Stoleshnikov Lane (Moscow’s version of Via Condotti), which winds its way just behind the Bolshoi Theater, has always been a street for shoppers. Today the luxury on display rivals that of, say, Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. On Stoleshnikov now stand branches of Gucci, Prada, Christian Louboutin, and even Santa Maria Novella, the oldest and the highest-class pharmacy in the world. The latter store hails from Florence and is located on the grounds of an eponymous cathedral where monks once concocted perfumes. “Everything is great in Russia,” an Italian friend once told us sarcastically. “The only thing missing is Santa Maria Novella.” No longer.
One rainy spring afternoon when Moscow was buzzing with preparations for the May 9 Victory Day Parade on Red Square, we walked into that brand-new Santa Maria Novella in Stoleshnikov. Glass tables brimming with perfumes; wall displays of soaps, candles, and home fragrances; antique mahogany chairs under the Roman-like columns; and Leonardo da Vinci’s prints on the walls—Italy indeed. Immediately smothering us in world-class customer care, a leggy blond attendant (“Anastasia, the curator,” according to her name tag) showered us with an array of the finest coffees, chocolates, and sample scents. We asked her what would make the best gift. She informed us that Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defense, just had bought an eau de cologne here.
“For the Victory Day Parade,” she added. “We are proud that he will be wearing our fragrance when receiving the troops.”
The immensity of Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, which cost 26 million citizens their lives, merited, and of course got, in Soviet times, magnificent pageantry. But already in the Khrushchev era such parades were losing their splendor—even their raison d’être.
“Whom are we planning to invade?” Khrushchev wondered aloud as he inspected a military base outside Moscow in September 1964. “Nobody! Yet we have all these weapons, and because of the exuberant cost of our military people are losing their pants.” Brezhnev, however, returned the parades to their Stalinesque glory. Proud of his past as a war hero, and expanding the Soviet military and acquiring the rank of marshal long after the war ended, Brezhnev, in white parade uniform, enjoyed the spectacle of thousands of troops marching in front of him on Red Square.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with Russia no longer a superpower, Yeltsin discontinued such costly ceremonies altogether. Yet in 2005 Putin started them up again for the sixtieth anniversary of World War II. Then, with the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and other Western countries sharing the podium with Putin at the parade, Russia still seemed to have a global future.
With the international community much less on Russia’s side now, the Victory Day parades are becoming ever more breathtaking in their grandiosity. Last May Red Square witnessed more than ten thousand troops and 114 units of tanks, missile defense systems, and armored vehicles, including the new monstrous, white-camouflaged Arctic defense machines, with polar bears painted on their sides, that are able to operate in minus-fifty-degree weather.3 Led by Shoigu, the troops and tanks passed before President Putin to the loud cheers of the crowds. Such military might be, at least theoretically, deployed against European powers and the United States. According to curator Anastasia, Defense Minister Shoigu’s tastes in perfume from that very Europe, which Russia is potentially planning to attack, should inspire the admiration in the rest of us.
As we looked over the wares on offer, we chitchatted with Anastasia about Russia’s heroic past. She asked if, the previous week, we had gone to the Patriot Park on the outskirts of Moscow in Kubinka to watch as two thousand people dressed as Soviet soldiers reenacted the 1945 storming of a mock-up of the Reichstag by the Red Army. Part of the Magic World of Russia site, this patriotic Disneyland of sorts, appropriately designed by a Hollywood firm, had Shoigu along with five thousands spectators watching period tanks and weaponry, explosions, gunfire, and men dressed as Nazis falling to the ground in flames.
Anastasia said that she was “excited” when she watched the event on television. Today officials like Shoigu and even more so Putin himself are not just leaders, they are celebrities. Shoigu won national popularity the previous decade while running the Ministry of Emergency Situations and has since been prominently featured in media coverage as a savior in military garb. Russia suffers from aging infrastructure, illegal construction, and professional negligence—movie theaters burn, retirement homes collapse, trains derail. But who doesn’t like a man in uniform!
