In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  Stalin in Samara

  The next day, after a hot, bruising five-hour car ride (to cover a mere 150 miles!) instead of the pleasant two-hour boat trip we would have enjoyed in previous decades, we pulled into Samara. With a population of 1.2 million and known in Soviet times as Kuibyshev, Samara, with its traffic jams, high-rises, and busy shopping malls resembles something like a Moscow-on-the-Volga. The old wooden huts, some almost fallen to the ground, still abound—something Moscow has not seen in decades—but the local offices of Gazprom banks affiliated with it, and the giant state-owned Sberbank look formidable and palatial. They are second only to buildings that belong to the municipal administrations and the security agencies. Such structures, despite what they symbolize—the Russian state’s dependence for its survival on its bounty of natural resources and the unceasing labors of its police force, both covert and overt—do rescue the city from anything resembling a provincial air.

  Indeed this has always been so, and thus Soviet planners selected Samara for a unique honor, as we would see.

  Upon arrival, we stopped by the city’s museum of ethnography. In contrast to the Ulyanovsk museums, the Samara display is not supposed to be political, but exhibits about the history and customs of local peoples quickly give way to yet another tribute to Russia’s imperial grandeur. The museum is mostly dedicated to Stalin and his victory in World War II, with due coverage awarded to Lenin and the czars—Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Nicholas I and II, Alexanders II and III, and so on. And then there was Czar Putin, promoter of the double-headed eagle and all it stood for.

  In the far corner, next to an exhibit of the region’s prehistoric era and mock dinosaurs, we found a small section devoted to Stalin’s purges. Yet if you didn’t know the history of all the bloodshed and imprisonment in his day, you might come away with the impression that the bosses of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the precursor agency of the KGB), not the dictator himself, were to blame. One cannot understand Russia’s history without comprehending the atrocities of the Stalin era and how they inevitably grew out of unbridled one-man rule and the need to eliminate—physically—any possible contender to the throne.

  In Samara stands a far more impressive relic of Stalin’s era and that of the war he prosecuted victoriously: the famed Stalin Bunker.

  As Nazi troops rapidly advanced toward Moscow in 1941, most of the USSR’s ministries, foreign diplomatic missions, and political families (including those of Stalin and Khrushchev) departed for Samara (Kuibyshev in those days), which was to serve as a makeshift reserve national capital in the early war years. The city also hosted facilities critical for the Soviet military—aviation and engineering plants and higher education institutions, including a relocated Moscow University. A massive riverbank bunker was built for Stalin just in case he had to be evacuated, too.

  Though open to groups, visiting it as individuals would be, it turned out, no easy task. First, we tried to book a tour from Moscow. The website urged us to reserve tickets by phone, but when we called, we were rudely informed that we could not get in unless we were part of a group.

  “Leave your names and call the day of your arrival. Maybe you’ll get in,” we were told.

  We did as advised. That morning, Nina made the calls.

  When she finally got through, a man’s crackling voice answered.

  “Deistvuyshyi obyekt gosudarstvennoi oborony. Dezhurnyi po obyektu” (Active facility of state defense. Facility officer on duty speaking.)

  “I am Nina Khrushcheva, and I’ve called a few times before. We want to make sure we are let in to the bunker.”

  “I remember your name. That Khrushchev, I’m no fan of his.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sick of him. He wrecked too many things (mnogo ponatvoril). Just take Crimea. Your name, Nina, is even the same as his wife’s, blyad,” he cursed, using the Russian word for “whore.” “But fine, come on over.”

  The man never even asked if Nina was related to the former Soviet premier. It took nothing more than hearing the name to set him off.

  We took a cab to the bunker, located at 167 Frunze Street and concealed beneath a nondescript apartment building. At a nondescript plain back door, a crowd of some forty eager visitors stood waiting for admission, some, no doubt, worried as we were that they would be refused entry if they were not part of a group. But ultimately the guards let everyone in. They still operated according to the tried-and-true Soviet precept of managing public places: even if they have to let you pass, you will have to suffer for it.

