After the Soviet collapse in 1991, these much-touted strivings turned out to have produced little. Trees were cut to free land for private construction, with the result that the long-suffering town found itself with a new, and ugly, moniker: the City of Trunks. Today, it is dirty and dusty indeed, even though in recent years another “green” policy has favored the planting of trees and the creation of parks.
This policy, too, has largely failed. By the end of a day of walking around, our shoes were caked with dust, and our clothes felt as though they bore a patina of week-old grime. After rains, roads widened in Sobyanin-esque style were unusually muddy. In 2016, during Putin’s annual national press conference (usually an event with questions screened in advance), one Omsk woman was able to sneak in a complaint about her town’s miserable roads. The president, always eager to act as a caring “father of the nation,” intervened, and in fact did thus foster some improvement to Omsk’s infrastructure.
Environment shapes character. The people of Omsk seemed reserved, even gruff; was it because of the dust, crime, the perpetually unbuilt metro, the reigning air of futility? Or does inhabiting a closed city for so many years sap the spirit? Could Omsk’s militaristic history have rubbed off on its citizens? Surprising for a city so dusty, Omsk, we discovered, is fitness oriented, at least along the newly renovated Irtysh river embankment, where people were out biking, jogging, and stretching.
Omsk was the only town in Russia in which we felt uncomfortable speaking English. When we did so, people eyed us with suspicion. As we took cell phone pictures of the local Ministry of the Interior building—an impressive structure with an adjacent monument consisting of an obelisk with a double eagle on the front honoring the “Heroes of Security Forces”—a group of police officers approached us.
“You can’t take pictures here.”
“Why not?”
“This is a security installation.”
“But this is a public space.”
“Please leave.”
A mother passing by with two small children overheard the conversation and cast us a suspicious glance, as if to say, “Why do you take pictures of Omsk’s landmarks? For what nefarious purpose?”
Omsk’s Lenin statue and its surroundings reflect the city’s purely Russian essence—that is, its “neither Europe nor Asia” quintessence. The onetime leader of the planet’s proletariat, standing in bronze, occupies a small park in the middle of a traffic circle with no crosswalk leading to it. A diminutive Orthodox chapel hides behind him. Across the road is yet another park, one celebrating those who fell fighting with Kolchak’s army. Diners in the adjacent Kolchak Restaurant may contemplate Lenin, the chapel, and those who perished for Old Russia as they sample their French or Japanese delicacies. In what other country on earth does one encounter such jarring, seemingly casual, juxtapositions?
Yet Omsk’s contradictions have a charm of their own. Religion and Old Russia and the czars versus Lenin surely feed into an obsessive desire to put the adjective “European” on signs advertising seemingly every type of business, from those selling furniture to clothes to wallpaper and even medicines. As if the word “European” is going to produce a different, more coherent, better reality. A European Wallpaper store nestles oxymoronically in a concrete Soviet-style high-rise. Geneva Watches sells anything but. And a nearby log shack announces itself as the Rome Clothes Salon, offering selections that surely come straight from the looms of China. To be fair, though, across Russia a mania for things Italian—Rome, and particularly Venice—prevails. We noted the Pizzeria Venezia in Ulyanovsk; a Venezia dance hall in Tyumen, and plenty of Venezia cafés and restaurants in places too numerous to mention. But Omsk offers a glaring oxymoron: Russky Dom Mody Venezia, that is, the Russian Fashion House of Venice. There is such a thing as Russian fashion—think of Valentin Yudashkin, for example—but its reach is, well, less than global.
