In Putin's Footsteps

7 NOVOSIBIRSK ^{A STORY OF SCIENCE AND SERENDIPITY TIME ZONE: MSK+4; UTC+7}

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 reference 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.

Then historical happenstance aided the new town’s fortunes. The Soviets retracted their communist blessing from Omsk, Tomsk lacked a rail line, and Krasnoyarsk, another regional rival, had too much czarist-era history. The 1917 Revolution cast a pall of doubt on all the monarchy’s achievements. Novonikolayevsk, then boasting only twenty thousand inhabitants and precious little historical baggage, had only to change its name—to Novosibirsk—to showcase urban development in the new Soviet Siberia.

Novosibirsk, thus, became a symbol, if one of ambiguous meaning. Its local nickname is Ensk—the “city of N.” Ensk has come to stand for a faceless, proverbial provincial town lost in the depths of Russia, a generic abode of misery. Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls—a novel written two hundred years ago yet still, in many ways, valid as a portrait of Russia—begins in N. The provincial town from which Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender journeyed to acquire the twelve chairs was also called N.

But Novosibirsk has defied the misery to which its nickname would seem to destine it. It is no Ensk, but a stunning success.

All across the Soviet Union, Lenin Squares were built huge to reflect the grandeur of communist aspirations. Such is the case in Novosibirsk, but at least its Lenin Square stands for the achievements made during its century of history. In the 1920s the Soviet authorities began working on the city, erecting, in Constructivist style, faceless cement behemoths for the masses—buildings that could contain anything the government wanted. Running from Lenin Square, the 4.5-mile-long Krasny Prospect—the locals brag (possibly not accurately) that it is the longest straight city street in the world—is flanked by the imposing Oblpotrebsoyuz (Regional Consumers Union), which now rents out space to private enterprises, from KFC to polling research companies; the Sibrevkom (Siberian Revolutionary Committee), now a major state museum of art; and Delovoi Dom (Business Building), with its own metro entrance. (Novosibirsk is the only Siberian city with a subway, equipped with grand marble platforms and decorated with portraits of Lenin. The subway owes its existence to Leonid Brezhnev, who, after being pressured by local officials, ordered its construction following his visit in 1972.) In the 1930s these Constructivist edifices competed for prominence with buildings erected in Classical Stalinist style, including the elaborate Stokvartirnyi Dom Rabotnikov Krayispolkoma (the Hundred Apartment Building of Employees of the Regional Executive Committee) on Krasny Prospect. All these buildings were constructed to glorify the state, not to offer creature comforts to their inhabitants.

Even the opera and ballet theater, built in the 1930s on Lenin Square, just behind the Lenin statue, is both monumental and eclectic in grandiose Soviet style. Its giant metal dome shelters an equally giant stage, large enough to accommodate a thousand-member troupe. Even the most populous of Russian operas, Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace, involves only five hundred performers. But there is another reason for its size. In the Soviet Union, art, as it were, belonged to the people. Hence the theater was designed to host not only ballets, but also circuses, a planetarium, and a cinema hall doubling as a tank for a circus water show. The largest theater in the world, its interior was also meant to permit the passage of huge Soviet parades.

The gigantic size of so many of Novosibirsk’s buildings represents, most of all, the vastness of Siberia; nothing is for the individual, everything is planned for the masses. One can love the unimaginable geographic dimensions of Russia most readily when one abandons one’s personal identity and joins that of the nation, a nation priding itself on the size of its territory.

Russia has always favored building huge, which often conflicts with building for style and comfort. Novosibirsk has managed this, though, better than many other Russian cities. Its relative youth may have well suited it to serve as the model communist city, yet its dimensions, miraculously, have not interfered with its inhabitants’ humanity. It is a cheery, inspiring place.

Like other major Siberian cities during the Great Patriotic War, Novosibirsk became an impromptu industrial center. The Kremlin ordered factories moved here and, in some cases, had them expanded, even though, unusually for Siberia, the city has access to few natural resources.

