In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  Following the October Revolution in 1917, the monks served the new regime as vigorously as they did the old. They eagerly accepted political prisoners sent to them by the new communist state, only to soon become prisoners themselves. The Soviet atheists had little use for Christian guards, and the priests were declared “enemies of the people.” The Bolsheviks closed the monastery as a religious institution, enhanced its prisons, and established the Specialized Solovetsky Camp, or SLON. The acronym, which means “elephant” in Russian, was the topic of many grim jokes about the incongruities of Soviet life, which situated an elephant in Russia’s far north. But after seeing a camel on the shores of the White Sea we hardly found the idea of an African beast here absurd. Many viewed the monks’ fall from the Lord’s favor as divine punishment. After all, they had betrayed their heavenly master to help found a version of human hell.

  Yury Brodsky, a photographer and Solovki historian who took an iconic picture of one of the cathedrals—the photo, shot through one of the monastery’s barbwire windows, showed the darkened cupola topped with a red star in place of a gilt cross—suggested to us that the island’s saga is nothing less than a microcosm of Russia’s broader history. The monastery ultimately devolved into an unholy trinity consisting of the state, its religious faith, and its karatelnye organy (punitive organs).1 Post-Soviet Russia has sanctioned this sacrilege by adorning the current five-hundred-ruble banknote with a depiction of long-suffering Solovetsky Monastery on its obverse. What sort of holy man would come up with such an idea?

  Large gray and black stones—those from which the monastery was built—cover the shores of the White Sea here. A black boulder now commemorates all the political prisoners who perished on the island. The spot on which it stands, appropriately, turned out to be an old unmarked mass grave, and the adjacent street now carries the name of a Solovetsky detainee, Pavel Florensky, an inventor and religious philosopher who lost his life here in 1937, at the height of the Terror. Since then, members of many religious denominations and nationalities (including Muslims, Catholics, and Poles) who suffered in the purges have had their own stone monuments erected on Florensky Street. In the 1990s one such rock, dubbed the Solovetsky Stone, was transported to Moscow and placed in front of Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters, to honor the Gulag’s victims. (A Soviet bust commemorating Stalin continues to stand half a mile away, by the Kremlin’s wall.) In the summer months these days, however, as state-fanned xenophobia rises, tourists often deface the memorials with nationalist graffiti.

  The islands have turned into a quasiofficial sanctuary for the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state. People we met jokingly called it the funktuary, a mashup of “sanctuary” and “functionary,” and laugh about the visits of supposedly repentant Kremlin apparatchiks. Many locals would enjoy running them up and down the steps leading up the 250-foot-high Sekirnaya (Flagellation) Hill—a trial said to absolve sins. (Flagellation Hill is where the angels supposedly killed the fisherman’s wife in the 1400s.) “Look at all those sins those Muscovites are guilty of!” they exclaim.

  Palatial Petersburg

  Four hundred miles southwest of the Solovetsky Islands lies Saint Petersburg, which long rivaled Moscow for domination of Russia. Saint Petersburg, founded in 1703, is the creation of Peter the Great, who enacted westernizing reforms on the thitherto Byzantine country that effectively brought about its split personality syndrome. Yet, better than any other Russian ruler, he managed to foment Russian nationalism and instill a desire to modernize. Putin, a native of Saint Petersburg (once Soviet Leningrad), has seen himself following in Peter the Great’s footsteps—to merge the old and the new across all of Russia.

  As part of his westernization program, the first Russian emperor moved the capital from tradition-bound Moscow to Saint Petersburg, Russia’s “window to Europe.” Saint Petersburg would become the only Western-style metropolis in Orthodox Russia. Not all were pleased with Czar Peter’s efforts to bring Russia into the modern world. Russophile writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky acknowledged this when he reportedly said, “We may be backwards, but we have soul.”

