To control the message, the institution is now less about this site as a once horrible camp; it has become about the Gulag as a whole. It focuses less on political prisoners, the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror, or Stalin himself. It nevertheless continues to display the details of the prisoners’ stark life, their bare barracks and their plank beds, and a chillingly simple interrogation room furnished with only two chairs, a table, and single lamp—all presented in the context of the Stalin regime’s efforts to industrialize Russia. The message is curated: traveling to the faraway region of Perm to see all this isn’t even necessary; the museum’s website offers a virtual tour.
Eager to see Perm-36 in person, we took a tour led by a flaxen-haired woman in her thirties with a businesslike demeanor. She instructed visitors on how to think about the inmates’ life of misery and deprivation: it is just a part of Russia’s great history. Sacrifices must be made, she told us. This broadly means that while undertaking the creation of a mighty country with a new social order, you should expect a few negative, unintended consequences. By this logic, our marvelous, if somewhat flawed, leaders had the state’s best interest in mind. “The great utopia when all was possible,” one display poster declares, with no hint of irony. Moreover, “enemies of the people”—including religious objectors who gouged out the eyes from portraits of Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet signatory of the 1939 nonaggression treaty—were driven by their “primitive” private interests with no understanding of the state’s mission for the good of all. That was our guide’s party line, also delivering the ultimate Kremlin message: embracing our past makes Russia great.
A jolly older man in a sailor’s striped shirt and a blue-and-white sailor’s cap soon joined our group.
“Aren’t you lucky that this man, who used to be here, can tell you all about the camp?!” the guide exclaimed.
We assumed him to be a former zek (labor camp inmate). But no, it turned out that he served as one of the guards and now works as a mechanic at the museum. He bemoaned the hardships of his job now in the same breath as he regaled us with tales of the prisoners’ plight. He was bearing out the words of Anna Akhmatova, one of the Soviet era’s most famous poets. Akhmatova, after Stalin’s death and the beginning of Khrushchev’s Thaw, mused that the two Russias—“odna, kotoraya sazhala, i drugaya, kotoraya sidela” (one that was putting people in prison and the other that was sitting in those prisons)—were finally “going to look into each other’s eyes.” That was almost happening around us—almost, because the members of our group were far too young to know how the Stalinist labor camps came about. No one objected or showed discomfort about the way the story of mass incarceration was being told.
In this, the Putin state was successful in diverting attention from the horrors of the repressions by presenting them as one of the tools for creating a great country.
“How have things changed here since the museum became part of the state?” we asked.
“They haven’t,” the docent replied with a strangely perky smile. “We have the same exhibits. We just put them in the proper historical context.”
That’s the genius of the Putin regime—opposing or controversial views are not always forbidden, but their “context” is manipulated for the benefit of the Kremlin.
Even though Perm-36 tells the story of the Gulag, it fails to present Stalin as the Kremlin’s chief murderer. And, as we had seen elsewhere, Khrushchev does not figure into the story told; his post-1956 mass rehabilitation of Stalin’s prisoners is absent. In the prisoners’ movie hall, a wall displays a long array of official portraits of high-level Soviet political figures, but the out-of-favor premier is nowhere among them.
“How come?” we asked. The woman replied, “Oh, right, I never noticed. Perhaps it’s because our museum is not political.”
The Gulag system was not political? How could this be, given that the greater part of those who did time here were political prisoners?
Khrushchev’s omission told us a lot about Russia. As our tour finished and we boarded our taxi to leave for Perm, we concluded that in Russia, despots are understood better and admired more than reformers; their harshness is justified as having served the good of the state. Reformers, on the other hand, are considered weak. When despots kill, they do so to save the country; when reformers try to bring justice, it must be because they have ulterior motives, and patriotism is not among them. At the start of Gorbachev’s Perestroika the ailing Molotov explained this state of mind: “With Stalin we followed the directions of a strong hand; when the hand got weaker, each started to sing his own song.”3 More than two and a half decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, this mentality still holds. “Singing one’s own song” remains dangerous insubordination to the state’s “power vertical.”
