In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  Leonid Brezhnev is the third leader on record and serves as a convenient bridge between the Stalin and Putin eras. (Putin is the fourth, of course.) Brezhnev can even boast of his own anniversary wing, opened to the public in 2016 to commemorate his 110th birthday. This section displays official gifts, such as his portraits made from grain in Belorussia or knit on a carpet by weavers in Tajikistan. Originally, the museum managers had intended that the exhibit be temporary, but visitors liked it, the young docent explained, so it has become permanent.

  And what of the “reformers”—Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it. The museum had dedicated a small corner—“Reformers and Their Reforms”—but addressed them nowhere else.

  “What about Khrushchev?” we asked a guide.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “There was no administrative order issued to set up such an exhibit,” she replied.

  “Did you ask why?” we pressed.

  She walked away, unwilling to answer uncomfortable questions. The reformers have largely disappeared from history in Russia because they don’t accord with the black-and-white view of Russian grandeur, as personified in firm leaders who must always appear unrepentant, despite the scale of the suffering they oversaw or caused. These three leaders showed humane concern for their citizens, which set them apart. As imperfect as their reforms were, they tried to democratize the imperial monolith. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, thus making the Russians doubt their communist czar. As part of his Perestroika, Gorbachev introduced glasnost—a wider dissemination of information, which allowed people to ask questions and hold the state to account. Yeltsin proclaimed Russia a democratic state that should join the world instead of fighting it. Nonetheless, they were products of the same authoritarian culture as the authoritarians preceding, and also following, them, and therefore they never fully succeeded.

  Once retired, Khrushchev often reflected on the lack of Russia’s political progress forward. “Russia is like a tub full of dough,” he used to say. “You push your hand through and you reach the bottom. You pull out your hand, and then right in front of your eyes, it is, again, a tub full of dough, without a trace of your hand. Perhaps Russia does need a strong hand to make change happen.” A depressing yet apparently accurate observation.

  Some are still striving after change these days. During our visit, Alexey Navalny, at the time a potential rival to Putin in the upcoming presidential elections, arrived to open up his campaign headquarters. In making his quixotic yet laudable bid for the anti-Putin vote, Navalny managed to gather supporters all across Russia, organizing at least fifty regional teams—unprecedented opposition outreach in a country where most political activity of note takes place in Moscow. Ulyanovsk was one of those towns he found most receptive—perhaps because of their affinity with another young radical, born in this little town, railing against the autocratic regime a century ago. It did not matter: the Putin electoral authorities eventually refused to let him register his candidacy on account of alleged crimes of embezzlement and a criminal conviction that many believe was fabricated to keep him out of politics.

  Ulyanovsk benefited greatly from the bicentennial celebration, in 2012, of the birth of the novelist Ivan Goncharov, one of Russia’s most famous domestically, though perhaps lesser known abroad. The Goncharov home museum, once the family estate, aims to document how Goncharov helped characterize Russian identity through his 1859 masterpiece, Oblomov. Its eponymous protagonist—kind-hearted, perpetually lazy, languidly aristocratic—remains one of the most endearing and enduring literary embodiments of the Russian predicament so often typified by statements Russians make about the “Russian soul,” namely, “we may be backwards but we”—unlike other peoples, the implication is—“have soul.”

  Goncharov Square, next to the museum, features not only a Soviet-era bronze statue of the writer pensively taking notes, but also more recent additions: Oblomov’s “philosophical sofa” (commissioned, a plaque incongruously informs us, by the local firm Commercial Real-estate) and a pair of bronze slippers. (Oblomov rarely changed out of his robe or ventured outside the house.) Both seem to symbolize an often all-encompassing stagnation ever present in Russia and the deep fear of change that underlies it. A quote from the novel encompasses this kind of thinking: “When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next.”1 The home’s builders, however, seemed to have feared little in designing luxury: the three-story corner brick building, situated a few blocks west of the Volga, stands elegantly trimmed in white granite, with its own clock tower.

  Few aspects of life in Russia are divorced from politics: in the museum’s entrance hall hangs a photograph, taken in 2012, of Putin and Sergei Morozov, the governor of Ulyanovsk Oblast, as the former grants the city and the museum an order to celebrate Goncharov’s bicentennial. There is also a certificate announcing Goncharov’s posthumously awarded title, Honorary Citizen of Ulyanovsk. As if the literary titan, a citizen of Russia almost a century and a half before either leader was born, would have cared! The writer lived and died in Simbirsk quite well without this honorific, but Russians cannot step away from the Soviet tradition of showering Russian figures, both historical and contemporary, with ceremonial medals and awards.

  Goncharov’s museum showcases what is both marvelous and malevolent about Putin’s country. There are wonderful exhibits—Goncharov’s wainscoted study, pages from a draft of Oblomov, and copies of the novel’s first editions, in addition to the writer’s letters to Mikhail Volkonsky, son of the famous Decembrist revolutionary Sergei—that elevate your spirit and help you appreciate the richness of Russia’s history and arts, the true manifestations of the Russian soul, as it were.

