In Putin's Footsteps

by Nina Khrushcheva

  When Tregubovich once discovered that a district leader was having his school-age daughter chauffeured around town in a municipal automobile, he confronted the official and warned him that he would write about his improper use of the city’s property.

  “He never used the car again for that purpose,” Tregubovich said, with a chuckle.

  “Why did you give him advance notice of what you planned to write?” we asked.

  “This is Russia, after all. He’s a good guy. It’s better that he’s on our side than to have him as an enemy. Unlike in many other places, though, courts here do let people win cases brought against the authorities.”

  We met Tregubovich for lunch in a crowded café, Travelers, on Kalinin Square in the north part of town. Despite its out-of-the-way location, it was bustling with people stopping in for a quick bite to eat or a cup of coffee. Commenting on how busy the place was, Tregubovich explained that Novosibirsk is entrepreneurial, a city in which small businesses can excel.

  For an oblast with a relatively limited number (by Siberian standards) of oil and gas businesses, smaller firms abounded, at least judging by the signs on the street. We asked him why.

  “Research and entrepreneurship,” he replied. “Every two meters there’s a café or a gas station attached to it, or a slick car dealership.

  “There is corruption,” he continued, “don’t get me wrong. We aren’t without corruption and bribery, for sure. But opening, say, a coffee shop still allows for less graft than the construction of business centers. So it’s good that people open places like this.”

  We found Novosibirsk to be a sophisticated city—no doubt the most sophisticated east of Moscow. Cafés and restaurants seem to occupy every corner and do brisk business. Residents dress modishly, but not outlandishly, sporting jeans, flat-soled shoes and sneakers, summery dresses, and T-shirts—just as they would in any major city in the West in July, the month we visited. In Ensk, the City of N, the “N,” we came to see, stands for normalcy.

  In some ways, Novosibirsk is better than normal. In two days of taking taxis around town, three of our five drivers were women—a higher male-to-female ratio than one would encounter in Manhattan. Two had raised children and were getting on in years, and declared that they could do anything they wanted but were driving cabs by choice. The third, a young woman named Tatyana, was studying law and philosophy at Novosibirsk University (located in Akademgorodok) and so drove to make extra money because it’s “better than tending bar.”

  Tatyana took us to Lenin Square, to the Museum of Local Lore, which occupies a fin-de-siècle brick-and-granite two-story building once used as barracks for Bolshevik soldiers and later to house the city administration. Unusually for Russian museums these days, no portrait of Putin greeted us as we entered, though the Lenin Square subway station features a wall honoring soldiers killed in Chechnya and Ukraine overhung by Putin’s words: “Every country has to support its heroes.” On the day of our departure, on the way to the train station (which also serves as a spectacular museum for the West Siberian Railroad), we passed by a billboard proclaiming, “Europe is just a flight away.” Never mind that there are only two direct flights to Europe—to Munich and Prague—the civilized atmosphere is unmistakable. The city feels central, connected: after all, it takes as much time (about four hours) to fly to Moscow as it does to Beijing.

  The Chapel of Saint Nicholas standing on Krasny Prospect, just off Lenin Square, used to represent the geographical center of the Russian empire. The Bolsheviks destroyed this house of worship and replaced it with a monument to Stalin, which was removed after Khrushchev denounced him, so the center became a glaring empty spot. And though the chapel was rebuilt in the 1990s, the center has since moved elsewhere. Still, Novosibirsk remains central—the most coherent city we saw in Russia, where elements of the Soviet past peacefully coexist with the czarist-era legacy of the double-headed eagle. The city had well earned the right to its renown, which its citizens were too dignified, too self-assured, to flaunt.

  8

  ULAN-UDE, IRKUTSK, AND LAKE BAIKAL

  ASIAN ABODES OF THE SPIRIT

  TIME ZONE: MSK+5; UTC+8

  God is the same everywhere.

  Kings are the slaves of history.

