Of course, influence can travel both from the capital to the provinces and from the provinces to the capital. Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin was once governor here. Since assuming office in 2010, he has been busy transforming Moscow into a grander, if more congested, version of Tyumen. (As one might imagine, this has not gone down well with urbane Muscovites.) In particular, he has broadened many sidewalks downtown to, in places, forty-six feet across, which has constricted roadways and worsened Moscow’s already horrific traffic jams: an example of Sobyanin’s know-how gleaned from his years in provincial Tyumen, where he also broadened sidewalks. If it is unclear why a provincial city like Tyumen would need outsize sidewalks, it is even less comprehensible in Moscow, which is, after all, first and foremost a city of cars—small sporty Italian cars, glistening black Audis and Volvos, boxlike Mercedes SUVs. Besides, frequently inclement weather discourages pedestrians, in both cities.
Famously partial to cobblestones or, to be exact, their cement equivalents, Sobyanin is rumored to have once declared, “Asphalt is not native to Russia.” He has, thus, been turning Moscow upside down every summer, tearing up thousands of miles of asphalt walkways (1.5 million square miles at the summer 2017 count) and laying down chunky concrete cobblestone look-alikes—at great inconvenience to residents—under the pretext of beautifying the city, just as he once did in Tyumen.9 Few Russia watchers would be surprised to learn that his (now former) wife Irina and her firm Aerodromstroi (Airport Construction) were involved in installing such faux-cobblestones in Moscow and elsewhere. In her native Tyumen, Irina was known informally as Irina Bordyur (Curbstone Irina). Cobblestones, if laid poorly, can become a menace to pedestrians, and are, after all, at least as foreign to Russia as asphalt is. No matter: during the eight years of Sobyanin’s tenure, the city has refurbished walkways with Curbstone Irina’s bricks. Imagine the wealth flowing into Aerodromstroi’s coffers!
Nevertheless, the slickness, artificial though it may be, that Sobyanin has brought to Moscow (and once to Tyumen) seems to be going down well with the Kremlin. In fact, just as Stalin’s favorite architectural style, socialist classicism—exemplified by wedding-cake skyscrapers with intricate facades—found itself replicated in major Soviet cities today, Sobyanin’s broad sidewalks have become commonplace all over Russia. A political message lies within these walkways: down their broad expanses a content, imperial, and patriotic citizenry is expected to stroll, grateful for the largesse of their government in making their time on the pavement more pleasant.
Tyumen residents, as far as we could tell, take pride in their proliferating array of Russian Orthodox churches. In recent decades and partly during Sobyanin’s tenure as governor, the city, as a taxi driver named Mikhail admiringly (and with some degree of exaggeration) joked to us, “exceeded the Kremlin plan by erecting twenty thousand new places of worship, churches, chapels, and so on.” A macho fellow in a sleeveless T-shirt exposing his biceps, tattooed with images of the Kremlin, Mikhail explained while driving us around town: “Putin is good because he represents power! He uses his office as head of state—a sacred office—to show Russia’s greatness. Russia will be saved through pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost”—the Orthodox faith, state power, and the people, those pillars of Russianness introduced by Nicholas I. “It will flourish through the expansion of its empire, its messianic, civilizing influence over other cultures. We would be nothing without our size.”
“What about other empires? Do they also have a civilizing influence?” we asked.
“Ha, they are truly evil. Those European settlers, when encountering Native American tribes early on in North America, gave them smallpox-ridden blankets to eliminate them, using illness as a means of biological warfare. That’s how they conquered North America, through death. What kind of empire is that?!” He contrasted how Russia spread east across Siberia. “We’re tough and strategic here. The Russian people expanded to the east for freedom and to spread its influence, and that’s how our national character was built,” Mikhail exclaimed proudly, though his toughness seemed a little too much on display, as though he had to strike a patriotic note in speaking to outsiders.
He was not entirely wrong about the Americans, but he was also not quite right about the Russians—their expansion was not benevolent, either. In fact, he confirmed just one truth: all imperial conquests are problematic.