  Yet the grumpy museum attendants suspiciously followed us everywhere and barked at us for attempting to explore on our own, without their vigilant supervision. Instead of answering our polite questions about what we were looking at, they gruffly instructed us to read the information sheets beneath the exhibits and visit the rooms in strictly clockwise order. “Nelzya! Vam tuda!” (It is forbidden to go this way. You have to go that way!)

  Never mind. Overwhelmed by the richness of Goncharov’s life and work and by Ulyanovsk’s literary heritage—the town was also a place where Pushkin and the Decembrists resided—we wanted to buy Goncharov’s books, and Oblomov most of all. So we approached a table strewn with souvenirs at the exit.

  There was no one there. The guard barked at us, confirming the obvious: “The ticket lady has stepped away.” When she would return he would not or could not say.

  If we learned anything visiting museums across Russia, it was that those who sell tickets or souvenirs are often absent from their stations when you need them most. Sometimes a lack of visitors might be to blame, but there is a deeper problem: even after two and a half decades of capitalism, customer service, at least outside Moscow, is not a priority. The Goncharov museum might stand as a monument to Russian high culture, but the recently renovated restrooms lacked toilet paper, paper towels, and soap, even as its clean white tile walls bore illustrations of blue swans and pink flamingos. After examining for hours the stately home of one of Russia’s literary giants, one wonders why one’s tour must end on a note of exasperation and personal humiliation. Perhaps, however, this humiliation has a point in a country where people are subordinate to the state. If the authorities don’t believe citizens deserve rights, citizens, accordingly, don’t believe they have a right to civilized comfort. The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was notorious for its deficit in toilet paper, and citizens resorted to using yesterday’s Pravda newspaper pages instead. Incidentally, in Stalin’s times this was a grave crime, which made the use of the restrooms a truly trying experience.

  Wet hands or not, we were nevertheless determined to buy a Goncharov souvenir. The souvenir stand lady returned. We asked for a copy of Oblomov.


  “We don’t have one.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are not available.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “The municipal authorities have not issued the relevant order for us to sell such books here.”

  Selling postcards of Ulyanovsk was one thing, but the classics of Russian literature, presumably for lack of demand, quite another. The saleslady sent us to the bookstore nearby. We followed a muddied path to a sign reading BUKINIST (secondhand bookseller). We entered the dilapidated, disorderly shop, with tomes old and new strewn on a table, stacked on the floor, and piled on the stools—a bibliophile’s dream, one would think. But before long, the disheveled shopkeeper was apologizing to us. No, he had no copies of Goncharov’s works, either.

  “Try the basement,” he suggested. “They have school textbooks down there.”

  Downstairs we found no Goncharov. However, pasted to the door under a sign reading ADMINISTRATION was a portrait of Putin, cut out of a calendar. Along the wall stood stacks of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. We finally asked the female shopkeeper how we were to obtain a copy of Oblomov.

  “Try online,” she said, barely lifting her gaze from a computer screen.

  The next morning was cold and gray, unusually so for a May day. We ventured down to the Volga embankment to take a tour along the river. The port was open, yet empty, with no boats scheduled to run. Vendors still peddled (to whom, we wondered) the souvenirs of the area—tiny magnetic portraits of Lenin, Karamzin, Goncharov, and even Stalin (even though the dictator had no relation to Ulyanovsk), and, of course, Putin.

  We approached the ticket office inside the dock building.

  “Two tickets for a boat tour, please,” we asked the woman behind the window. She shook her head: there were no boats running.

  “The weather is bad,” she added, in a friendly but basically indifferent way, “but if you want to rent the whole vessel for six thousand rubles [about $100] for yourselves, you can.” We decided to do just that and were quickly ushered aboard an old cruise ship meant to take as many as 120 passengers.

  Our cruise ship was a remnant from the Soviet days. The remaining craft are half a century old, but many have been modernized and refurbished. In 2011 one sank near Kazan, another Volga town, and more than sixty people lost their lives. The ships have been better managed since then. We hoped ours would be.

  Under leaden skies, chilled by a wind ruffling the pewter-hued surface of the water, we pulled out from the port, passing a gloomy junkyard—or, rather, docked passenger ships, including the former giants of Soviet waterways, ones with hydrofoils that lifted the hulls out of the water, allowing them to reach speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour. Now they sit as rusting behemoths. It was painful to remember that during Soviet times and even as late as the 1990s, these winged craft circulated among all the Volga’s major towns, including Kazan, Samara, and Nizhny Novgorod.

  Denizens of the Volga, of course, have always used the river to get about. But in 1956 the river became Khrushchev’s special project—as anticapitalist as he was, he was also searching for ways to improve people’s lives after the harsh Stalin decades. At the time over three thousand hydrofoil vessels coursed the country’s major waterways at high speed, ferrying people quickly and easily to their destinations. Inspired by the Soviet state space program, the craft were emblazoned with names like “Rocket” or “Meteor.” But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Yeltsin government abandoned industrial projects and public services in favor of privatization. That killed the shipyards producing the hydrofoils and left the speedy craft known as meteors to rust away in their nautical graveyards.