  —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

  The Buddha, Shamans, and a Throne for Putin

  The redeye flight from Moscow some three and a half thousand miles east, to Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, left us dazed, as much from the lack of sleep as from the stark change in scenery, almost equivalent to a change in planets. (If Russia was, as Obama famously declared, just a “regional power,” its “region” now seemed to us, at least from the plane’s windows, to encompass extraterrestrial realms.) Our Airbus descended through ragged skeins of mist paling with dawn light until, beneath us, we descried empty green hills stretching out in every direction, presaging the grassland steppes of Mongolia just a hundred and fifty miles or so to the south. Amid this expanse of green, Ulan-Ude, population 400,000, loomed into view, a jumble of concrete shacks and gray apartment buildings scattered about like trash on an abandoned lot, hugging the east bank of the Selenga River and bisected by the lesser currents of the Uda.

  The Selenga! The Uda! The waterways’ names bespeak, to Russian ears, impossible, forbidding remoteness and exotic non-Slavic peoples. The airport turned out to be nothing more than a tarmac and a terminal one might well mistake for a bus station. Awaiting us in the lounge we found a crowd of stocky Buryats, whose Asian features recalled their consanguinity with Mongols, as did their language, a dialect of Mongolian, agglutinative and thick voweled, totally unrelated to Russian. Russians here were relative newcomers, arriving in the seventeenth century, bent on mining for gold and trapping for furs. They could not have felt especially warmly toward the Buryats, who descended from Mongols, the leader of whom, Genghis Khan, exploded out of Mongolia in the thirteenth century with his armies of crossbow-bearing horsemen to lay waste to almost all Russia, massacring perhaps a third of the population, and even threatening western Europe. The Mongol empire Genghis Khan established had lasting effects, all baleful, on Russia’s history, cutting the country off from Europe just as Europe was poised to undergo the Renaissance and, worse, introducing tyrannical rule to Eastern Slavs who had governed themselves democratically in the city-states of Kievan Rus. (Not that the Russian princes of the time should fully escape blame—they chose to pay their Mongol overlords to protect them from the Swedes and Lithuanians, instead of siding with Westerners against the Tatar-Mongolian yoke.)

  Our taxi ride down potholed roads to Ulan-Ude’s center revealed a roughshod town of few comforts, with locals negotiating battered sidewalks or gravel walkways, at times subject to assault from whirling dust kicked up by the hectic traffic and sporadic wind.

  Our Buryat driver sat and steered on the right—his cab was an import from Japan, as were so many other cars on the road around us.

  “The federal authorities keep forbidding us from buying these right-hand-drive cars,” he said. “Putin wants us to buy Russian cars, not foreign ones. But it’s no use. These Japanese cars are so much better, even with the steering wheels on the wrong side.” The perennial dilemma of a country as large as Russia: what the central government in Moscow ordains does not always hold in the provinces, which may be nine time zones ahead of the capital.

  Our hotel, the Geser, was a functional brick structure, but comfortable enough. To our surprise, it hosted tour groups of Westerners on their way to China and Mongolia. Yet outside the hotel the town appeared stark and hardscrabble, dominated by crumbling cement buildings painted, in places, gaudy colors and bearing gaudy signs, some in Chinese; and in fact Chinese businessmen were out and about. Ethnic Buryats, not Russians, made up the majority here; a good number of Buryat men had crew cuts, weathered faces, and jutting brows. Here and there scurried Mongols on shopping expeditions. All in all, Ulan-Ude resembled Moscow about as much as Portland, Maine, looks like Lim
a, Peru.

  “What would we do out here without China?” our driver exclaimed. “They’ve built a lot here. Just look!”

  He was right: ramshackle skyscrapers of blue-and-yellow glass and steel stood in colorful disarray against a leaden sky. Here and there were Chinese noodle shops, Chinese clothing shops, and Chinese bric-a-brac shops. Of course Chinese businessmen were out and about, too.

  When local Russian friends met us as the hotel later that day and took us for a stroll, we could find no café open in which to sit down and talk. We espied the Venezia Restaurant, but it was closed. Even the sidewalk ice cream vendors had disappeared by nine in the evening. The city at such an hour, we thought, should have been bustling with people but instead stretched before us empty, its broad avenues sweeping away toward empty hills.