And we do not need to remind anyone that the world can’t get enough of Putin’s own James Bond exploits: his 007-ish flying planes, diving in submarines, and riding horses bare-chested. For the Russians, he is their national hero; for the West he is an equally entertaining anti–James Bond villain.
Despite all his chastising of the West for its supposedly hegemonic objectives, Putin surely understands that there is no other choice than for Russia to join it. Does Russia’s current animosity toward the West stem from a desire to re-create a militaristic state along Soviet lines, or is it truly a quest for the renewed role in the world as a superpower? Or is it simply a call for respect and recognition—for “imperial status,” so to speak, if nothing else? Russia’s behavior vis-à-vis Europe and the United States may amount to less a sign of aggressive intent and more a defensive reaction to the fear of encirclement. After all, NATO has expanded to Russia’s borders and plans to one day induct Ukraine and even Georgia, another former Soviet republic, the Western aspirations of which the Kremlin tried to suppress in 2008. Such fears of “Europeanization” run counter to Russia’s imitation of Europe since Byzantine times. Of course, they have been borne out by history with, three times in the past 210 years alone, the country having suffered invasion from the West.
Putin, however, surely would like to enter the history books not as a dictator, but as the leader of a country he has guided out of impoverished backward chaos into modernity and relative wealth. Modern Russia, he must know, cannot afford isolation, with one aspiring satellite, Serbia, and one alliance of convenience with China, along with a number of unsavory clients in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. If Russia does become a monolithic imperial state, it will betray its true ambition—to fulfill its European aspirations of finally joining the modern world and becoming a part of the West.
4
ULYANOVSK (SIMBIRSK) AND SAMARA (KUIBYSHEV)
CITIES OF THE MIGHTY VOLGA
TIME ZONE: MSK+1; UTC+4
In Russia, there is a thousand-year-old tradition—the same dream is transferred from generation to generation, from father to son, from one political system to the next—that in the country so rich with natural resources people will live well one day.
—A contemporary Russian joke
Whence Greatness Comes—Ulyanovsk
In Ulyanovsk, a medium-size town of 600,000 inhabitants on the Volga River about five hundred miles southeast of Moscow, one senses, in a primal way, Russia’s might. As Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities, the Volga is the mother—matushka—of all Russian rivers. More than two thousand miles in length, the Volga is the grandest river in Europe—it has come to be dubbed Bogynya (the Goddess). It is celebrated in Russian literature and art both for its unfathomable might and the role it has played throughout the country’s history.
From Ilya Repin’s famous nineteenth-century painting Barge Haulers on the Volga (depicting exhausted, disheveled laborers on shore dragging a floating barge by means of ropes tied round their torsos) to Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm (which foretold the Russian Revolution of 1917), the river has inspired the imagination and held a preeminent position in local lore. Wide and mostly tranquil, the Volga turns dangerous during floods and changes in the seasons. It is also a lifeline—a kormilitsa, or one who feeds—connecting the towns and villages along its shores, in part because of Russia’s notoriously bad roads.
Residents of Ulyanovsk maintain that their position just downstream from the confluence of the
Volga and the much-smaller Sviyaga tributary subjects their city to powerful magnetic currents that mysteriously influence the area’s climate, population, and culture. The Volga, not surprisingly, figures prominently in how the people of Ulyanovsk see themselves: their city is, as they would say, the “Aristocrat on the Volga,” because of the many literary and noble families in the Russian empire hailing from here. It is perhaps no coincidence that the center of town, which sits on a hill overlooking the river, is called, with an allusion to royalty, Venets (crown). Therein lies a contradiction of a distinctly Russian sort. The city’s original name, Simbirsk, was changed to Ulyanovsk in 1924, to commemorate Vladimir Lenin after his death. Lenin, whose original last name was Ulyanov, was born here in 1870. His family was one of minor aristocrats but not royal. And the regime he led to power ultimately rested on regicide.
