In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  For comparison, the Kremlin powers that be spared Ulyanovsk’s governor Morozov such a fate in his Lenin-famous hometown. His good standing with the Kremlin has helped assure the longevity of his position. Even though Ulyanovsk could certainly use more sprucing up, Morozov has done well navigating local and national political, social, and cultural currents.

  The farther east we would travel, the more we would see the well-being of a city, a whole region even, relying on the local government for its prosperity, while that prosperity was dependent on the regional authorities’ cordial relationship with the Kremlin.

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  PERM, YEKATERINBURG, AND TYUMEN

  THE URALS’ HOLY TRINITY

  TIME ZONE: MSK+2; UCT+5

  When you are Putin, the Russia you see around you is flourishing.

  —A contemporary Russian joke

  Europe’s Final Frontier

  Three towns in the time zone that is second past Moscow—Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen—are major stopovers on the Siberian Throughway (in Russian, Sibirsky Trakt, also known as the Moskovskiy Trakt, or the Moscow Throughway). The throughway was the longest road in the world and for centuries connected Moscow and the Far East, passing through China. The three towns are also main junctions on the Trans-Siberian Railway, forming the trinity of the Urals—the mountain range dividing Europe and Asia.

  Perm is the Urals’ culture capital—the “first city in Europe,” we would be told, and the setting for Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Named in honor of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine the Great, Yekaterinburg—known as Sverdlovsk in the Soviet days—is the regional political center and the capital of the vast Ural region. Boris Yeltsin was born in a village nearby. Tyumen is the hub for the region’s oil industry, the industry supporting the Russian state and enmeshed in its politics.

  The Perm Paradox

  Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, offers us a charming précis of how diet affects character. “Pepper … makes people hot-tempered … vinegar … makes them sour … chamomile … makes them bitter … and barley-sugar and such things … make children sweet-tempered.”

  Hard candy confected from barley sugar was for the prim Victorian Brits, of course. For the doughy Russians, Carroll’s Russian translator Nina Demurova’s pronouncement is apt: “ot sdoby dobreyut” (they grow kinder from eating buns). In Russian sdoba (yeast dough buns) and dobryi (kind) share a root.

  Perm impresses with its buns and its decorative gingerbreads—Russia’s most famous—and kindness. The city’s bakeries brim with a variety of pastries sweet and savory, with fillings of cheese, fish, meat, cream, and potatoes and coming in various shapes and sizes. The vendors, smiling, make suggestions and offer samples of flavors you have never imagined. Say, an intricately decorated multilayered calf-liver cake with fresh herbs—amazing. Or a salmon turnover with cheese—even better.

  After the lean, dour Soviet decades with their empty shelves and shortages, baking has been making a comeback all over Russia. One can buy fine baked goods even in subway stations—but in Perm they are even finer. The Russian soul, they say, dwells in its pastries and pies. Long before Lewis Carroll came on the scene, Russians had their own saying: “A home is not nice because of its decor, but because of its pies.”

  Maybe that is why Chekhov and Pasternak chose to memorialize Perm in their work. Chekhov’s Three Sisters tried to salvage their intellectual lives in a “regional garrison town” where they eagerly dreamed of moving to the more refined Moscow. Doctor Zhivago—Pasternak’s novel about a Russian poet-physician in love with another man’s wife—is set in the fictional town of Yuryatin, based on Perm, amid the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution. There love blossoms between Yury Zhivago and Lara. Their meeting place—the nineteenth-century caryatid-decorated house in gorgeous Prussian blue, now on Lenin Street, that once belonged to the wealthy local trader Gribushin—is as important a character as the lovers themselves. They call it the “house with figures” here. In a double literary twist, Yuryatin’s doctor learns that Chekhov’s Three Sisters was, too, set in Perm.

  The last city before the Urals, Perm, according to its residents, is “where Europe begins.” Others view it as the last European city—the end of the world, even. The Perm Paradox.