Our next stop east was Yekaterinburg—the Ural’s capital and throbbing heart and the onetime stomping ground of Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Traveling by car, a dozen or so miles out of Perm, the “first city in Europe,” we noticed something we had missed on our way to the labor camp: an artfully designed bus stop bearing a sprawling, faded banner: “Glory to Dear Stalin for the 70th Anniversary of Our Great Victory 1945–2015.”
We were glad to be on our way.
Yeltsin’s Yekaterinburg
Approaching Yekaterinburg by the Moscow Thoroughfare, we drove by another memorial erected in honor of victims of Soviet political repression, a giant diptych in bronze authored by the artist Ernst Neizvestny. The monument displayed two faces—one, a mask of suffering with closed eyes; the other, a visage encased in what seemed to be concrete blocks. The message was indicative of Russia’s split-personality disorder: one half of the country was imprisoned, with the other half guarding it. Russia still cannot decide what it wants to honor. It cannot decide what it is: a European nation or a country that glorifies its despots.
Yekaterinburg is the only city in Russia that fondly memorializes Boris Yeltsin, the bearlike, reform-minded Czar of Russian Democracy—he sought to embrace the aura of czarlike power on the top of a postcommunist system. Born in 1931 in the local village of Butka, Yeltsin attended the Ural Polytechnic Institute, preparing to lead Russia’s industrial heartland. That he did, in the mid-1970s becoming the regional Communist Party Secretary. He moved to Moscow to become its mayor in the 1980s and to join the Politburo—a Soviet parliament of sorts. Rising from the regions Yeltsin became a powerful figure in the collapse of the Soviet Union and led the Kremlin afterward.
Posthumously, this son of the Urals serves as Yekaterinburg’s main attraction, with the Yeltsin Center rivaling in majesty any American presidential library. The center is a giant, ultramodern cubist complex that lauds the defunct head of state as—oddly, or perhaps not—a new Lenin of sorts, presenting to its visitors a version of the former president no less mythologized than a Bolshevik revolutionary. While visitors swarm throughout the glass and steel complex, television crews are at work filming the displays.
We were to meet with the center’s deputy director, Lyudmila Telen, but she was away in the capital during our visit. In her place, she had kindly arranged a tour for us with the center’s director of archives, Dmitry Pushnin, a tall, balding fellow in his forties. From the complex’s central circular hall (reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim), where a bronze Yeltsin sits ruminating on a bench, our eloquent guide led us to the first exhibit: an exposition of the future president’s early job as the First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for the Sverdlovsk region, a position that put him in control of one of the most important industrial zones of the Soviet Union. Thanks to Yeltsin, Pushnin told us, the mighty, highly industrialized Soviet-era Sverdlovsk (named after Yakov Sverdlov, a Bolshevik revolutionary) retained its glory as the new Yekaterinburg. Now with almost a million and a half inhabitants, Yekaterinburg is the fourth largest city in Russia after Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.
“This seems a bit like Ulyanovsk and Lenin. When the Kremlin leader i
s from a certain place, the place gets a lot of mileage from it,” we remarked.
Pushnin bristled at such a comparison, saying that Yekaterinburg was much more exciting than Ulyanovsk and had always been.
“It is,” he explained, “the real center, Russia’s window into Asia,” occupying, as it does, a crucial spot in the Urals, with territory both in Europe and Asia.
Established in 1723 under Peter the Great to process metals mined from the nearby mountains, the city bears the name of the towering emperor’s wife, Yekaterina, or Catherine I (not to be confused with the later empress, Catherine II, the Great). Yekaterinburg came into being more than 150 years before Novosibirsk, the current unofficial capital of Siberia. On orders from Catherine II, in the eighteenth century Yekaterinburg joined the Perm guberniya. In the Soviet era, Yekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk (with the surrounding territory renamed the Sverdlovsk Oblast, a designation it has retained). Message intended by the administrative move: Sverdlovsk was becoming more important than Perm, far surpassing it in both size and in the number of vital industries based there. Once the Soviet Union fell, Sverdlovsk became Yekaterinburg once again.