In the center of Tyumen next to the City Administration on Lenin Street stands Patron (“cartridge,” as in ammunition), a store catering to hunters and outdoorsmen. In addition to guns and fishing tackle, Patron also displays a dark green cannon on wheels. Manly hunters, one presumes, are also patriotic and ready to defend the Motherland. A block away, next to the imposing local affiliate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, across from the Lenin statue in Central Square, we spotted yet another hunting store, Bagira—as in Bagheera, Mowgli’s panther protector, from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, still immensely popular in Russia. Through its tinted windows we saw posters lauding “Military Tourism in Crimea”—here is Crimea again, nowadays the pinnacle of all things Russian. Patriotism, firearms, and guns, all amalgamated into flashy advertisements displayed as much for the money they would generate for tour companies as for the increase in revenues the state has hoped to generate for its newest region, reliant, since czarist days, on summertime visitors for much of its annual income.
Yet not only hunting shops manifest fervent patriotism here in Tyumen; local cats are enlisted in this noble task, too. Tyumen may be the only city on earth boasting a Siberian Cat Park (Skver Sibirskikh Koshek), laid out to honor feline service during the Great Patriotic War. Then, local authorities rounded up two hundred tough Siberian cats and dispatched them westward, to save Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum, in which marauding rats were damaging priceless works of art.
Even fashion here is of a distinct Tyumen style we had not encountered elsewhere in Russia (in recent years, at least; such attire was common in summertime Moscow in the early 1990s). Young women strolled down their city’s wide sidewalks draped in flower-print dresses—rather common, yes, but they reach to the ankle, resembling a mixture of a ball gown meeting casual Friday threads. In a coffee shop, we couldn’t hide our curiosity and complimented a young woman on her dress, which was festooned with prints of large red roses.
She replied, “We in Tyumen like to wear nice clothes. To dress up, if you will.”
“What kind of fashion is it?”
“Siberian fashion!” she answered combatively.
No patronizing Muscovite visitors were going to impugn her taste, motivated, at least in part, by the pride Siberians take in their home region. During the chaotic Yeltsin years, Siberians often referred to European Russia as “the continent”—implying that the turmoil in Moscow belonged to another land.
Impressed with such conviction, we smiled and got our coffee.
After passing through the Urals and entering Siberia, we recalled a line from Nikolai Gogol’s famous play The Government Inspector: “From here you can ride for three years and won’t reach another country.” It took the exiled Decembrists over a year to march to this province. Nowadays, Tyumen is only a thirty-hour train ride (not much, by Russian standards) from Moscow, but here, for the first time, we began to ponder, “What happens when you cross into another time zone? Does more than scenery change? Do people change?”
Almost imperceptibly, we felt Russia’s spirit changing—into something more expansive, infused with the grandeur of a land whose geographic boundaries, as well as the human cruelty they have witnessed, exceed our capacity to comprehend.
6
OMSK
A MIXED METAPHOR OF PUTIN’S EMPIRE
TIME ZONE: MSK+3; UTC+6
If you write the word “Navalny” on a snowbank, it will be cleared in an hour; if you write “Putin,” it will stay on for the fourth term.
—A contemporary Russian joke
It is eight in the morning and guests in one of the city’s leading ult
ramodern hotels awaken to a persistent rapping on their doors.
“Housekeeping!”
“Too early! Please come back later!”
“No, I can only make up your room now!” Two stocky, glum middle-age ladies are determined to clean the rooms that very moment. “Wait down in the lobby!” they bark.
What’s the point in holding out? guests wonder, subjected to such harassment. Their morning sleep has been ruined anyway. Not fully ready to face the day, they obediently depart their rooms and settle into the Knoll-style leather chairs in the spacious lobby, well appointed and flooded with brilliant Siberian summer sunshine. Next to them stands a spotless glass table on which lies a glossy Cartier catalog, a brochure advertising luxury cars, and a leather-bound tome on skiing in the Swiss Alps.