  Our stroll took us to the Square of the Soviets. There we confronted, set against a row of larches, the gigantic weathered bronze Lenin head—the largest such statue on earth, standing twenty feet tall from nape to crown and resting atop a granite pedestal that raises it another twenty-five feet. If the streets were empty, Lenin, here, was always on duty, his brows furrowed in perpetual vigilance and subjecting passersby to his fierce gaze. Despite the monument’s size, the few out and about barely seemed to notice him, save for a group of skateboarders honing their skills on its pedestal—a familiar sight in other Russian cities. Another one who noticed was the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, who paid it a visit in 2011.

  A few blocks away, on a promontory above the Uda River, we encountered a monument of a very different kind: one memorializing the city’s victims of the Stalin-era political purges. Fresh wreaths of roses, laid by the children and grandchildren of the murdered, testify to the ongoing interest on the part of the relatives of the perished. We visited it the next evening, as the sun, already set, lit from below a scattering of clouds, giving them the appearance of molten boulders floating above the verdure of the surrounding hills. A black granite wall engraved with the names of the victims and the dates of their birth and death (the latter predominantly having occurred in 1938, at the height of the Great Terror) rose beneath a tangle of barbed wire, in front of which stood a faceless citizen carved in bronze.

  A plaque on the pedestal reads:

  In memory of those perished innocents!

  In memory of those buried in labor camps!

  It is a pity we cannot bury them!

  Their remains cannot be found.

  Another plaque says, simply, “Za chto?” (For what?)

  Buryatia was the first place we visited with a large, distinct minority population professing a religion of purely Asian provenance. About one out of four people in Buryatia profess Orthodox Christianity and one out of five, Buddhism. (The number of believers may well be larger—older people who grew up in the USSR are often hesitant to formally disclose their religious beliefs.) Nonbelievers, the stats tell us, account for 14 percent of the population—another legacy of decades of atheist Soviet education. Nonetheless, near Ulan-Ude sits Ivolginsky Datsan, the most important Buddhist temple in Russia, one belonging to the Tibetan Vajrayana school and frequented by both Russians and Buryats.

  “A Russian can go to church in the morning and light a candle for a dead relative, but then go in the evening to the temple and perform a Buddhist ritual or two for him there, just to be sure,” a Russian resident of Ulan-Ude told us. “Buddhists are tolerant. They recite their mantras and don’t give anyone any trouble, unlike the Muslims.” Other ethnic Russians we spoke to, though, talked of tensions with the Buryats, with the latter calling the former “occupiers.” Yet such hostile sentiments, we heard, usually emerged as a result of a surfeit of alcohol. The kind of tension characterizing relations between Russians and Muslims in the country’s North Caucasus region does not exist in Buryatia.

  One cloudy morning, a taxi ferried us fifteen miles west of Ulan-Ude through the surrounding hills on the plain where the Ivolginsky Datsan dominates the horizon. Twenty-five years ago, the temples, with their Chinese-style flaring eaves, gilt spheres, and lama figurines, and their red, green, and blue decor, had once impressed visitors amid an empty steppe; now, they stood surrounded by a multicolored congeries of workaday shacks, log cabins, and souvenir shops and living quarters (housing visitors and monks, astrologers and healers and masseurs), the space between them crisscrossed with telephone cables droopily suspended between crooked poles. At the ticket office, we hired a guide—a monk in sneakers, burgundy robes, and a matching fisherman’s cap. He introduced himself as Torzho, a name, he told us, that in Buryat is translated as White Pearls, or, alternatively, Big Diamond, with the intended import of “peaceful.”

  We set out on our tour. Around us were mostly Buryats, who come here to seek spiritual guidance from all over the area, some from hundreds of miles away. Many seemed poor local farmers, but others were clearly prosperous, in colorful traditional silk Mongolian robes.

  Navigating among other groups on narrow unpaved paths, our guide mumbled his spiel in a barely audible staccato, as if bored and in a rush. As we trod the dirt walkways, we discovered that the temples each now charge a two-hundred-ruble (about $3) entrance fee and were for the most part similar: green plank floors, red columns around the walls, red tables covered with tapestries and holy books. Chintzy-looking portraits of lamas seem to hang on every wall. Perhaps because of the fee, we were always the only ones inside.

