In Putin's Footsteps

6 OMSK ^{A MIXED METAPHOR OF PUTIN’S EMPIRE TIME ZONE: MSK+3; UTC+6}

It is eight in the morning and guests in one of the city’s leading ultramodern 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.”[37]

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.

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.