and most infamous of these camps—the “Mother of the Gulag,” as Solzhenitsyn put it—was located on the Solovetsky Islands, colloquially called Solovki, a short forty-minute flight northeast of Arkhangelsk. Solovki soon became a byword for incarceration in brutal conditions—“go to Solovki!” meant “go to hell!” But there is much more to Solovki’s history than hell. Indeed, as with so much in Russia, the tale of Solovki’s existence consists of a paradox blending wrenching tragedy with almost otherworldly holiness.
In the fifteenth century, an Orthodox Christian monk, and now saint, named Zosima arrived on Solovki seeking refuge from persecution in Moscow, then ruled by the tyrannical Ivan the Terrible. He and two other monks settled down for good and founded a monastery—Solovetsky Monastery—that soon morphed into an influential center of Orthodox Christianity. With its large landholdings—the islands cover 134 square miles—and its varied sources of income, from fishing to algae extraction to salt gathering, Solovetsky Monastery flourished.
The harsh subarctic winter climate—windy and humid, with temperatures below zero—and trying summers during which thirty types of ferocious mosquitos emerge from bogs to torment man and beast, plus three hundred species of fauna, many of which do not fear people even today, all serve to augment the islands’ legendary aura of mysticism, of being outside this world. A curious fox entered the house where we stayed to spy on us; a deer calmly paused to let our snowmobile past, which brought to mind notions of paradise before the fall of man. These, of course, quickly fade when you recall how many humans killed one another here. Local lore has it that only the devout could survive Solovki’s arduous conditions; hence, before the fifteenth century, the islands had no permanent inhabitants. Settlers proved able to defend their autonomy for several hundred years and even welcomed exiled opponents of autocracy but eventually found they had to surrender to pressures from the state, with monks eventually almost officially serving as jail guards of political opponents deemed guilty in the eyes of the czars. They began turning their monastery’s cellars into prison dungeons, some of which were so small that one could barely sit. Under Peter the Great, Russia further encroached on Solovki’s monastic vocation, conscripting monks to serve as the jail guards of political criminals. The twenty-foot-thick walls of the monastery and the surrounding sea began to entrap rather than protect, and the island transmogrified into a Hades—utopia turned dystopia.
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