The twentieth century was hardly kinder to them: Stalin, fearing that ethnic minorities might rebel against the Russian majority following the Nazi invasion, initiated a policy of “population transfer,” a Soviet version of ethnic cleansing. Through operations conducted by his murderous secret police chief Lavrenty Beria in 1944, the Chechens, and other peoples of the Caucasus, were deported to Central Asia and Siberia in unheated cattle cars in the dead of winter. About a quarter of them died. The Chechens’ doomed struggle, in particular, was commemorated in Anatoly Pristavkin’s The Inseparable Twins (1981), a powerful narrative about two boys, a Russian and a Chechen, who became brothers of a sort in the crucible of forced national relocation. The main message of Pristavkin’s tale: the Chechens cannot be conquered; hence, they must be freed.
No one can understand Russia without understanding its literature, yet Russian leaders often fail to contemplate its lessons. Yeltsin and now Putin, who launched the Second Chechen War of 1999–2009—by then a battle with militants of various Islamist groups—learned that Chechnya may be pacified for a while but not vanquished. Putin has resolved this dilemma for now by allying with Chechnya’s current strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov: in return for remaining within the Russian Federation, Chechnya receives generous state subsidies, with Kadyrov allowed to run his republic as his own private estate—an outwardly Islamic state, in fact.
The Yeltsin Center tackles none of these political questions. A skillfully laid out display of the First Chechen War letters from Chechens and Russians makes clear the terror overhanging the bloody conflict. Its message, not exactly controversial: war is a curse on everyone.
“How do you reconcile Yeltsin’s involvement in the war with his democratic aspirations?” we asked our guide. He evaded the question and instead stressed the emotion expressed in the letters, and how “so very openly” the center decided to display them without taking sides.
Pushnin then led us to a stunning, sun-drenched hall—the Hall of Democracy. There ceiling-high windows opened onto the city, bathing in light a sky-blue mural entitled Svoboda (Freedom) painted by a well-known dissident, the Yekaterinburg-born artist Erik Bulatov. The word “freedom” emblazons not only the mural, but also the hall’s mirrored columns. Freedom—the aspiration of the new, liberal Russia Yeltsin helped birth.
For a moment, we felt carried back in time, to the era when Yeltsin’s Russia—chaotic, corrupt, and fearful—was still heading toward a freer future, a future in which Russia would, at some point, become part of Europe rather than what it is, de facto, today: a world of its own. Leading their tour groups, upbeat guides in their early twenties reminded us of the promise of the 1990s, when Russia’s talented, hardworking citizens were going to transform the post-Soviet space from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka.
Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, also known as the “father of Russian privatization,” once planned to accomplish this glorious transformation “in three ‘shock’ years,” following the dictates of neoliberalism laid out by mostly American advisors. This was a transformation “the rest of the world spent three hundred years achieving,” as Chubais said in a television interview back in 1994.
Pursuing such a utopian goal did not bring about the desired results of capitalism and democracy; instead it sowed disillusionment and mistrust. That feeling of both high hope and bitter disappointments was, perhaps, best captured by one exhibit, an orange sweater, a birthday gift from the late Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s onetime prime minister and, later, a leading member of the opposition to Putin. The orange color, Nemtsov’s undated note says, is “a reference to what Russia is missing today,” that is, freedom, a nod to the prodemocracy movement in Ukraine that brought about the Orange Revolution of 2004.