Pushnin pointed out a display showing black-and-white photographs of Ipatiev House, in the basement of which Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Soviets in 1918. The Bolsheviks’ brutal act and how Yeltsin responded to it would mar the future president’s legacy. In the 1970s, the Ipatiev estate was supposed to be transformed into a museum. Instead, in 1977, Yeltsin, then the region’s Communist boss, quietly ordered its demolition. By the late Brezhnev era, as the myth of soon-to-arrive communism was fading, the Ipatiev House became a destination for pilgrims wishing to honor the murdered czar’s memory. Yet the Yeltsin Center presents Yeltsin not as a seasoned Soviet apparatchik conducting the Party’s business but as an unwilling political “executioner” of Moscow’s will.
Few who know Soviet history would argue with this assessment. But Pushnin’s subsequent comment—“we displayed the controversy as accurately as we could”—also suggested a savvy public relations move to control the key message: Yeltsin was different from other Soviet leaders, who played up their successes and never admitted making mistakes. In tearing down the Ipatiev House Yeltsin betrayed himself as a true Soviet indeed. But he was different, too—as president of the new Russia he allowed the rehabilitation of the czar’s family to happen on his watch. Was it an act of repentance, a feeling of guilt? Did he succumb to the social pressure from the public? Fed up with atheist communism the country was ready to love their czars again.
Pushnin didn’t say.
The next exposition detailed the return of the remains of the czar and his family from Yekaterinburg, where they had been discovered in a shallow grave in a nearby forest, to Saint Petersburg in 1998. It displayed photographs of the construction, on the spot where the Ipatiev House had once stood, of the Church on Blood of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land. Work on the house of worship began during Yeltsin’s terms in office but was completed only in 2003, with Putin taking credit for the return of the last czar.
As did so many former communist leaders, Yeltsin went from advocating Soviet policies that resulted in the destruction of churches and the persecution of religion to the post-Soviet building of cathedrals almost everywhere imaginable. A new chapel even rose on the premises of Moscow’s School for the Ministry of the Interior—perhaps the most ungodly institution of the Russian state, with a history of punishing opponents dating back to 1802, to the reign of the authoritarian Alexander I.
After the Soviet collapse, the rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church has allowed it to play an outsize—and growing—role in the country’s political life. For instance, Patriarch Kirill instilled himself in politics by telling Russians, just before the bitterly contested presidential elections of 2012, that Putin revived Russia after the disastrous 1990s through a “miracle of God.”4 Russia’s main problem is its propensity for veering from one extreme to the other. In this case, the swinging pendulum—from fervent Orthodox faith to virulent, anti-theistic communism—of Russians’ allegiance has destroyed millions of lives. First it was a justification of serfdom, then of purges and forced labor camps. Yet for all the Putin government’s stridently expressed views, at times embodied in legislation that seems intended to mollify the church, including a law prohibiting the “gay propaganda” of the “corrupt West,” the state has, by and large, persecuted relatively few. A sager approach to governance in Russia shows that the ruling elite has learned at least some lessons in moderation.
We stopped by a trolleybus on display. In many Russian cities, trolleybuses still play a major role in local transport. But this was the trolleybus Yeltsin took to work in 1985. After becoming the head of the Communist Party of Moscow (which essentially made him the capital’s mayor) Yeltsin, famous for his fight against privileges accruing to those in power, rode it to show that Politburo members should live no better than did ordinary Soviet citizens. His fight, we might add, did not last long. After he became president, the number of privileges he enjoyed skyrocketed; those with access to power would become richer, those without, poorer.