  An almost cubist stained-glass portrait of Stalin puffing on his pipe welcomed us in. We climbed twelve stories down a steep staircase to the Generalissimo’s quarters: a conference room with a large map of Russia, and a wooden oval table surrounded by twelve chairs; and a living room office with a white sofa, a desk covered with a musty piece of green felt, and a red emergency phone line, all watched over by an austere portrait of Alexander Suvorov, one of czarist Russia’s greatest military heroes. The last Generalissimo of the Russian Empire, Suvorov inspired the first Soviet one.

  The cheerful guide, a blond woman in her forties, couldn’t hide her excitement about how roughly Stalin treated all those who were tasked with defending the Motherland. “One of the local factories,” she said, “which was producing munitions during the war, at first made less than required.” Stalin reprimanded them. “You can’t make just one bomb a day,” he bellowed. “You have to make hundreds, thousands a day!” Fearing for their lives, they did just that.

  She finally delivered the punch line—“Stalin actually never stepped foot in the bunker, remaining in Moscow all through the war”—but mentioned nothing about Stalin’s key role in starting the war. Fearful of being undermined by capitalist France and Great Britain, and even more afraid of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin was eager to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, in 1939. This, in effect, permitted the Third Reich to take over Europe without worrying about a Russian response. After the Nazi invasion of the western areas of the Soviet Union, Stalin, in the early stages of the war, blamed massive Russian defeats on his countrymen’s unpatriotic behavior. But the military failures owed much to inexperienced officers who assumed their duties after the NKVD had wiped out the gifted old officer corps, accusing them of being “enemies of the people.”

  The bunker, our guide told us, was built in nine months and cost 19 million rubles ($324,000 in 1942)—more than $5 million today. We overheard two men, perhaps father and son, walking in front of us down the clean, cold spiral staircase.

  “Imagine that, they built it so quickly, but nobody stole anything!” said the young one.

  “Of course not,” the older man replied. “You would not steal under Stalin.”

  “But with Khrushchev, you could!”

  “Oh, that Khrushchev!”

  After much climbing up and down claustrophobic stairs and passing through innumerable steel doors resembling those aboard a submarine, the tour ended and we reemerged at street level. We went over to introduce ourselves to the two duty officers. Both looked to be in their eighties—still too young to have fought in the war but, judging by their bearing and mannerisms, quite likely former police or KGB officers. They were also clearly devoted Stalinists and were exited to meet Jeff, the American.

  “Trump has sent you to see what power Russians have!” said one. “Tell him that we are peaceful people, but we won’t be pushed around!”

  We asked which of them had been so rude to Nina on the phone earlier that morning. Both denied having spoken to her, alleging, oddly and irrelevantly, that their German was better than their English, so there must have been some misunderstanding. This statement made no sense, as she had spoken to him in Russian. Whatever. Since Jeff had introduced himself as an American journalist, we could only conclude that they feared he would report on how angry Stalinists had mistreated his “minder,” and they wanted t
o avoid any scandals.

  We walked back out into the glorious spring day. After listening to our guide expound on the heroic nature of the Soviet Union’s most infamous mass murderer, we needed some air and a drink. The bunker lies just a couple of blocks from the Volga’s shore. Samara sits on the river’s left bank. The rocky Zhigulevsky Mountains on the right bank dominated the view from the bench on which we sat.

  Pleased with such stunning scenery, we nevertheless recoiled at the bunker guide’s de facto glorification of totalitarianism and repression, which, in the twenty-first century, run counter to everything Europe stands for. Russia is not Europe, many would say. Yet Europe is and always has been Russia’s main point of reference, the standard against which, willingly or not, it both judges itself and finds itself judged. This held true even deep inside the Stalin Bunker. There, our guide had proudly informed us that it was Europe’s deepest (121 feet); which is more than twice as deep as Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and, of course, far deeper than Winston Churchill’s piddling dugout in London.