No doubt, the center, as do presidential libraries, aims at highlighting its namesake’s victories and downplaying his defeats. A replica of his Kremlin office, complete with a decorated Christmas tree, does take one back to December 31, 1999. Then, Russia’s first-ever president, at age sixty-eight, looking exhausted and slurring his words, addressed the country and announced he was resigning and ceding power to Putin, whom he had handpicked to replace him. Yeltsin had reason to do so: he needed to ensure that his family’s riches remained intact following the presidential elections, scheduled for 2000, which he surely would have lost. His less than laudable motives notwithstanding, Yeltsin became the only Soviet-era leader who voluntarily left office. The now sixty-six-year-old yet ever-youthful Putin is staying in power at least until 2024. In 2000 Russians complained that Yeltsin’s riches were calculated at fifteen million dollars, a meager amount compared to Putin’s projected worth, counting palaces, yachts, watches, cars. The total has come to some 40 to 70 billion dollars,6 although his annual Kremlin salary is about 8.9 million rubles ($137,000).7
“This is a lesson in civics—giving up power when it’s time,” our guide told us, having mentioned nothing of the complicated circumstances surrounding Yeltsin’s resignation. “We teach kids who come here to learn about democracy, societal responsibility, political literacy, and so on.” The young guides listening in ardently nodded, their eyes shining with a conviction rarely seen elsewhere nowadays. They seemed to belong to the hopeful 1990s, when Russia, by leaps and bounds, was advancing toward something better. What a contrast they presented to the museum guides in Ulyanovsk—tired, scolding elderly ladies with beehive hairdos who seem to have stepped out of the Soviet past. The Yeltsin Center’s young people were indeed guides to the future.
In a way, despite its remote location, Yekaterinburg has been progressive. It gave birth to Russian hard rock. Now iconic bands—Nautilus Pompilius, Chaif, and Agata Kristi—with their revolutionary Ural Rock style and philosophical lyrics—first reflected the hopes and struggles of Soviet-era Perestroika and then of the disorderly, yet free, 1990s. In front of one of the city’s business centers stands a statue of Vladimir Vysotsky, the Soviet bard known for his brutally honest, wry depictions of Soviet life. A local skyscraper—“the most northern skyscraper in the world,” locals say, is even named after him. Vysotsky, a James Dean of sorts, died in 1980 and is celebrated all over Russia as “the heart of the nation.” He sang about the hardships and heroism of the everyday people in lyrics delivered in his signature raspy voice. His simple heartfelt words provided an alternative to dry socialist realism—the officially approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. Vysotsky was a Muscovite, yet the people of Yekaterinburg, and elsewhere in Russia, recognize his spirit as akin to their own.
The sculptor Ernst Neizvestny was also from Yekaterinburg. In his work, Neizvestny, approaching his craft by following his individualistic, original inclinations, challenged the artwork borne of socialist realism, with its themes always relevant to the workers’ state and that state’s politics. In 1962 at the Manezh exhibition he heatedly disagreed with Khrushchev’s criticism of avant-garde art. Yet in recognition of the achievements of the Thaw, Neizvestny made his most recognized creation, the former premier’s grave memorial in Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery: Khrushchev’s bronze head between two jagged pieces of white marble and black granite—he is both the anti-Stalin reformer and the Soviet reactionary.
After saying good-bye to Pushnin, we spent the rest of the day walking around this well-kept city, which has a cool, Chicago feeling about it. It is a mighty manufacturing metropolis with skyscrapers, diverse outdoor exhibits of art, its own music, and a lively nightlife. It even passed our café culture test with flying colors. Not only are coffee shops many, they are lively and open late into the night, welcoming curious and hungry passersby.
Though with Putin having scored a record-breaking win in the presidential elections of 2018, the Kremlin has apparently decided to disregard effective governance as a crucial factor in maintaining control over some of Russia’s cities and oblasts. Now in his nineteenth year in office, Putin expects Russia to surrender to him. The more homogeneous and devoid of any potential discontent the country is, the longer he may stay
in power. If the public begins to demand a renewal of political blood, obedient governors and mayors should be prepared to suppress any related discontent. Such logic runs counter to the Kremlin’s own long-standing argument that the economically better developed regions should offset the less developed ones.
Until recently Yekaterinburg had skillfully managed to balance serving both its people and Moscow—an increasing rarity in Putinland. In 2014 Yevgeny Roizman, a charismatic politician of the Just Russia party beat a candidate from the ruling United Russia, and has been, since then, resisting Kremlin-backed contenders for regional power. At the beginning of Putin’s fourth term, however, he resigned in protest against the new rules aimed to cancel direct local elections.8 Stifling changes to the vibrant city are probably to come, but during our visit in July 2017 the pulsating energy of the metropolis that never sleeps was still manifest.