The birthplace of one of the most mystical Russian painters, the symbolist Mikhail Vrubel, lies just outside the portals of Omsk’s Vrubel Museum of Art: a grand mansion with a pale green facade and cream trim that resembles a baroque train station standing on—of course—Lenin Street in the center of town. Announced years ago as a Siberian affiliate of Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage, it remains an affiliate of that institution in name only. Nevertheless, it presents its contents with curious verve, displaying pieces of prerevolutionary furniture from the upper classes as an exhibit centered around the much-beloved Soviet-era, yet deeply anti-Soviet, 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs, composed by two brilliant Odessa-born journalists, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. Whimsical and unassuming, Chairs is a masterpiece that, like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, became cult reading for Soviet citizens yearning for literary release as they were inundated with a numbing onslaught of Social-Realist fare. The plot concerns the hunt for a set of old chairs in which aristocrats hid their diamonds after the 1917 Revolution. The narrative’s hilarious journey from Moscow through provincial towns to the Caucasus bristles with funny yet shrewd, often unflattering, observations about everyday life under the then-new communist regime.
In keeping with the Twelve Chairs theme, in the Vrubel Museum Italian-made chairs and vases, flowery Dutch still-lifes, French tapestries, pink Limoges porcelain, and blue Wedgwood pottery bear captions with witty quotes from the novel (sample: “Spasenie utopayushchikh delo ruk samikh utopayushchikh,” or “The rescue of drowning people is the responsibility of the drowning people themselves”). The sum of effect is as humorous as it is telling and speaks to the predicament of so many in Omsk (and across Russia).
Outside the museum, Lenin Street presents pedestrians with wide faux-cobblestone sidewalks, equipped with park benches, well kept, and similar to those in Moscow and Tyumen laid down by Mayor Sobyanin. (Surely that is no coincidence. Even here what happens in the capital makes itself felt.) On our way from the museum to our next destination, the slick café New York Coffee, we noticed a book—Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita—lying unattended on a bench. No surprise. After all, Bulgakov’s satirical masterpiece was serving as an unofficial cicerone throughout our travels across Russia. In this case, this was particularly apt, for the café’s interior resembled a scene from the novel.
New York Coffee’s blackboard wall menu proudly announced “Trump coffee.” The American president, it turned out, was just as consuming a topic of conversation in Russia as elsewhere. After all, he prevailed in an election Russians perceived would be, if not outright rigged, then at least arranged after one fashion or another to put their arch-enemy Hillary Clinton (disliked for a slew of reasons, but mostly for her fiercely anti-Russian, anti-Putin stance) in the White House. Trump, if nothing else, won over the hearts, if not the minds, of many Russians because he repeatedly voiced his desire to “be friends” with their country. Few Russians considered him an upstanding individual, yet no other American presidential candidate was talking that way.
But in Bulgakovian fashion, it was not politics—that is, whether the café’s Trump coffee was meant to glorify or mock the president—that a gaggle of teenagers in front of the counter was arguing over. With skateboards under their arms—they had been practicing their moves beneath the nearby Lenin statue—they were quarreling about what sort of orange syrup you need to top the garish caffeinated concoction to achieve the exact tinge of Trump’s hair.
Out of curiosity, we ordered the Trump. The sweet caramel drink had about as much to do with coffee as Trump had to do with presidential dignity.
“Is Trump coffee meant to marvel at or mock him?” we asked the waitress, whose name, said the button on her shirt, was Lyubov.
“As you like!” she said with a wry laugh.
“Clever. Have you actually been to New York?” we asked her after the young group settled on their drinks and ordered. (None went for the Trump.) “We’re from there. Or at least one of us is.”
The teenagers joined in, eager to meet their town’s foreign guests.
“So how does the café
compare? How do you like Omsk?” they and Lyubov asked.
“How do you like Omsk?”
“Don’t try to leave Omsk!” they joked. Intimations of the Omsk Bird of Doom!
We chatted: the feeling that life was somewhere else, beyond Omsk’s dusty borders, was strong, and permeated their banter. They were pleased that we were enjoying our stay in their city. They pointed out that Lenin Street was the main drag, with few places as cosmopolitan elsewhere in town. Other big Russian cities—Yekaterinburg, for example—had more to offer, with Saint Petersburg interesting Lyubov in particular. She told us that she planned to work at the Hermitage next year; she wanted to live in a beautiful city, one without “the pervasive feeling of depression and neglect behind the sense of doom emanating from the Omsk bird.”
“Why do people want to leave?” we asked.