  Tens of thousands of serfs died of disease and hunger draining the gloomy swamps along the Gulf of Finland, on the Baltic Sea, to build Saint Petersburg and fulfill the dream of Peter the Great, a task they accomplished in fewer than ten years. The emperor was determined to convert mostly landlocked Russia into a naval empire on a par with Holland, which he had visited on his embassy to Europe. Saint Petersburg boasts marble embankments along the Neva River, imitating the “first” Rome, and other top-tier European cities—Amsterdam, Venice, and Paris. The Russian tricolor is even modeled after the Dutch. Luxurious palaces, designed by Italian and French architects, dot the downtown area and the suburbs. Celebrating Western-style modernity with its factories, military academies, shipyards, and plenty of German tradesmen hard at work, the city represented everything that the rest of backward, sleepy Russia was not.

  The proximity of Saint Petersburg (eventually renamed Petrograd, and then Leningrad following Lenin’s death in 1924) to the West, however, became risky after the Bolshevik Revolution. Then independent Finland and Estonia lay only twenty five miles away, which meant the Soviets would have little buffer space to fight back an army invading from either country. Moscow, on the other hand, stood more than four hundred miles from the nearest border. After Lenin reclaimed Moscow as the capital in 1917, the clock on the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower became the measure of all things temporal in Russia—the country’s “standard time,” as it were.

  Byzantine Moscow

  Moscow’s almost nine-hundred-year history has witnessed the transformation of the once-remote northern village of the twelfth century into the truly Byzantine capital of the Putin era. (The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, but one might not know this in Russia today, where Putin has often acted as though he were the direct descendant of a Byzantine emperor.) Founded, according to most legends, by the prince Yury Dolgorukiy amid bog and forest along the Moskva River, Moscow arose as Kiev began to lose its influence in the 1100s. The name Moskva, meaning “the place of marches” or “gnats,” is said to come from the area’s Finno-Ugric tribes.

  At times you can’t help feeling that Moscow is Byzantium, its modernized version, with Mercedes and gourmet supermarkets. As did Byzantine emperors of centuries past, Putin and his supporters talk about Russia today as if it were a divinely ordained power, destined to withstand the moral corruption and decay supposedly emanating from the West. Hence, the Byzantine double-headed eagle emblem now not only graces government buildings but pops up everywhere, even on milk cartons and cell phone covers, produced outside Russia by wily foreigners. Byzantium and its leaders and symbols are discussed on talk shows, their imperial grandeur cited as an example for Russia’s own future glory. Orthodox priests with distinguished beards preach, in their sermons, about how Russia, if it is to regain its greatness, must look to its Christian predecessor’s past. The television station Spas (Salvation) not only reports on the history of Orthodox Christianity but also comments on foreign and domestic affairs. Spas has repeatedly shown a feature-length 2008 documentary called The Demise of the Empire: A Byzantine Lesson, with other major Russian networks following suit. The not-so-subtle idea behind all this nostalgia for Byzantium is that Russia can, and even should, exist only in opposition to the West, which supposedly hated Byzantium in the past just as much as it despises its spiritual heir, Russia, today.

  Yet this is fanciful thinking. The old ideas and symbols that Putin has used to strengthen Russia’s self-image no longer correspond to today’s global realities, nor do they reflect Russia’s present capacities. And even though the double-headed eagle once again purportedly signifies imperial power, in reality it incarnates the country’s split personality, appearing to be a desperate attempt to mask a deep sense of insecurity—the anxiety of a former superpower torn between the old and the new.

  During his first decade in power, Putin, financed by high oil prices, di
d indeed manage to transform Russia from the bankrupt, desperate loser of the Cold War into a wealthy country with an independent foreign policy often running counter to the interests of the West. But in 2011, Putin—prime minister from 2008, when Dmitry Medvedev formally (and temporarily) occupied Russia’s top post—faced presidential elections as the global financial crisis wrought havoc on Russia and oil prices collapsed. He thus announced that he needed to return to the Kremlin to “steer Russia in the right direction”2 and unite the country. (It is worth noting that Putin had chosen not to become a traditional autocrat by amending the constitution so that he could run again in 2008, but allowed at least the appearance of democracy by stepping down from the presidency to assume the post of head of government.) This went down poorly, with a Russian electorate insulted by the Kremlin’s assumption that the people did not deserve to choose their leader. The 2012 presidential elections, as a result, did not go smoothly, with nationwide protests gathering hundreds of thousands at a time rocking Russia. Putin still took the Kremlin, his victory aided by the industrial regions of Siberia and Far East, but in view of uncertainty, Putin clearly decided that the path to future reelection lay through presenting Russia as threatened by an enemy abroad—as usual, the West.