Slowly turning the pages that display tidy chalets, and still grumpy about being forced from their rooms, they say hello to another middle-age woman entering with a vacuum cleaner. She flicks the “on” switch and her machine roars into action. The guests’ conversation dies in the racket as she vacuums around their feet, under the table in front of them, and beneath their chairs, meticulously and for a long, long time. The lobby is empty, and she has plenty of places she could be cleaning apart from their corner. But surely, she is following the routine dictated by the hotel’s administration; the presence of hotel guests is not about to deter her.
Welcome to the four-star Hotel Mayak (Lighthouse), so picturesquely situated at the confluence of two mighty Siberian rivers, the Om and the Irtysh. Welcome, in fact, to Omsk, capital of Omsk Oblast, after more than twenty-five years of capitalism.
On the southern steppes of Siberia, only some seventy-five miles north of the border with Kazakhstan, Omsk has a population exceeding a million people, and a three-hundred-year-old history dating from when the Cossacks were pushing east over the Eurasian landmass and attempting to secure trade routes back to cities in Russia’s west. A perfect metaphor of the Putin empire—a fine, double-headed eagle almost smack in the middle (2,500 miles to Kaliningrad, 3,125 miles to Kamchatka) of outback Russia—Omsk, despite its potential and aspirations, comes up short.
In Russia, Omsk enjoys a bad reputation, ranking extremely low in quality of life. Even though it is one of the country’s top industrial cities (though long “closed,” owing to its space-program-related industrial plants), its municipal budget is just over ten billion rubles (about $200 million), which is almost three times less than that of Novosibirsk, the next major city to the east on the Trans-Siberian rail line. The federal government takes most of Omsk’s revenues from oil and heavy industry central to the city’s economy, leaving little left over for local use.
Omsk, with its large population and revenue-generating potential, should be one of the most attractive places for investment in Russia. But its inhabitants lack the requisite purchasing power. And as the service economy leaves much to be desired—as the maids in our hotel so clearly demonstrated—in recent years Omsk has lost around ten thousand people, most of them with higher education. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the city was an infamous hub of Russian racketeering, with political and economic clans fighting one another to the death; even the city’s mayors and the oblast governors couldn’t get along. To this day, it has a reputation for crime. The best one can do in Omsk, it seems, is leave.
In the 2000s the Russian internet was buzzing with images of the Omsk Bird—aka, ominously, the Winged Doom—a shimmering black raven draped in a red cape with a Venetian hood that originally came from a painting by the German artist Heiko Müller. With the anonymously added caption “Welcome to Omsk!” the symbol came to stand for addiction to narcotics and gambling. The idea of living in Omsk, at least for those not from here, eventually became as frightening as inhabiting a real-life Hieronymus Bosch grotesque. Though it really had little to do with the city, the image of the Omsk Bird nonetheless came to represent it, perhaps because so few people from elsewhere in Russia actually visit the place.
It hardly helped that in 2014 even a local monument—a giant sphere of wood and metal named Derzhava (Fatherland)—decided to escape from one of the main squares, and the square named after Ivan Bukholts, Omsk’s founder, at that. Lashed by a violent thunderstorm, the Fatherland rolled off its perch—incidentally in front of our hotel—into the Irtysh. This prompted the Omichis (inhabitants of Omsk) to concoct another meme, Ne pytaytes pokinut Omsk! (don’t you try to leave Omsk). Derzhava failed to heed the injunction and tried to abscond yet again, though less successfully.
Otherwise, Omsk has done little to help better its image. Its metro system has just one station, going nowhere. Its “new” airport has been under construction for forty years. And despite the availability of funding, plans to build two four-star hotels, the Park Hills and the Hilton, came to naught.
The new young mayor, Oksana Fadina, with a doctorate in economics from the Agrarian Academy, now promises to reverse the fortunes of this major industrial city that seems to have never caught a break.