“Because of the local government.”
“Are you going to vote for Putin in 2018?”
“Yes, for him and United Russia.”
Yet it turned out that two of our impromptu young friends supported Alexey Navalny, the popular anticorruption activist. In fact, they were volunteering at his local office and believed him to be the future of Russia. The backing Navalny could count on from such young Russians made him a threat to Putin.
Later, we met Tatyana Bessonova, chair of the regional journalists union. Once a reporter for Omsky Vestnik (The Omsk Caller), Bessonova, in her early fifties, sported henna-purpled hair recalling the Soviet days and worked for the governor’s office. Which no doubt accounted for her reluctance to answer our prickly questions, including those about the notoriously bad relations between the oblast administration and that of the city.
However, she sounded upbeat about the recent journalism project they had implemented, proclaiming Siberia the Territory of Hope.
She went on and on about this. Yet we had seen precious little evidence that the project had had any effect.
“We haven’t seen much hope among the city’s young,” we responded. “Wouldn’t the morale boosting go better if you had improved governance here?”
“Well, yes,” she admitted, and straightaway opened up about the difficulties plaguing the journalists union. Located in an Art Nouveau building with a magnificent, if rundown, oaken staircase, the union found its property being eyed by the government. Bessonova told us that she was unsure how long they could fend off a state takeover of their premises. It hasn’t happened yet, she said, because she was advising the authorities on public relations. As both a journalist and a government employee, she faced a constant conflict of interest. How could she report on the injustices committed by the functionaries and then promote their work? Doing both, she responded, was the only way to keep the union alive, to continue the work—conferences and symposia, mostly—that gives Omsk what little standing it has in Siberia.
Omsk did grow on us. Perm may have had more confectioneries, but those in Omsk did not disappoint. One wonderful bakery on Lenin Street bore the run-of-the-mill French name of Éclair, but the wares it sold were tasty. Before moving on, we stopped one last time by the Skuratov café, perhaps the most memorable such café from our wide-ranging travels around Russia. A tiny hole-in-the-wall joint next to the river port, the café offered the best espresso we had enjoyed in a long time, serving it in elegant stoneware cups. The Skuratov won us over with its sincere service, handmade multiflavored chocolates, and sophisticated clientele. In fact, Skuratov had recently expanded to Saint Petersburg, and opened its cafés in four central locations in Moscow—no mean feat in the highly competitive market of these two cities. A business moving from the provinces to major Russian cities—this was something rarely heard of.
We left Omsk—yes, you can leave Omsk, despite its notorious avian symbol!—feeling down. The city has so much potential and yet enjoys such terrible repute. Russian cities, and Russian people, are like snowdrop flowers—battered by tempestuous crises, swept away by changing regimes, and wilting under a warm miasma of mismanagement and neglect. Yet every spring when the winter ends, they reemerge. In Omsk we saw evidence of their hardiness, as they tirelessly strove to turn their city into the third capital with the European flare they imagine befits it.
On the way to our next Siberian destination, Novosibirsk, the Omsk train station appeared to be as conflicted as the rest of the city. Two doors lead to and from the platform—“exit” and “no exit.” The “exit” door is shut, so everyone passes through another door—an entrance from the outside. We did so hesitatingly, but the security guard waved at us to proceed. It bothered no one but us that exit from Omsk happens through the “no exit” door.
7
NOVOSIBIRSK
A STORY OF SCIENCE AND SERENDIPITY
TIME ZONE: MSK+4; UTC+7
“Can you fix a town in twenty-four hours?”
“Yes, we can.”
“How?”
“Putin just has to say that he is going to visit not only Novosibirsk; he needs to say that he is going to visit the whole region, and decide on a town later along the way.”