  The intoxicating smell of lindens, so rare elsewhere in Russia, wafts over the house from where these trees stand on the nearby Komsomolsky Prospect, adding to the house’s fin-de-siècle charm. Next to it stands a more recent, commercialized sign of the times: a posh Doctor Zhivago restaurant, named in the post-Soviet tradition of pilfering literary texts for marketing memes. Have its customers read Pasternak’s novel? Doubtful—the story is popular in Russia, the book itself much less so. Popular, because the novel’s history is a political ordeal that many Soviet artists had gone through. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech Pasternak wrote a Zhivago romance set at the time of the Revolution, like Bulgakov exploring political themes of Stalinism and religion. The manuscript, forbidden in the Soviet Union—de-Stalinization notwithstanding—was secretly published in Italy in 1957. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Soviets forbade him to travel abroad to receive the honor. Later in life, Khrushchev was embarrassed by this decision he called “despotic.”

  Having passed by the house with figures, we continued on Lenin Street, which we assumed would lead to the city’s Lenin statue. We asked two young women for directions, but they didn’t know the Soviet leader’s location. Luckily, we came upon an older man who kindly explained that in Perm, a city of culture, the local Lenin monument was associated not with his eponymous street but with a park, where he stands in front of the stately pale blue Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater.

  Music and ballet have always been cultivated here. Sergei Diaghilev, a native of Perm, founded in Paris in 1905 the Ballets Russes—the most famous twentieth-century Russian contribution to European high culture.

  A hundred years later, in the summer of 2017, the city continued those cultural traditions. The Tchaikovsky Theater’s orchestra, MusicAeterna, conducted by the Greek (and current Perm resident) Teodor Currentzis, opened the Salzburg Festival with its performance of Mozart’s Requiem, the first time such an honor was bestowed on a non-Austrian company. Many do wonder how this town so off-center can attract world-class artists such as Currentzis. His explanation was that he chose to move to Perm because there he found “the spiritual depth he had been craving.”1

  Currentzis is not the only one who believes that Perm offers an atmosphere conducive to the creative life. The prominent art entrepreneur Marat Gelman, another native of Perm but known throughout Russia, launched many projects in town, including the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, PERMM.

  In the mid-2000s, the young governor of the Perm region, Oleg Chirkunov, had an idea to follow in the footsteps of Diaghilev, Chekhov, and Pasternak, and to turn Perm into the new capital of Russian culture. He was encouraged by Putin’s then pro-European statements, including his BBC interview that “Russia is part of the European culture.” “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. It is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy,”2 Putin said.

  Chirkunov indeed made Perm’s culture prosper, but by 2012 the political atmosphere changed and the governor resigned, effectively ending the period of the Perm “cultural revolution.”

  After Putin’s third term as president began in 2012, the Russian government showed itself increasingly intolerant of diverse viewpoints—including in art—and the Kremlin decided Gelman’s creation enjoyed too much popularity among the political opposition. In 2013, the government, or so Gelman contends, deprived him of control of the gallery, though it remains open and still plays an important role in the city’s cultural life, albeit operating under the tighter supervision of the authorities.

  Perm’s spirit of the post-Soviet cultural revolt finds expression in the city’s bus stops even today. Famous in h
is own right as a hip internet designer and a founder of a Moscow-based urban design firm, Artemy Lebedev, son of the writer Tatyana Tolstaya, in the late 2000s designed each stop to creatively reflect themes in Perm’s past. Unfortunately, by the time we visited in July 2017, many of these stops had, in a way, shared Gelman’s fate, and been damaged or defaced with graffiti.

  Despite today’s reigning conservatism, Perm hasn’t completely lost its magic. Construction sites are ugly everywhere. In Russia, they amount to pathological eyesores, lasting ages, blocked from public view by gray hulks of concrete or drab canvas curtains, casting a pall of gloom over towns. But not in Perm. Since 2011 construction sites have enjoyed the ministrations of artists from a street art festival who paint the surrounding fences according to themes they chose. First, they selected “Perm—a European City,” of course. The year of our visit it was “Perm’s Lengthy History,” in reference to the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era.