  He did take to heart his imperial project. In 2010, the Kremlin, then under President Dmitry Medvedev, declared modernization by reducing Russia to only nine time zones to streamline business relations with Moscow. But when Putin returned as Russia’s president, larger size began to loom anew. He swiftly canceled the time-savings calendar, reverting the country to its eleven-time-zone geography.

  Since then, Putin further surrendered to the traditionally xenophobic, inward-looking approach of what we might call “Byzantinism”—the attitude of “us versus them,” with the Third Rome better than the First, and so on. Few Russian leaders have managed to escape such a pattern of interaction with the outside world. Stalin’s obsession with the grandiosities of power is perhaps the most relevant to understand Putin.

  With Moscow as the capital of the (atheist) Soviet empire, Stalin could not, of course, declare it a holy city, yet the style and structure of the buildings he had erected was often nothing short of Byzantine. His imperial ambitions found expression in reinventing the palatial architecture of Saint Petersburg, though deriving a more modern inspiration from the 1914 Municipal Building on Center Street in New York City. After all, New York’s nickname was, Stalin knew, the Empire State. Victory in the Great Patriotic War required a victorious style of urban renewal. At home, Khrushchev recalled Stalin’s thinking of the time: “We won the war.… Foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and there are no skyscrapers. If they compare Moscow to capitalist cities, it will be a mortal blow to us.”

  During the decade starting in 1947, the Soviet government oversaw the construction, on Moscow’s seven hills, of Stalinskie vysotki (Stalin’s high-rises), as the wedding-cake buildings came to be known, and a new eight-hundred-foot-tall headquarters for Lomonosov Moscow State University on Lenin Hills (Vorobyevy Hills before and after the Soviet era). The architects planned to grace the building’s central tower with a statue of the university founder Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov, or so the plan envisioned, was to resemble the victorious Stalin. In 1953, thousands of Gulag inmates completed the construction of the headquarters, which remained the tallest building of its kind in Europe until 1990. The statue of Lomonosov, however, was never mounted atop the tower, since Stalin died that year and soon fell into disgrace, following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization.

  Some of the seven buildings provided spacious living quarters for the nomenklatura—the officials, artists, and scientists the Kremlin considered vital for the success of the regime. Most other Muscovites huddled by the dozens in communal apartments. Figuring among the high-rises was, and remains, the grandiose Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Smolensk Square, from which Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s seasoned foreign minister, often fires his salvos toward the United States and conducts diplomacy across the globe.

  The constructed high-rises were audacious and stunning, but an eighth one, the Palace of Soviets, was to top them all, with a truly gigantic statue of Lenin as its principal feature. Stalin had intended to be buried beneath it, but following his death and denunciation, the Soviet government abandoned the project, and it was never built.

  With Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization came a “humanization,” as it were, and the much-celebrated (and much-cursed) era of the khrushchevki. On Khrushchev’s order, Soviet builders raised some eight thousand five-story apartment complexes all over the Soviet Union. These simple buildings that provided families with private lodgings came to be known as khrushchevki or khrushcheby (from trushcheby, slums) because of their stark contrast to extravagant Stalinist architecture. Khrushchev hoped to foster, inexpensively and on a broad scale, personal privacy at a time when individualism was considered something of a secular sin.