We then came upon an exhibit devoted to a wildly popular television show of political satire, Kukly (Puppets), showing Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the post-Soviet Communist Party leader. The display was meant to showcase Yeltsin’s open-mindedness. Unlike his chosen successor, Putin, Yeltsin did tolerate his critics on the airwaves. They found in him an easy target: by the time he resigned, on New Year’s Eve of 2000, his popularity had sunk to 2 percent. Kukly didn’t last long after Yeltsin’s departure. The Kremlin’s new master did not like his puppet, fashioned after E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1819 character Zinnober, from “Little Zaches, Great Zinnober.” Seemingly more insecure, and a former KGB operative, Putin apparently thought it inappropriate that the Russian public should watch a televised mocking of his person. Hoffmann’s description was not exactly flattering: “An unobservant eye would discover little about the face, but if you look more closely, you discover a … a pair of small, darkly flashing eyes.”5 Moreover, Hoffmann’s character had questionable credentials, just as Putin did, many thought. And yet, as Hoffmann has it, Putin’s puppet, “for most people,” was “a perfect gentleman, poet, scholar, diplomat, and lover.”
We had serious questions for the chief archivist about Yeltsin’s term in office. What about his 1993 shelling of the Russian parliament, then called the Supreme Soviet, which is housed in a building known as the White House in Moscow? What about the constitutional crisis it had provoked by abolishing the legislative body? At the time, Yeltsin was locked in combat with a government accusing him of the corrupt and incompetent management of the economy that had given rise to the oligarchs and had drained the country’s coffers. Yeltsin dissolved the parliament, arguing that the communists, who held a majority, would bring back the Soviet Union. The dissolution was illegal, as was the shelling of the parliament, of course. But in the 1990s, the words “the threat of communism” were magic and excused all excesses. And here at the Yeltsin Center, we learned, they still do, at least according to our guide.
Pushnin both lamented and celebrated the fact that many pro-Putin public figures—including the highly educated and fervently Orthodox Christian Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov and the retrograde Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky—have declared the center a “rassadnik inakomysliya” (a hotbed of dissident thinking).
“Such attacks on us are good,” Pushnin stated, “for our reputation in other circles. And let’s face it. The Kremlin needs us to create the impression that it’s allowing freedom. Just by our existence, the center upholds the constitution, which guarantees freedom of thought and expression and prohibits censorship.”
Once again, the Perm-36 phenomenon—the Kremlin’s appropriation of the opposing views to promote its nonautocratic reputation. But whereas Perm is no longer a mass destination for the liberal luminaries who used to attend the ann
ual Pilorama, the Yeltsin Center is still a must-visit for prominent artists, journalist, writers, and European diplomats. Perm-36 and the Yeltsin Center are, in short, the last holdouts of Russian democracy.
Although the Yeltsin Center denounces Stalinism and lauds Khrushchev’s Thaw in its historical displays—in contrast to the Lenin museum in Ulyanovsk—the exhibitions do not dwell on the questionable acts of Yeltsin’s reign. Still, when viewed in retrospect from the Putin era, the hardships and errors of Yeltsin’s presidency appear more acceptable than they were at the time.
One of the most glaring of these errors was the 1994 invasion of Chechnya—in what would become known as the First Chechen War—when Yeltsin rejected the demands of the Chechen Republic for a separate state. In the 1990s, as the Soviet empire was crumbling, Russia unequivocally pronounced itself pro-Western and democratic, for free markets and free choice. The Chechens, not surprisingly, declared independence in 1993, under the leadership of their president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former air force general. In January 1994 Yeltsin responded by sending Russia’s armed forces to besiege the Chechen capital of Grozny. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his Russian imperial predecessors.
Chechnya, a tiny Muslim republic in the mountains of the North Caucasus, has posed a problem for Russia for centuries. In 1810, under Czar Alexander I, Chechnya’s leadership “voluntarily” joined the Russian Empire. That immediately triggered a guerrilla war as locals sought to regain the independence their leaders had supposedly surrendered willingly.
During the decades of conflict that followed—with the Chechens continuously oppressed by the Russian state—a succession of Russian writers ventured into the mountains to write about the war, winning fame through the literary brilliance they manifested. From Pushkin’s poem “A Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1821) to Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of the conflict in his novella Hadji Murat (1912), these works of literature romantically acknowledged that the Chechens, hot-blooded warriors that they were, could not be fully conquered.
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