  We walked alongside a multicolored construction site fence admiring the artists’ work, then asked a young bearded man painting there what else there was to see nearby. He hopped down from his ladder and, wiping a smudge of green color from his forehead, pointed to the linden-lined Komsomolsky Prospect, with its Central Exhibition Hall and its Art Gallery.

  “They have a tribute to Marc Chagall and the Bible, a rarity,” he responded. “And the Art Gallery, which is in a cathedral, has an exhibit showing eighteenth-century wooden sculptures. There you’ll see Christ and Saint Nicholas looking more like pagan monuments, with flat cheekbones and slanted, widely spaced eyes.”

  Inspired by his detailed recommendations, we rushed to the Chagall exhibition of biblical lithographs. As we bought our tickets, the vendor said, “He”—Chagall—“is a Jew! But even he painted God Russian.”

  “He didn’t,” we interjected. “These are not Russian but biblical characters.”

  “Doesn’t matter, a Jew portrays Christian religion!”

  The Russian Orthodox Church, effectively an institution of the Russian state, was rank with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Distrust of anything perceived as foreign, or at least not Christian—or specifically Orthodox Christian—fueled both the pogroms of the czarist era and discrimination against Jews during the Soviet decades. Thankfully, the bane of anti-Semitism has largely disappeared in modern Russia.

  “You’re not from here?” the vendor asked amicably.

  “No, from Moscow and New York.”

  “From far away, then! Thank you for stopping by. How do you find us comparing to New York and Moscow?”

  “Very cordial,” we replied.

  The woman could not have smiled more broadly.

  Perm’s claims to European civilization buttress its identity and define its history. A banner over the Heroes of Khasan Street, once the Sibirsky Trakt, proudly announces Perm to be the sister city of Oxford.

  Never mind that Perm, rather un-Oxford-like, is a nightmare to reach from any of the nearby cities. A two-lane highway, potholed and narrow, serves as the main road into and out of town. On the way to the center, a mess of jewelry and fur stores line the unevenly paved lanes, heralding the Urals and Siberia, where hunters and gold miners once dominated towns. There is a reason for this. In times past, the state dispatched convicts to the region in the hopes that they might hunt for sable to supply the western areas of the Russian Empire with its precious fur. They also dug for gold.

  The cobblestone streets and lawns on Perm’s squares may have seen better days, but, we discovered, repairs are under way. Oxford, Perm is not; yet there is an orderliness to this place. Once the village of Yagoshikha—but founded as a city in 1781 under the patronage of Catherine the Great—Perm was strategically planned, which is unusual for a Russian town. A German and an Anglophile, Catherine wanted it to reflect her penchant for order, productivity, and civic awareness (or at least as much as would be permissible in an autocracy).

  She may have succeeded. Perm’s European status allows it to evade, to an extent, Moscow’s control and still exude a feeling of a progressive cultural environment.

  Many Russian towns, we noticed on our travels, present themselves as the center of something. Which makes sense. When the “power vertical” (as Putin once termed the Kremlin-dominant power structure he was set to reestablish in Russia) dominates all, each place creates its own raison d’être, at least for the purposes of public relations. Ulyanovsk showcases the aristocratic lifestyle and Lenin; Samara, its status as Russia’s wartime reserve capital and the hub of the space industry. Kaliningrad, of course, takes pride in being the sprawling country’s westernmost territory. And Perm, in the midst of the Ural Mountains, geographically, at least, is indeed the easternmost border of Europe.

  Oppressed societies often express themselves through humor. In Russia, engaging in satire has enabled people to overcome their fear of the government and feel free of it. “If we can make fun of the Kremlin,” Russians have reasoned, “the Kremlin can’t have complete power over us.” The city of Perm has taken a humorous approach to naming its tourist walkways, for example. A one-ton bronze bear stands in front of the giant, Soviet-era Ural Hotel as the terminus of the Green Line, the town’s main historic route. Russians have never appreciated having the fearsome bear as their informal national mascot. When we asked Permyaks—those living in Perm—about their bear statue, they responded with a cheerful “Stesnyatsya nechego!” (nothing to be ashamed of). The bear stands not only for Perm, they explained, but also represents a subtle, ironic dig at foreigners, who, Russians believe, imagine bears walk around the streets of the country. The Red Line arrows show the way to sites associated with Doctor Zhivago, a love story.