Long before Lenin there were other greats from Ulyanovsk. Simbirsk was the birthplace of Nikolai Karamzin, who became known as the father of modern Russian letters under Catherine the Great and Alexander I. The town also boasts of Ivan Goncharov, the renowned nineteenth-century novelist. A major nineteenth-century poet, Nikolai Yazykov, came from here. And so did the Slavophile writer Sergei Glinka, a relative of the famed Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, author of “The Patriotic Song”—the Russian anthem of the 1990s. The Tolstoy and the Vyazemsky families have roots in the region as well.
In the late 1700s Catherine the Great, understanding the town to be a crucial trade and military outpost on the Volga protecting European Russia from invasion from the east, designated it capital of the Ulyanovsk Guberniya (a political entity akin to a state or province) and handed out vast plots of land in the region to loyal aristocrats. The two most infamous peasant rebellions of the 1600s and 1700s (led by Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, respectively) played out in and around Simbirsk. In 1833 Alexander Pushkin visited, searching for stories about Pugachev, who had aspired to replace Catherine the Great as ruler on the Russian throne.
Then came the Decembrists—the Russian nobles who formed a movement against the czar’s absolute monarchy. Their 1825 uprising drew in many officers and was brutally suppressed—some were hanged; others exiled internally, dispatched to the Simbirsk pochtovyi i katorzhnyi trakt (postal and penal servitude throughway), to trudge for months in rain and snow to their Siberian abodes of involuntary residence.
As we strolled down Ulyanovsk’s Goncharov Street on a sunny May morning, Sergei Petrov, an elderly historian, professor, and local celebrity, led us, root and branch, through the family trees of locally born Russian and Soviet luminaries, speaking rapidly and passionately. With his impish eyes, circle beard, and silvery aristocratic coif, Petrov, a voluble raconteur enamored of meandering discourse, seemed to have stepped from the pages of a nineteenth-century Russian play. His gray checkered suit looked too dressy for our morning tour and ill befitted his blue-red cardigan or his tattered brown loafers.
As we progressed down the street, passing by pastel-hued shops with fin-de-siècle facades, every fifteen minutes or so somebody recognized him and stopped us for a chat. Each time we expected Petrov to run out of words, or stories, or even breath itself, he surprised us by producing more facts about the town he so loved. Peasant rebel leader Stepan Razin, he said, was wounded during his assault on Simbirsk; he survived only to be captured and drawn and quartered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. The Volga Germans had always held leadership positions in town, as the drab, redbrick Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary he pointed out would attest. With these Germans often in charge, Simbirsk prospered, which augured ill for it after the 1917 Revolution. “One out of nine people here belonged to the gentry. Imagine what this meant when the Bolsheviks took over!” He paused. “People were burning their title deeds, they were so afraid! Most of them just fled to other parts of Russia.”
We stopped in front of the Simbirsk Classical Lyceum Number 1, where Lenin had studied and where, near the entrance, a plaque showed, in stark Social-Realist style, the iconic revolutionary with Alexander Kerensky, who was also born here and would head the provisional Russian government after the czar had abdicated in 1917.
“Lenin let him live,” Petrov told us. “I believe they may have shared Christmas goose together when they were growing up. Did he do so because both were born here, in this special town on the Volga? Could Lenin have showed him some compassion for this? I can’t prove it, but I think so. Now you see them together on the same plaque! You will find nothing like this anywhere else in Russia!” Kerensky eventually immigrated to the United States, where he died in 1970.
Petrov conjured up a lost world of landowners, high culture, and even cosmopolitanism—imagine, German gentry dwelling on the banks of Russia’s mighty Volga! That almost no trace remains of any of this mattered not to Petrov, who could verbally resuscitate the lost souls of the world the Bolsheviks destroyed—a world, we sensed, he would have been happy to inhabit.