  Outside, around us Buryats and a few Russians enthusiastically hurried to spin prayer wheels and affix prayer flags to their knobs, with a few doing the ritual circumambulation of the entire premises. Our guide recounted the details of samsara, the pursuit of nirvana; he talked of the region’s lamas and other holy men. He lamented the repression the Bolsheviks visited on the monks, who, at the time of the revolution, numbered some sixteen thousand.

  Yet he praised Stalin for reopening the temple in 1946.

  “He had a religious education, so he could see the value in it,” he told us flatly, alluding to the bloody tyrant’s years as a student at an Orthodox Christian seminary.

  “Why did he see the value in these temples only in 1946?” we asked.

  “There was a change in government.”

  There was not. Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church during the war, understanding that it would help rally Soviet citizens for the fight to save his regime. He doubtless thought little of faraway Datsan, but surely Buddhism’s traditional pacifism weighed in the temple’s favor. Moreover, rebuilding the country after the war, Stalin reasoned, people needed all the faith they could get.

  Our guide reserved the greatest praise for Putin, to whom he referred always by his full name.

  “There are two thrones in our country,” Torzho announced. “One is occupied by our lama. The other by President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

  “What?” we asked. “Putin on a throne?”

  “In the Kremlin president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sits on a throne. As does our lama. We’re grateful to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for restoring our temples here. And he’s also restored our stadium.”

  Our guide went on to explain that President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin shared a “holy background” with Prince Siddhartha, the Indian noble who, millennia ago, had become the Buddha.

  “Putin?” we responded, amazed. “A holy background? He may act like a czar, but he has never claimed any such thing! Anyway, the Buddha renounced his throne. Putin is preparing to run for president yet again.”

  “We are grateful to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who sits on a throne in the Kremlin. We really are.”

  Putin sits on no throne, not physically at least, although his grand coronation-like inauguration for his fourth presidential term in May 2018 may suggest otherwise. The gratitude the monk voiced finds reflection in the president’s ever-high popularity ratings—up to 80 percent, even after almost two decades in power, and the perception that he is, indeed, all powerful.

  Soon after
this, we parted and hired a taxi back to Ulan-Ude and the giant Lenin head.

  * * *

  One of our Buryat drivers in Ulan-Ude waxed enthusiastically about shamans.

  “Shamans have a lot of power, it’s really true. There are white shamans who do good. Best to stay away from the black shamans.” White shamans intervened, he said, in the lives of many, and generally helped people. Even during the Soviet decades people consulted them, asked for their aid. Or, if need be, they entreated black shamans to harm their enemies. White or black, though, shamans formed a part of the region’s age-old culture; Buddhism, in these parts, was an import.

  Intent on visiting a shaman, one gloriously sunny, breezy morning we boarded a late-morning train for the eight-hour ride from Ulan-Ude west to Irkutsk, a city known as the Paris of Siberia and a jumping-off point for visits to Lake Baikal, the world’s largest (and deepest) body of freshwater, water so pure that one can see clear through to the rocky bottom from almost anywhere on its surface. The trains run in such a way that windows face the lake, affording views for which one would certainly be disposed to pay extra. We would share our car with a great number of Chinese, who spent little time looking out the windows, engrossed as they were with watching television series on their tablets or slurping noodles from Styrofoam buckets.

  Yet the vistas of Baikal did more than impress; they instilled a peace of sorts, curative, uplifting, and enthralling. The lake appeared suddenly, sixty miles out of Ulan-Ude and about an hour into the trip. The railroad tracks veered away from the grassy clearings and larch forests to parallel the pebbly bank, with the far (northern) shore so distant as to be almost invisible. Azure sky and azure-green waters, at times still, at others frothy with the wind, swept away from us, with the taiga-covered low mountains—sopki in Russian—on either bank receding and shrinking away into the north. The shores, with their cliffs of schist in places, taiga in others, sheltered secluded coves on which nerpas (Baikal seals) sun themselves and moose and bears roam. When mists roll in, as they often do when the seasons are changing, the tableaus Baikal presents rival the finest work of the impressionists. This lake and its surroundings, one finds oneself thinking, seemed to exude a spirituality befitting notions of shamans; of lost, ancient worlds where peace reined and mankind lived as one with nature.