  Perm’s pride is the Kama River and its splendidly renovated embankment. The Kama has always figured in the past and present of the city. To the west, it flows into the Volga and is its longest tributary; in the east it connects with the great Siberian rivers, the Ob and the Irtysh. In Catherine the Great’s time, the Kama was famed as a supplier of salt, which was exported west at a great profit. Muscovites even developed a nickname for Perm traders, solyenye ushi (salty ears). Ignoring the condescension, the Permyaks, proud of their roots, erected a monument to that, too.

  Of course, “Europeanism” here has a decidedly local tinge. The fashion store Comme Il Faut brims not with haut de gamme threads, but with giant displays of plastic flower arrangements; signs for the festival mini-Avignon display photos of the Kremlin in Moscow; and the Wonder Woman Pizza shop—where we stopped for a bite—was eerily empty, its servers busier with their phones than with us. We were almost the only customers. Nevertheless, the pizza shop’s owner was at least gender-aware, choosing for its theme a female superhero, and not Superman or Spider-Man or some overtly masculine figure. This was unusual in patriarchal Russia. Though we saw signs saying Administratsiya po Blagoustroistvu (administration for civic renovation), streets and squares have been under construction for years, we were told. Perm’s airport was one of the worst we saw during our journeying—jammed with disgruntled passengers and their screaming babies, with little flight information available, and a waiting lounge area resembling those of bus stations in provincial Soviet cities. Yet, unusually for Russia and very socially consciously—which is also unusual—many billboards here denounce the wearing of fur. This in the fur-producing Urals and despite all the fur shops lining the Heroes of Khasan Street.

  When it underwent a cultural awakening of sorts in recent decades, Perm also began to champion the values of civil society, at least for a while. Hence, on a sunny July morning, we rode out to Perm-36, once a Gulag labor camp but now a museum, just outside the village of Kuchino, some sixty miles northeast of the city. The countryside through which we passed, with its undulant green hills empty of human habitation, recalled the Scottish Highlands, if under a cloudless azure sky.

  In Perm-36, hapless prisoners engaged in logging—one of the most brutal forms of hard labor. Among them, struggling to survive the inhumane conditions
for which the camps eventually earned worldwide infamy, were prominent dissidents, including the long-suffering writer Vladimir Bukovsky and Gleb Yakunin, the late priest and member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

  The fate of the Perm-36 museum is, unfortunately, typically Russian. Opened in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin was eager to expose the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism, the establishment for two decades was affiliated with Memorial, a human-rights organization dedicated to keeping alive Russia’s history of political repression. At the time, Perm-36 was more than just a museum; its mission was to inspire social consciousness. The site was a special one—it survived Khrushchev’s Thaw and was operational as a political prison into Brezhnev’s 1970s. The expositions contextualize how Perm-36’s inmates lived with displays found in its white-walled barracks, a hall used for meetings and showing films, a forge, a sawmill, and a repair shop. A green watchtower overlooks its rusting barbwire perimeter, beyond which stretch empty fields and scraggly forest.

  After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the connections between Soviet repression and the modern Russian state’s current aggressive nationalism became too obvious to ignore. The museum was almost closed; its annual gathering devoted to human rights, Pilorama (Sawmill), ceased to convene after complaints of dubious sincerity from former prison guards and nationalistic Stalinists about its supposedly “antipatriotic” stance. The Kremlin, however, decided that closing the Gulag site would only give ammunition to Putin’s critics. So, instead the government took over Perm-36 as a historical project under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Culture and replaced the museum’s Memorial founders with new state appointees.