But never mind that: Novosibirsk lucked out in the post-Stalin era, too. After Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech denouncing the dictator, the country began opening up to the world and to science that could serve more than just the military’s need for modern technology and weapons. After the mass liberation from the Gulag’s labor camps and the housing deficit of the Stalin decades, the state endeavored to construct reasonably comfortable living quarters for its citizens.

Enter the five-story buildings with studios and single-bedroom apartments, the khrushchevki, which kicked off what amounted to a housing revolution in the Soviet Union, allowing people to have their small private residences away from the watchful gaze of suspicious neighbors—and the state. And it was not just comfort the post-Stalin Soviet state was after.

Khrushchev, lacking higher education, was a great fan of the applied sciences and revered the learned academics—namely mathematicians Mikhail Lavrentyev and Sergei Sobolev and the physicist Sergei Khristianovich. They argued for creating an interdisciplinary scientific center in Siberia, far from the established institutions of Moscow and Leningrad. In Novosibirsk, they believed, young scientists would be offered their own khrushchevki and work in research facilities just a walk away.

The Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Akademgorodok (Academic City), was established in 1958, eighteen miles south of Novosibirsk. The surrounding pine forest, a recently completed hydroelectric power station, and the nearby Ob River reservoir factored into the state’s decision to dedicate to Akademgorodok almost 3,500 acres of land, of which one-fourth was wooded, which would come to host thirty-seven institutes of higher learning and research. The forest was to form part of an “ecological city” in which residential neighborhoods of modest and efficient housing and all the research institutes blended holistically.

The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Einstein worked, served as the model for the new Soviet enterprise. Khrushchev believed mightily in borrowing from the West. After all, he is known as much for his denunciation of Stalin as for his mass planting of corn, an idea he borrowed from an Iowan farmer named Roswell Garst.

In the late 1950s, Novosibirsk was no more science oriented than any other outback city in the Soviet Union, and so would hardly have been anyone’s first choice as a future hub of research and development. But it had successfully hosted at least two major Soviet enterprises, a secret uranium plant and Sibselmash (a Russian abbreviation of the “Siberian Agricultural Machinery”), a complex that focused on the production of farm equipment. The existence of these factories buttressed arguments in favor of opening centers for the applied sciences there.

The hallowed city of Tomsk lost out here again. Farsighted planners chose Novosibirsk to be a future scientific powerhouse because it was situated at great remove from the halls of government and from recognized educational institutions; this would afford young scientists a chance to work independently and creatively.

Though it might not seem so, the idea behind Novosibirsk’s transformation was, in essence, communist: savvy planners would take a tabula rasa city and turn it into a rival for the Soviet Union’s established centers of science. This was, to be sure, a leap from the Princeton model. Princeton sits, after all, just an hour’s drive from New York City, whereas Novosibirsk is a two-day train ride or a four-hour flight from Moscow. New Jersey has warm enough cold months, but in Novosibirsk −25 Fahrenheit passes for mild winter weather. And yet this Soviet attempt at building a scientific utopia succeeded well enough, with, strangely, state planners fostering a civil society and an intellectual climate propitious to free thought. In this Siberian enclave of freethinkers, the country’s top physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and chemists, be they old or young, have worked together on everything from science to landscaping. Novosibirsk has seen the number of its research institutes grow from fifteen to thirty-seven over the course of sixty years.

One warm, overcast July day we walked along Akademgorodok’s broad avenues, interspersed with pine and birch groves, their names meant to celebrate the town’s strength and occupation—Builders, Engineers, Academia, and Institute. Some local traditions of collective labor still hold—on the way to the famed Café Integral, we passed by a few elderly academic types cutting grass. The Café Integral—integral is a mathematics term—was long a legendary gathering place for discussions and debates; habitués, while consuming the premises’ renowned goulash or cheese sandwiches, and downing its weak coffee or strong tea, hashed out new ideas about freedom and scientific innovation. In 1968 the Café Integral held the first Soviet festival of bards, who were, then, mostly amateurs and included scientists and engineers writing and singing their own songs while playing their guitars. The smartest in the country no longer sang about the achievements of the communist masses, as they once did under Stalin. Instead, they heralded their own lives, often lamenting how the Kremlin bosses got in their way, even out here.