  We spoke English as we sat drinking the cans of Zhigulev beer we had just acquired from the centuries-old famous local brewery of the same name. The brewery’s on-site store offers numerous varieties of beer on tap and salted-fish treats to go with them, all traditionally much beloved in Russia, but long gone from Moscow’s posh environs.

  Soon we found ourselves the object of curiosity of high school students sitting on a nearby bench. This was, it turned out, their graduation day; their cohorts strolled past us, dressed in stylized Soviet-era school uniforms—plain brown dresses and laced white aprons for girls, dark blue woolen suits for boys. Those were the uniforms that Lenin’s unfashionable wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had adopted for schoolchildren in the 1920s. Hated for their dullness in Soviet days, they have made a comeback as a festive school outfit for special occasions such as graduation and evoke nostalgia in those pining after the now-defunct communist superpower.

  Hearing us speaking English, the young Russians on the next bench were curious about the foreigners visiting their town: “Do you need help?” they asked in good enough English. “Would you like to have something translated or explained?”

  Switching to Russian, we expressed our pleasure at seeing how well kept the Volga’s embankment was here—families strolling, one of which appeared to be same-sex, children running, teenagers skateboarding. Crowded even on a weekday, the embankment stood in contrast to the neglected wasteland along the river in Ulyanovsk, and we told the students this. They proudly explained, “Ours is the longest river embankment in Europe!”

  “Is Russia Europe?” we asked.

  “Well, no,” one of the boys answered. “But Samara, as the country’s reserve capital during the war, is now the capital of the oblast and needs to look the part. Even though Nizhny Novgorod [another Volga town] has taken over as the unofficial capital of the Povolzhye, we are going to catch up.” The others voiced their agreement.

  Samara had languished in disarray for decades, but in recent years it has been trying to revive its riverine transportation business. From here speedboats—the meteors that we saw rotting away in Ulyanovsk—run to the larger industrial cities on the Volga, including Kazan, Tolyatti, and Syzran.

  Our new friends described how the river loops around the hills, creating a peninsula encompassing a reserve of tens of thousands of acres of national forest that, before the Revolution, used to be farmland. In the decade preceding the Great Patriotic War, factories began encroaching on it as the Soviet Union, fearing attack from the West, prepared for potential evacuation eastward of industries in European Russia.

  In Soviet times Kuibyshev was, like Kaliningrad, a “closed city” owing to its defense-related industries. It also became, eventually, the “space capital” of the USSR, producing rockets and much else the country’s space program required. (The city was also famed as the producer of the Pobeda (Victory) timepieces—a Soviet Rolex of sorts.) Our young interlocutors complained that these days the Russian space industry relies on foreign-made equipment and is being neglected.

  Yet the space museum remains one of the city’s prominent landmarks, featuring, as it does, exhibits of the war. It was Khrushchev who presided over the Soviet Union’s space program, long after Stalin’s death. The Sputnik satellite circled the globe for the first time in 1957, twelve years after the war ended. Yury Gagarin made mankind’s first journey into space, when Stalin was thoroughly expunged from the Soviet pantheon. And yet here he is again, the dictator rehabilitated. The museum presents the momentous achievements of the Space Age—some of the Soviet Union’s most momentous—as the direct consequence of Stalin’s era.

  “What is Samara really good at?” we asked the new graduates.

  “Industries, of course,” they replied.

  “But you say factories are being neglected here.”

  “Well, Samara is more a trade town these days. As a major river town, we’ve been always good at trade, too.”

  After saying good-bye, we walked back up toward Kuibyshev Square, breathtaking in its size. “It’s the largest in Europe!” said a passerby, noticing our fascination.

  “Are we in Europe?” we asked him.

  “Well, not exactly,” he replied, chagrined.