The new café Makers, on Malyshev Street, off Moskovskiy Throughway, sits just a few blocks from Yekaterinburg’s Lenin Square. Its bright pink refrigerators and green-jungle-leaves wallpaper make it look as though it could have been a hip destination in Brooklyn. Typewriters sit on each table offering visitors a chance to pound out their views and suggestions; pencil cases are meant to hold your coffee bill, and once paid, your banknotes; pencil cups serving as tip jars—all are fun and clever, but not pretentious. Plus, their espresso is out of this world.
Not all shops around town, however, cater to modern tastes. Two streets, Chelyuskintsev and Sverdlov, are lined with fur stores emblazoned with a potpourri of names, from the banal to the patriotic—Squirrel Furs, Czar’s Fur, Russian Furs, Furs of Siberia, World of Fur, and so on—selling mink and shearling, beaver and chinchilla. Fur coats, the ultimate apparel of status and achievement, have always enjoyed primal popularity among Russians, even during the socialist decades. Here, too, they unite Europe and Asia; from the Urals and Siberia, fur has been traded west from time immemorial.
After perusing them, we readied ourselves to depart for our next destination, further east. On our minds would weigh, with a certain degree of sadness, the lost promise of the Yeltsin years—a time when in Russia almost anything seemed possible, as the soaring glass ceilings of the Yeltsin Center reminded us.
Tyumen, Capital of Russia’s Klondike
On a warm, clear July morning after a five-hour journey by rail through ragged deciduous forest and marshy clearings, our train slowed and stopped by the platform. The brilliant afternoon sun reflected off the metal-and-glass station festooned with a sign proudly announcing, WELCOME TO TYUMEN. The building, one of the major stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad, had been recently renovated, as was apparent in its ever-changing electronic tableaux announcing arrivals and departures, its spotless, mostly white modern interior. The Russian Railways have become a billion-dollar business with competitive prices; clean and comfortable cars; efficient services; and modern, well-kept stations. The station and service to Tyumen were no exception.
Founded in 1586, Tyumen, the current hub of the Russian oil industry, has had an even shinier look than most. After all, 64 percent of the region’s oil reserves, as well as nine-tenths of its natural gas, lie nearby. The Antipinsky Refinery alone, for example, processed almost eight thousand tons of oil in 2016. Moreover, Tyumen, population 750,000, is the capital of the vast Tyumen Oblast stretching from the border with Kazakhstan to the north, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Compared with much of the world’s vision of oil in the deserts, Russia is different once again—its oil country is nestled in the mountains and steppes of western Siberia.
Some of the largest international oil companies maintain offices in Tyumen, and Tyumen residents enjoy commensurately higher incomes—in fact, they have the highest standard of living in the Russian Federation.
No matter how sleek Tyumen’s train station was inside, though, upon debarking we confronted a motley crowd selling everything from furs to meat and cabbage pies to ice cream and pungently salted fish—a scene familiar along many stops on the Trans-Siberian. In Soviet days when consumer goods were available in limited supply, travelers loved jumping down onto the platform and perusing the creams or cakes or flowers on offer. In the Yeltsin era, when the economy collapsed, many in the outback found the only way to survive was to trade just about anything of value they could cart onto the platforms—from cups of tea and pastries to family heirlooms. Today, despite the much-improved economy, private trading of this sort persists, as prosperity is still a distant dream for many.
The origins of Tyumen’s name remain obscure, though it probably derives from the Tatar tumen (“ten-thousand-strong army”), which makes sense for a settlement that in the Middle Ages was a military stronghold—an ancient, prominent town belonging to the Tyumen Khanate of the Golden Horde, Khingi-Tura, on the Tura River. Tyumen stood on the old caravan route connecting the Povolzhye (lands along the Volga) with Central Asia. In 1580, Cossacks, pushing eastward to win territory for the czar, wrested control of the town from the Tatars. A few years later, Russians established their own fort there, the first Moscow outpost on the eastern side of the Urals. Tyumen found its status augmented when, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the government decided to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Tyumen. For political reasons it bypassed the more elegant town of Tobolsk, a famed place of exile for the Decembrist revolutionaries, the crème de la crème of the Russian aristocracy. During the Russian Civil War, the last czar’s family hid out here for a while, sheltered by the troops of Admiral Kolchak, until the Reds overtook them in January of 1918. During the Great Patriotic War, Lenin’s body was moved from the Red Square mausoleum to the blue-and-white nineteenth-century college building here that now holds the State Agrarian Academy. In the 1950s, government prospectors discovered major oil fields all around the Tyumen Oblast, which transformed this region into an industrial hub. Tyumen quickly became an administrative and educational center, with its renowned Tyumen State Oil and Gas University being founded in 1956.