The preeminent dissident and bard Alexander Galich, known for his contemplative yet pointed criticism of the regime, made his only concert appearance there, in that year of protest. His performance frightened the authorities because he sang as he spoke and delivered a ballad in memory of Boris Pasternak in which he denounced both Stalin and Khrushchev as palachi (executioners), and Khrushchev for his opposition to Doctor Zhivago. The audience rose in silence, honoring his lyrics and his bravery in telling the truth. Brezhnev, then in power, was not mentioned, but he took the affront personally. And while the authorities allowed concerts by other bards to continue, Galich was firmly forbidden to officially sing in public ever again. Soon after he found himself forced into exile in Paris, where he died in 1977.

Today the old atmosphere of freedom on the rise has waned. The original 1960s minimalist furniture has given way to chairs and tables one could find in any modern restaurant. The cuisine is excellent, but few scientists hang out there nowadays; they are busy making money. The clientele consists of people like us, curious about the iconic place, wanting to experience it for themselves.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Akademgorodok’s fortunes declined, as did those of most Soviet enterprises, research centers, and factories. The Yeltsin government, concentrating on the privatization of state assets, neglected the country’s intellectual resources. Say what you will about the Soviets, they did promote science and education. During the Yeltsin decade, many scholars chose to immigrate to the West, where they could count on the high salaries and esteem due them.

With Putin’s quest to increase Russia’s global status and influence, science and scientists have become priorities for the Kremlin once again. The year 2010 saw the inauguration of the Skolkovo Innovation Center (which merges business and high technology) just west of Moscow. The project has been mired in scandal and has produced little of value, at least so far. But in Novosibirsk the government has been striving to harness and develop talents that contribute to the needs of the country’s modern economy.

GlaxoSmithKline, along with other global pharmaceutical companies, have chosen Akademgorodok for HIV drug testing and research. This makes sense, given the scale of the epidemic sweeping Siberia and much of rural Russia.[38] With the Orthodox Church helping Putin to consolidate his rule, social conservatism has backfired on the population—the priests cracked down on sensible approaches to sexually transmitted diseases fueling the Russian crisis.

The oil field service company Schlumberger has a strong presence in Akademgorodok, as do Intel and its Russian software competitor Novosoft. To foster the birth of at least twenty successful tech companies a year and their growth, the municipal authorities oversaw the construction, in 2007, of Technopark, a fourteen-story glass-and-brick cubist structure shaped as the letter “n”—an eastern precursor to Skolkovo.

Innovation doesn’t come without controversy, of course. Akademgorodok has now become a fashionable neighborhood, with its woods facing constant threats from luxury condo developers.

Apropos of this, we tracked down an activist named Natalia Shamina, a professor of biology who, in 2013, found herself fired from Akademgorodok for her political views and who now heads the local environmentalist movement. Shamina had gained fame as a crusader against the destruction of the very forest that underpinned Akademgorodok’s study of nature; in 2010 she went on a hunger strike for this cause. Most recently, in 2017, she was fined for disturbing the peace. We met Shamina, in her fifties, with her dark brown hair pulled back in a taut ponytail, during a protest: she was standing, alone, under Novosibirsk’s Lenin Statue, holding a sign reading “Protect the forest of Akademgorodok.”

“Why are you by yourself?” we asked. “No one else is interested?”

Major protests against plans for the forest took place in the spring, she explained, but by July most demonstrators had tired of their task and showed up to picket government buildings only a few times a week. The authorities also changed the law regarding demonstrations, making permits to conduct them more difficult to obtain. Individual protesters, however, don’t have to file for permits, at least as long as they stand fifty meters apart. So Shamina was out there alone. For a month, she had been shifting, week by week, from Lenin Square in Novosibirsk to Builders Avenue in Akademgorodok.

“These forests are needed for research and cannot be destroyed,” she explained wearily, but with conviction.

She has been waging her movement’s battle for a decade and has had some success, saving the botanical garden from destruction and blocking the construction of an upscale medical center in the woods.