The next day, alone, we visited the Lenin dom musei (house museum), located on—what else—Lenin Street, in central Ulyanovsk. A modest, two-story graying wooden house with a few bedrooms, a dining room, and a study was the greatest attraction for the seventy-five years of Soviet rule. And it was not just Lenin—other members of his family were revered, too, as studious and serious, the pinnacles of communist morality. His father, Ilya, was an inspector of public schools; his older brother, Alexander, a revolutionary radical, was executed in 1887 for trying to assassinate Czar Alexander III; his younger brother, Dmitry, was a doctor and a writer; his sister, Maria, another revolutionary who studied at the Sorbonne. Millions of people from all over the world had come here to admire Lenin’s childhood home and see the environs in which he came of age.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of communism as a promising ideology, interest in Lenin almost disappeared. The authorities in Ulyanovsk, nevertheless, converted his neighborhood into a historical sanctuary, the Birthplace of Lenin, which encompasses all the landmarks connected to his era. At first glance, this might seem strange. Even the November 2017 centenary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia barely featured Lenin. Instead, festivities focused on centuries of heroism in Russian history and, of course, on the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Why? We can only surmise that Putin, approaching two decades in power, is concerned with preserving it, and therefore is not particularly fond of revolutions. Yet the Lenin sanctuary found unexpected saviors in hordes of Chinese visitors. It now forms part of their “Red Tour”—visits to the landmarks of the revolution’s history. Lenin did not direct the revolution from here, of course, but his sanctuary gives a good idea of what the world he destroyed looked like.
But, as we discovered, even the guides at the Lenin house museum no longer talk much about communism and revolution. They showed us the modest family bedrooms, a dining room that doubled as a game parlor and study, Ilya’s dark office with the dauntingly progressive books on the shelves, including Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s nineteenth-century guide to socialism, What Is to Be Done? As had Petrov, they spoke at length about the intellects the Volga region had produced, among whom just happened to be the intellects of the Ulyanov family. Their home impressed us with its unremarkable, bourgeois interior—a reminder that the man who led the revolution of proletarians and peasants was, by birth and upbringing, neither.
To learn more about Lenin in the town of his birth, we toured the Lenin museum on the eponymous square in the central Venets district. Typically Soviet in its mammoth dimensions, built of pink-red Soviet-era marble, the museum exudes grandeur of a sort and depicts Lenin in historical perspective that began with the role of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. This perspective now emphasizes imperial coherency—centuries of Russian history peopled by firm, formidable leaders from the bygone times of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great (who gave Simbirsk its first coat of arms consisting of a crowned Greek column) to our day, the Putin era. From the double-headed eagle to the hammer and sickle to the double-headed
eagle again. Coherency—and elision of all the wild and destructive detours Russia has made to end up where it is today.
The museum’s current account of Russia’s history almost grants Stalin a role as prominent as that of Lenin—something impossible from the time of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the beginning of the Putin era. Today it highlights Stalin’s program of crash industrialization (carried out in the 1930s) and the Soviet victory, under his command, in the Great Patriotic War. Velikiy vozhd i uchitel (the great leader and teacher) announces, without a hint of irony, the caption under one Stalin portrait. This is just what cult-of-personality propaganda called the dictator during his almost thirty years in power. The murderous Holodomor accompanying the industrialization, the devastating political purges, and the Gulag camps merit only brief mentions and are explained away by raisons d’état: to make a country great one needs to take tough—even brutal—measures.
Examining the museum’s exhibits, for the first time we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia’s recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, almost devoid of political value now, who has become more a monument than a personage. He serves as a symbol of continuity, if no longer of communism. He represents that important, almost century-long time when Russia was a great country, even a superpower, that made the world tremble. Stalin comes second, after being partly rehabilitated in the mid-2000s when Moscow decided to emblazon his name in gold letters on the ceiling of the Kurskaya subway station and school textbooks began lauding him as a “wise manager of his people” who, instituting the forced-labor camps, acted out of necessity to compensate for a shortage of manpower. In fact, in the last decade Stalin has become more “alive” than Lenin, who was also once lauded as zhiveye vsekh zhivykh (more alive than all the living). The continuous celebrations of the Soviet victory in the war against Nazi Germany render him almost as contemporary as Putin himself.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 8