—A contemporary Russian joke
On the train to Novosibirsk, we shared a compartment with a young fellow best described as lupine: he was tall and wiry, with a pointy nose and close-set eyes; from his white tank top protruded arms covered in tattoos. If he resembled a wolf, he also looked like a hardened criminal itching to pull out a knife. With his lanky legs stretched across the floor, he controlled access to the door, thereby blocking the entrance of a grumpy porter in a dull gray uniform. Avoiding eye contact with him, we huddled next to the window, staring hard at the sea of white flowers blanketing the steppes outside—a healing sight for eyes often wearied by Russia’s endlessly repetitive vistas of forest, steppe, and hardscrabble villages. Yet it turned out that this sea would have had something other than a healing effect on us had we dived into it, covered as it was, in places, with water hemlock.
The flat landscape of this, the West Siberian Plain, was a pleasing sight, though it eventually turned tedious, subjecting us to sky and earth, earth and sky, with nothing to catch the eye. Welcome variety came during our train’s brief stops at tiny wayside stations, at which locals sold pies, pickles, jam, and even furs and whatever else they could come up with. But soon the fields disappeared, forest intruded, and the stations became larger and more orderly.
Our lupine compartment companion eventually pulled out not a knife but a laptop. He turned out to be a shy hardware engineer named Igor, who, warming up after hours of travel, told us he worked for a company that made air conditioners, with offices in Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk.
“I’m going all over the country,” the “criminal”-cum-computer geek said. “Omsk is okay, they say. It has more sunny days than any other place in Russia. But Novosibirsk is the best. It’s Russia’s third largest city and perhaps, on the whole, its most sophisticated.”
Four hundred miles deeper into Siberia than Omsk, prosperous Novosibirsk, with a population of 1.6 million and set amid taiga, fascinated us. Not that it was without its own contradictions. In places, cracked sidewalks cried out for Sobyanin-style cobblestones. On the banks of the Ob River, which cuts a magnificent azure loop through the city as it surges north, sits a dilapidated port befitting an outback Siberian town. Amid new structures gray concrete blocks crop up, recalling the Soviet past—and, of course, Lenin Square spreads a formidable expanse of cement; arising in its center, a mighty, if weathered, bronze statue of its namesake towers above lesser bronze figures depicting workers, peasants, and soldiers. As always, the Russian double-headed eagle makes its appearance on the adjacent Krasny (Red) Prospect, this time atop the Chapel of Saint Nicholas, erected in honor of Nicholas II. The city was founded under his reign at the turn of the twentieth century. Whence the city’s name, translated as “new Siberian town.”
In front of a shopping mall near the square also stands a billboard: “Don’t know what to give as a gift? Buy a model tank from the Eastern Front” (a referen
ce to World War II). Here as elsewhere in Russia, “European” enterprises abound, emblazoned with PARIS or ROME, including the garish business center called Rome, outfitted with its very own Roman columns. The usual Russian schizophrenia notwithstanding, the city and its inhabitants exude an unusual aura of self-respect. Novosibirsk is, after all, young, with little in its past to be ashamed of.
In 1891, the engineer and writer Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky, charged with drawing up plans for the Trans-Siberian railroad, originally wanted the line to pass through Tomsk, an old university town some 150 miles to the northeast. But he eventually decided against dragging the rails north to accommodate Tomsk, insisting that the latitude of the tiny Novonikolayevsk (“New Nicholas Village,” as it was originally called) be exactly fifty-five degrees north of the equator.
Thus began the story of Novosibirsk—a story of scientific bravura and historical serendipity, and of clever administrators who managed to profit from their central location (about three thousand miles from both Kaliningrad and Kamchatka) and turn their city into the de facto capital of Siberia.
In 1912, just twenty years after lucking out with the Trans-Siberian Railroad—if it weren’t for Garin-Mikhailovsky, Novosibirsk would have been just another forgettable stop on the way east where villagers hawked jam and pine nuts and whatnot—the shrewd municipal boss Vladimir Zhernakov lobbied in Saint Petersburg to add another rail line to the Trans-Siberian station of Novonikolayevsk. With his town strategically named after the czar Nicholas II, Zhernakov scored a rail line to Semipalatinsk (now just across the border in Kazakhstan), and thus turned the little town into a major transportation hub for the Altai region, serving the European and Asian parts of the empire.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 15