Shamina’s chief concern is the preservation of Russia’s academic glory. She shares this aspiration with other scholars trying to reconstitute Russia’s scientific know-how after the disarray of the Yeltsin years. The problem, of course, is that in Russia, the government, distrustful of free thought, always wants to oversee innovation, to be able to meddle in it if it becomes threatening.

During our visit we heard much talk about Dmitry Trubitsyn’s company Tion, which manufactures, to global standards, high-tech air-purification systems for hospitals. By upgrading the purifiers to greater energy efficiency without certification, he allegedly broke an obscure law that essentially prevents innovation deemed too fast and too free, and now he is facing five years in prison. Fellow scientists and entrepreneurs in Akademgorodok have collected over five thousand signatures in his favor, but to no avail. One newspaper headline about the matter read, “Cleaning the Air Turned Out to Be a Crime.”

The Tion case highlights the tensions between the Kremlin’s aspirations for dynamic private-sector research and its obsession with controlling the process. The result: the Russian government thwarts its own strategic goals for moving away from its dependence on oil and mineral revenues to a more diversified economy rooted in innovation.

At the time of Trubitsyn’s indictment, in February 2017, Putin, who often travels to Siberia for power-vacations and to touch base with the empire’s outback, visited Novosibirsk and voiced support for the initiative, “Akademgorodok 2.0,” a huge endeavor launched by the regional governor Andrei Travnikov. Travnikov hoped to enact a plan “for the development of the Novosibirsk Science Center … and … its territory,” encompassing its “scientific potential, engineering sector, and social infrastructure.”[39] But Putin’s visit and support for the large-scale project (rather than for smaller, more focused ventures with a good chance of succeeding)—shed light on what always hampers Russia, the desire for size.

The Russian state perennially works at cross purposes with itself. The government announces change and then fears relinquishing control of the change. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, yet the reforms he oversaw—the lessening of political repression—did not go far enough because he feared where they would lead. When Hungary, encouraged by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, set out to forge its own path in 1956, the Kremlin sent tanks into Budapest to “protect socialism.” Yeltsin declared democracy in 1991 and then, two years later, faced with opposition, opened fire on his own parliament, thereby putting the brakes on democracy; he further worsened matters with the adoption of a new, more presidentially oriented constitution—Russia’s current one—later that year, which set the stage for Putin’s centralized rule.

Kremlin control notwithstanding, Novosibirsk, almost miraculously, has managed to chart its own course. No matter what has gone on in Moscow, the city has flourished, just as snowdrops—a flower so common in Russian forests—bloom every spring, despite the punishing winter just past.

This has much to do with municipal and regional leadership that tends to listen to the people’s demands. In the summer before our visit, the oblast governor—Novosibirsk is, naturally, the oblast’s capital—canceled plans to increase fees for housing and communal services by 15 percent, because of public outrage. Earlier, Novosibirskans had held a March for the Federalization of Siberia and in Defense of the Constitution, calling on Moscow to abstain from pillaging the budgets of major Siberian cities. This led to accusations of separatism and the blocking of demonstrations. But other powerful cities, including Yekaterinburg, joined the movement and made their voices heard in Moscow, too. (Though, perhaps, not for long.) However, in contrast to what happened in Yekaterinburg, with its mayor Roizman, Novosibirsk’s mayor Anatoly Lokot, a communist whose support for United Russia the Kremlin had questioned, was able to make a deal to stay on. He promised not to challenge the recent Putin-backed import to the oblast’s governorship, Andrei Travnikov.

Back in town, we met with Yury Tregubovich, formerly a legal reporter for the regional office of the hard-hitting longtime opposition paper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). In a gray T-shirt and jeans, looking like a balding, thirty-year-older version of Mark Zuckerberg, Tregubovich touted the intelligence and sophistication of the city’s leaders. Local authorities, according to him, cannot get away with abuses common elsewhere. While visiting a relative in Kemerovo, another major Siberian city, he happened upon a local corruption trial but discovered that a judge banned journalists from the courtroom. “In Novosibirsk,” he said, “the authorities would never dare do such a thing.”

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.