  Stalinist urban planners made people share old multiroom dwellings or built apartment blocks in which as many as thirty inhabitants per unit shared a bathroom, and a kitchen. The housing reforms of the 1950s gave families their own kitchens and bathrooms in modest, low-ceiling units located in blocs built according to little-varying plans across the country. For those taking up residence in the new khrushchevki, this meant no prying apartment-mates and thus a reduced likelihood that someone might listen in on your private conversation and report you to the KGB. The threat of being packed off to a Gulag labor camp for something said at home, at least, all but vanished. Labor camps, too, were formally halted in 1960, though some individual camps exist even today.

  For half a century, these five-story buildings symbolized a freer Russia. Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union would become communist by the 1980s and wanted his modest buildings to tide people over until the onset of true “proletarian” luxury in the coming “workers’ paradise.” Instead, however, the Soviet Union collapsed (along with the communist dream, of course), but the khrushchevki remained, having patiently withstood political disaster and the often harsh Russian climate.

  Today, with notions of Moscow’s and Russia’s “Byzantinization,” the Kremlin is set to enact plans to demolish the modest constructions and replace them with upscale apartment complexes, giant hotels, and slick business centers—all with the aim, as in the Stalin era, of benefiting the state and its functionaries more than the people. Some khrushchevki are, indeed, more decrepit than others and should be replaced, but others require nothing more than a renovation (which would save the government time and money). In the summer of 2017 tens of thousands protested against plans to demolish the 1960s-era homes in Moscow, as did many more thousands of people across Russia.

  Such “urban renewal” plans followed Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s revolutionary—and highly unpopular—gentrification of much of Moscow. The building of roads and the replacement of asphalt sidewalks with cobblestones keep the capital, and other cities, in conditions of eternal, disruptive remont—the endless “renovation” Russians learned to live with in Soviet times. Sobyanin’s endeavors also just happen to enrich those involved on the construction side. His apparent motive: to turn Moscow into a gorod progulki (a city for strolling). And of course to impress those arriving for the summer 2018 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament; visitors did enjoy impromptu fan parties on the broad sidewalks. Still, the fifteen-yard-wide pavements, outfitted with benches and the occasional tree, even though meant to encourage cycling and scootering, instead have further congested traffic in a city long beset by terrible jams. Their grand dimensions seem to mimic the reality of Stalinist-era construction that aimed to create a city that would inspire admiration but not actually provide comfort for those living there.

  In 2015 many in Moscow also shivered in disbelief when Sadovoe Koltso (Garden Ring Road), a major avenue circling central Moscow, boasted a new addition to the old Stalin vysotki, an Oruzheiny (Weapon) high-rise. Made of glass and steel, it is a skeleton of what the state i
n the 1950s used to build with bricks, an eerie ghost of the Stalin past in the Putin present.

  Whether it is headed by Stalin or Putin, the country’s leadership is always imitating what it sees abroad—in this case, Western-style living conditions. Russia, despite its civilizational claims, models its greatness on what others, namely the West, have already achieved. Now, the authorities seek to re-create, in a Russian nouveau imperial style, the luxury of Western cities. However, ambitions to build the Russian equivalent of Via Condotti in Rome or Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris derive from a desire to serve the needs of the Russian state, not the Russian people. No longer the ascetic revolutionaries of prerevolutionary Russia or the badly dressed Soviet apparatchiks of the 1960s, the men and women of Putin’s ruling elite emit an air of sophistication. Russia, after all, has been open to the world for more than a quarter of a century. Putin himself, who began his first presidential term in pitch-black badly tailored suits with sleeves too long for his short stature, is now dressed impeccably in navy blue. Sobyanin’s gray suits are, too, beyond reproach. Medvedev is known for his fancy ties and expensive watches—his presidential and prime-ministerial corruption became a subject of a YouTube documentary produced by the Kremlin chief nemesis, Alexey Navalny, the anticorruption lawyer and blogger. Released in March 2017, the video helped galvanize tens of thousands of protesters in cities across Russia. It was the first large grassroots rally in the country since a series of demonstrations preceding Putin’s third term.