  The square’s ever-mutable name reflected the historical epochs through which it, and Russia, had passed. In czarist Orthodox Christian Russia, it was called Sobornaya (Cathedral) Square, for the huge house of worship that once graced its northern reaches. The Soviets dynamited the cathedral and designated the square Kommunalnaya (Communal) but eventually changed that to Kuibyshev, in honor of Valerian Kuibyshev, who ran the planned economy under Stalin. In 2010, a municipal commission recommended switching the square’s appellation back to Sobornaya, but the mayor nixed the move. The young people we had spoken to on the riverbank didn’t know who Kuibyshev was, but, in any case, they insisted that “At thirty-seven acres ours is the largest square in Europe.” Again, Europe. Where we were not. But to which Russia looks.

  Trapped between the double-headed eagle and the hammer and the sickle, Samara straddles the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the communist and the capitalist.

  Ramshackle, centuries-old wooden buildings decorated with intricately carved eighteenth-century latticework stand next to high-rises of glass and steel. Samara is a city of contrasts that even in Russia one rarely sees.

  On our way back to the hotel, as we sped past the wooden houses, we asked a friendly cabdriver named Nikolai, “What are you going to do with the old huts, renovate them with contemporary amenities? Only a few, we saw, have been redone that way.”

  “No,” he laughed. “The city got 26 million rubles [at the time $500,000] to drape painted tarps over walls facing the street. Just like the old Potemkin villages! Two hundred years later, Russia still has not changed!”

  The Potemkin reference goes back to the summer of 1787, when Catherine the Great set out to inspect the recent additions to her vast empire, including the Crimean Peninsula, annexed from the Ottomans four years earlier. Catherine’s lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the governor-general of her new southern provinces, knew shabby land- and cityscapes would displease the Germanic empress, who set high standards for order. So he saw to it that roadside buildings along her route would be lined with cheerful, prosperous facades, to hide the reigning squalor of rural poverty. On her return to Saint Petersburg, Catherine announced she was pleased with her new territory’s bucolic riches.

  Centuries later, the authorities still carry out renovations to impress visitors, be they czars or presidents. The current Potemkin program in Samara owed its origins to the 2018 World Cup, because along with ten other cities in Russia, it was picked to host a number of the tournament’s matches. This time, the local government has decided to hide Samara’s unseemly side not from the president, but from foreigners.

  “At least in the USSR the authorities knew how to make life better. We made rockets and watches, we
had boat rides on the Volga,” Nikolai said.

  We were curious: Kuibyshev was the reserve capital during the war, and the Soviet space industry capital after that. Yet the authorities have not managed to change the look in many downtown spots.

  Just a few feet away from the wooden shacks on Vilonovskaya Street stands a fancy yellow building showing elements of Classical Stalinist style. There dwelled the Khrushchevs, the Stalins (his children, that is), and other political families evacuated from Moscow. Nina grew up hearing stories about the privileged wartime abodes within.

  Nikolai had no answer as to why even the city center seventy years later still falls short of the “second capital” designation, except to note that Putin was working on it. Which did not mean that he was necessarily a fan of Russia’s current ruler.

  “With capitalism,” said Nikolai, “there is no money for anything good for the people. And our governor is almost a communist,” he announced, referring to the regional chief Nikolai Merkushkin. Officially a member of the dominant Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia) party, Merkushkin has racked up a notoriously long list of complaints among his electorate, all the while making strident statements about the West’s plot to destroy Russia. “Of course, things take a long time,” our cabdriver said. He was speaking before Putin’s elections in March 2018. “We’ll see who will replace the governor.”

  “But didn’t you say communists did everything well before Merkushkin, who was also a communist?” we asked.

  “Those were good Soviet communists, but now they are bad capitalist communists,” Nikolai replied.

  Before the presidential elections, a sort of “musical chairs” was taking place across Russia, with mayors and governors being dismissed and others nominated in their stead to assure that Putin’s de facto party, United Russia, would fill all the most important positions with the most reliable—that is, loyal—people. Just a few months after our visit, in September 2017, Merkushkin resigned “voluntarily” and was replaced by Dmitry Azarov, a local politician with a better economic pedigree.