Its history and prosperity notwithstanding, this town with its oil-boom ambiance resembles a Russian hybrid of the Klondike and Las Vegas, populated with modern-day prospectors and those who service them. People visit jewelry stores more than cafés; café culture is not Tyumen’s forte, yet garish restaurants abound. Zolotaya Lavina (Gold Avalanche) jeweler serves double duty as both a workshop for gold and diamond goods and, of all things, a bridal salon. Its large windows feature Siberian belles gracefully modeling wedding gowns. Nothing looks permanent; everything has something of the flashy, slapdash about it.
We couldn’t help wondering, where did Tyumen’s four-hundred-year history go? The new has obliterated the old. Even though it boasts the highest standard of living, the city revolves around oil revenues and buying things—furniture or fur or jewelry—not around enjoying life’s comforts, such as, say, having a cup of coffee or a relaxing meal.
Yet in this Vegas-cum-Klondike we discovered incipient signs of change to come. Although some of the restaurants serve reindeer meat and sour cream–smothered pelmeni, the Double B Coffee and Tea (a café from a Moscow franchise) employs a barista sporting a fashionably scruffy beard and a man-bun; he deployed the panache of a true artisan in making us an espresso, taking a full twenty minutes to do so. “How cool am I, creating this real European drink in this real coffeehouse that has its headquarters in the Russian capital!” his mien seemed to tell us. Outside, fashionably dressed young men and women strode down clean, well-paved sidewalks, glancing at their reflections in store windows. Tyumen folk project a cool, tough demeanor: they live in an oil-rich town and take pride in being Siberians; one may even say they have created what amounts to “Siberian chic.” The display of toughness, though, seems too ostentatious to be real. Perhaps it is no wonder that Grigory Rasputin was born in a nearby village. A notorious fraud, Rasputin wielded tremendous influence over Russia’s last empress, Alexandra, the wife of Nicholas II, for his seeming ability to alleviate her son’s hemophilia.
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sp; Souped-up motorbikes with oversize tires roar about Tyumen, showcasing their owners’ excess of testosterone and spare cash, and muscle cars shoot by with their camouflage paint-overs, perhaps signaling a readiness to fight for the country. Many display both the red flags and Russian imperial Saint George ribbons, which in the Putin years have come to represent Russian nationalism. They became especially popular after Russia’s lightning takeover of Crimea. Some of Tyumen’s store windows display huge posters, inviting tourists to “Crimea, the Holy Origins of Russia,” in reference to Vladimir the Great’s 988 baptism of Kievan Rus, which according to some sources took place in Korsun, present-day Chersonesus, in Crimea.
During the Stalin decades of Soviet classicism, the government built grand statues, opulent parks, and elaborately designed subway stations—“people’s palaces,” as it were—to compensate, at least in part, for the austere nature of life. Even now, in Tyumen, public displays of state wealth spent on the “needs of the people” seem to matter more than encouraging the private investment that would flourish in the café culture we saw developing elsewhere in Russia. Here the cafés were almost empty. We detected further evidence of this in the city’s large pedestrian zone in the center, along Tsvetnoy Boulevard (named after a famous street in Moscow); there, those out for a stroll wander across several squares with fountains and pose for photos beside the jets of water, line up to enter museums, and visit the circus.
Public displays of state wealth lavished on the people also lend an official imprimatur to individuals the state selects as convenient for its image. On Tsvetnoy Boulevard stands a tribute, sculpted in bronze—a helmet and motorcycle gloves—to the local bikers’ band, Siberian Hawks. When we visited, it was surrounded by admirers. Tyumen Oblast governor Vladimir Yakushev has been a vocal supporter of the Hawks. Yet he is not entirely original in this. Putin, famously, has been riding with the right-wing nationalist group, the Night Wolves. These biker gangs became synonymous with Russia’s intense displays of militant patriotism and machismo in the wake of Moscow’s confrontation with Ukraine.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 13