Its university is named after Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who in the 1850s was imprisoned here for plotting against the monarchical regime. His grim novel about the horrible conditions in the Siberian labor camps under the czars, Notes from a Dead House, was set in Omsk, which he described as “a despicable little town. Almost no trees. In the summer it is hot, and sandy winds blow; in the winter, storms come. There is almost no scenery to speak of. The little town is dirty, military and debased to a great degree.… If I didn’t find people here I would have perished completely.”1
Given that Dostoyevsky so passionately hated the town, the decision to dedicate the university to the writer seems surprising. Dostoyevsky’s criticism notwithstanding, Omsk was once a place that mattered. Established in 1716, it was the imperial capital of Eastern Siberia, the seat of a steppe-and-forest guberniya that included parts of what is now Kazakhstan. Eastward still, its Altai region served to connect the Russian and Kazakh steppes. In its flatness, the landscape of this colossal province resembles much of the rest of Siberian Russia as it gives way to Central Asia and its deserts.
Like Samara, which touts its status as Russia’s wartime reserve capital, Omsk takes pride in having been, if only briefly, Russia’s “third capital”—the so-called White Capital, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg fell to the Reds in 1917. In 1918 Admiral Alexander Kolchak, a man of many talents—he was a polar explorer and a writer, in addition to being a warrior—became the head of the czarist Russian government as opposed to that of the Bolsheviks, and ruled what remained of “White” Russia from here. But not for long. The Bolsheviks caught up with him and executed him in 1920.
In the post-communist era the Kolchak legacy contributed to the city’s image of itself as vital to the course of Russian history. The Admiral Kolchak House, located in an estate he once occupied, is dedicated to the history of the Civil War. We paid it a visit. Two studious-looking young men—one a monarchist with a shaggy beard, the other a clean-shaven technocrat—mesmerized the few visitors with their tale of Omsk as Russia’s third capital. We learned that it was not selected for this honor just because it was far from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. No, many officers abandoned by the czar’s government after World War I traveled here to better their lives, thereby making the city a natural seat of governance. Their large number drew Kolchak’s forces here as well. Under his command, these officers banded together to protect the monarchy and fight the Reds to their last breath. Here the short-lived commander of White Russia remains as big as Lenin once was. A few steps away from the museum stands an elaborate four-story restaurant named Kolchak. A garish collection of many styles—an old wooden house decorated with the admiral’s portraits set against more recently added gilt onion domes as from an Orthodox cathedral—the Kolchak offers diverse dishes from a variety of cuisines, including French and Japanese, just as the more Europeanized elite of czarist days would have liked. A banner stretching across the street in front announces that the Kolchak Restaurant offers a
“taste of true Russian democracy,” presumably in the variety of plates on offer.
In fact, though, the admiral believed not in democracy, but in a military dictatorship for Russia. A century later, however, local legends (and advertising exploiting them) based on his time in town have given rise to a Kolchak-related craze: scores of people digging in nearby forests for the elusive Kolchak gold, riches supposedly hidden from the Reds during the Civil War. Fads aside, life in Omsk does owe something to its martial past. Its Cadet School, founded in 1813 and originally the Omsk Military Cossack School, is the oldest such establishment in Siberia and now offers some of the best war training in Russia. And locals laud the Saint Nicholas Cossack Cathedral across the street, Lenin Street, as an outstanding landmark evocative of the lost glory of the old czarist army.
The loss of its imperial glory sealed Omsk’s fate in the new communist country. When in 1920 the Red Army pushed out the Whites, the Kremlin made sure that the city would lose its prominence. Most state institutions moved four hundred miles east to the small town of Novonikolayevsk (now Novosibirsk, the third largest Russian city and the capital of the neighboring oblast). Omsk has been left fighting to regain its lost status ever since.
As Dostoyevsky observed (and we confirmed), dust has been one of the town’s most notable features. In the 1950s, the Omsk authorities planted hundreds of trees to clean up and “green” the climate. The Soviets promoted the idea of podchineniye prirody cheloveku (submission of nature to man) as a means of demonstrating progress that, presumably, only devoted communists could bring about. A famous song of the 1920s promised in the new Soviet Russia “to make fairy tales a reality”—and Omsk was to become a Gorod-Sad (Orchard City)—evidence that communists could force nature to submit to their will, tame vast steppes, and bring even dust storms under control.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 14