  A mechanic on our boat told us that he used to pilot the meteors from the Khrushchev era, but then, he said, they were declared cost-ineffective, so he was compelled to switch to excursion craft running at more leisurely speeds. His eyes dreamy with nostalgia, he listed at least seven routes those meteors used to run in the region.

  “Now people smarter than us own them,” he declared sarcastically. “Our speedboats are being used as far away as Vietnam and China. You can find some still gliding down rivers in Canada, Greece, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Thailand, and Turkey.” He paused. “I rue for what we had and stupidly destroyed.”

  The mighty matushka Volga, spreading away on both sides of us, should have been breathtaking, yet what struck us was the shambolic, neglected shoreline that has only recently begun reviving. Still, for an hour and a half we had a large, majestic Volga liner on the river all to ourselves—something impossible to imagine anywhere else, at any other time, and at so little cost.

  The sun finally appeared, right after we sailed under Ulyanovsk’s recently built President Bridge—one of the longest in Europe, the mechanic told us. It is one of the two bridges in Ulyanovsk, and with a typically Russian story behind it. By 2009, work on the structure had been stalled for over two decades, but then Putin came to town and voiced his displeasure at the delay. In quick order, the bridge was completed. Another, older bridge we passed beneath bore the name Imperial. It dated from the 1910s, when Emperor Nicholas II visited Ulyanovsk.

  In Russia, where the welfare of the state takes precedence over the needs of the citizenry, public works are often enacted to meet the exigencies of the bureaucracy rather than to help people live more comfortably. The President Bridge, indeed, has been a necessary improvement, lessening traffic bottlenecks in the region, but functioning waterways would be an even bigger improvement. A demand for them has yet to reach Putin’s desk, it seems.

  Even though we were the only two passengers aboard, the barwoman in her middle years, Lyudmila, stood at her post ready to serve us and to talk. Fixing the scarf covering her henna-red hair, she offered us peanuts, instant coffee, and bottled water. She marveled at our foreignness. She had seen foreigners before but never really talked to one. She had never ventured beyond the Volga region but did enjoy traveling along the river. She told us that while working as a janitor at the train station, she liked to watch the trains arriving from or heading out to distant, enigmatic destinations—Moscow, Minsk, Saint Petersburg. But “the Volga pulls me in, and I had to come here,” she said, displaying a mouth filled with gold teeth. In the old days, such teeth were a manifestation of an achieved or an aspired-to status, mostly found in men and mostly those men coming from the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. She had a son, who was about to graduate from the Suvorovsky Military Academy in Moscow. She worried that he would be sent to war in Ukraine or, even worse, in Syria. “The curse of war,” she sighed.

  In Russia where wars—fighting, winning, or preparing for them—are a big part of the Kremlin propaganda of the country’s superior heroism, Lyudmila’s sad comment showed how the horrors of war scar society despite the upbeat patriotic message.

  Lyudmila was upset about how life along the river had changed. She could no longer walk around the port, she said. “It’s all very strict now, all fenced up. The area became private property after a rich guy bought it to make money, but it turned out to be too much trouble for him to do anything.”

  After the Soviet Union collapsed, markets became a priority, and the state abandoned publicly funded river transportation in almost all Volga towns and elsewhere in Russia. Businessmen bought ports and the crafts berthed in them, but all this required investment, and the new owners, unsure of quick returns, proved unwilling to provide any.

  We checked with Lyudmila if there was a way to get by water from Ulyanovsk to Samara, our next destination. A boat trip theoretically would last only a couple of hours, while by car it would take at least five on a crowded, potholed two-lane road, stretches of which were under construction.

  “No such luck,” Lyudmila said. “You have to travel by taxi or bus.” She went on to recount to us how she used to run to the piers to buy the world-famous black caviar from Volga sturgeon. “Now there are few boats and no black caviar.”

  As t
he boat trip drew to a close, we tried to tip our chatty bar host, but she refused to take any money. “We were told not to take bribes,” she explained. In a country where so many state employees do take bribes, from the plumber to the president, Lyudmila was the best the country has to offer—kind, cordial, hardworking—and uncorrupted. The kind of Russian Goncharov described in Oblomov:

  His heart has never struck a single false note; there is no stain on his character. No well-dressed-up lie has ever deceived him and nothing will lure him from the true path. A regular ocean of evil and baseless may be surging around him, the entire world may be poisoned and turned upside down—Oblomov will never bow down to the idol of falsehood, and his soul will always be pure, noble, honest … Such people are rare; there aren’t many of them; they are like pearls in a crowd!2

  * * *

  Ever keen to tout Ulyanovsk’s status, our local historian Petrov had grudgingly admitted to us that their part of Povolzhye (as the territories adjacent to the Volga have been historically called) had been transferred to the Samara time zone down the river. As he reminded us, Simbirsk was once the capital of a guberniya that prestigiously shared the Moscow time, but now clocks in Ulyanovsk run in synch with those of downscale Samara further east.