In Putin's Footsteps

2 KIEV ^{THE MOTHER OF ALL RUSSIAN CITIES OR THE THREAT TO MOTHER RUSSIA? TIME ZONE: MSK-1 FROM NOVEMBER TO MARCH AND MSK FROM MARCH TO OCTOBER; UCT+2}

A hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, so well described by the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov in his classic 1924 novel (quoted in the epigraph), Kiev’s prince Vladimir the Great has only grown in stature and symbolism. Ruling from 980 to 1015, the prince brought Christianity to his land, Kievan Rus, importing it from the Byzantine Greeks. He has now come to personify the current rift between Russia and Ukraine, two countries locked in a conflict over territory and asserting primacy in their shared Slavic heritage.

Who is senior, the Ukrainians or the Russians? Prince Vladimir ruled over the regional proto-Slavic state, Kievan Rus—a name bespeaking this historical dilemma. It’s worth noting that at the time Rus was a voluntary conglomeration of independent city-states with elements of nascent democracy—a democracy laid waste by Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century and eventually stamped out entirely by Russian rulers in Moscow.

A city of some three million, Kiev shares a time zone with Moscow from March to October (during daylight savings time, which, since 2014, Russia has not observed). This one-hour time difference lasting just half a year connotes both the connection between these once brotherly nations and Ukraine’s revolt against control by the dominant imperial Russia. Spring is the best time to visit Kiev, so we chose to arrive in April—and pay our respects. And respects were due: Kiev is, after all, mat gorodov russkikh—the mother of all Russian cities. Given the critical role Ukraine has played in Russia’s history—and especially the dilemmas with which it presents Russia in the present—it cannot be ignored.

One needs to be fit to make even an unhurried ascent to the summit of Vladimir’s Hill from Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s broad, chestnut-tree-lined central avenue, which the Soviet authorities—under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev—transformed into the capital’s main thoroughfare after the Great Patriotic War. From Khreshchatyk’s Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti—the famed Maidan from which Ukrainians launched their Euromaidan protest movement in late 2013—it takes thirty minutes to mount the hill to the station from which an oft-crowded funicular car spirits passengers up to Kiev’s highest terrain. Once having disembarked atop Vladimir’s Hill, though, visitors may survey the Dnieper River bisecting the city below and enjoy a magnificent view of the age-old waterway so vital to Ukraine’s history.

Fresh off the funicular, we walked out onto Mikhailov Square, noting the tony restaurants and posh hotels that have sprung up around it in recent years. The square, dating from the twelfth century—even if known by several other names since then—was once the site of demonstrations and uprisings. It is a host of contradictions: it has both the gray, imposing, oddly concave Soviet-style Ministry of Foreign Affairs; an incongruous, ornately decorated, yet entirely empty children’s carousel; an angel-shaped monument to the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Kiev has a number of these sculptures); and Saint Michael’s Monastery, with its white-trimmed lapis lazuli facades and soaring, cross-topped golden domes.

Just outside the monastery’s portals, along its western wall, a long, glass-encased pictorial memorial stands honoring the Ukrainians who have died fighting for their country in its east against the rebel troops of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk—officially, the single Confederate Republic of Novorossiya (“New Russia”). The Confederate Republic’s founders resurrected the czarist-era name Novorossiya for these territories, which have ethnic Russian majorities and a strong sense of Russian, as opposed to Ukrainian, identity.

In Moscow, one hears a good deal about the war for Novorossiya, which has allied itself with the Kremlin. However, so far away in the Russian capital, the conflict seems almost imagined—little more than conjured-up fodder for patriotic propaganda. Ukraine’s break with Russia in 2014 has been, nevertheless, very real and wrenching both for those in the Kremlin nostalgic for control over the large Slavic state on Russia’s southern flank, and also for a good number of ordinary Russians, who view Ukraine as Malorossiya (“Little Russia,” a subordinate Slavic “little brother”). All Russians, though, understand that the land Ukraine occupies was the wellspring of Russian civilization, the hallowed locus of the Kreshcheniye Rusi (the Baptism of Rus) that Prince Vladimir brought about more than a thousand years ago.

The Orange Revolution of 2004, which after rigged presidential elections overturned the victory of the Kremlin-compliant Viktor Yanukovych (who hailed from the Donetsk Oblast, now part of Novorossiya), ended with installing in power two pro-Western politicians: President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Although eventually doubts grew about the two leaders’ commitment to democracy, the pro-European Union Euromaidan uprising still proved that the independent Ukraine is no longer Malorossiya.

We walked along the memorial wall surveying the faces and names of men and women who went to eastern Ukraine to defend their homeland, and the reality sank in: Ukraine is at war, and with Russia—a once-inconceivable notion.

Our stroll eventually led us away from Mikhailov Square, down a path to a headland overlooking the Dnieper, where a daunting, sixty-seven-foot-high statue of Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr, in Ukrainian) surveys the island-studded river and the parks and apartment blocks on the right bank. The statue dates from 1853, the era of the Russian Empire under Nicholas I. Constructed of iron and bronze in neo-Byzantine style for the four hundredth anniversary of Byzantium’s fall to the Turks, Prince Vladimir holds aloft a fifteen-foot cross, as though baptizing the land anew. The monument was meant to both highlight Russia’s spiritual ties to the Eastern Roman Empire and to establish continuity between Emperor Nicholas I and Vladimir the Great. Though what is less advertised is that following his conversion to Christianity, Vladimir led a less than pious lifestyle that induced one medieval chronicler to dub him fornicator maximus. One version of history has it that the still-pagan Vladimir seized the Crimean town of Chersonesus from the Greeks and agreed to return it only if the Byzantine emperor Basil II would grant him the hand in marriage of the emperor’s sister, Anna Porphyrogenita. The Greeks acceded to this demand, on the condition that Vladimir convert to Christianity, which he did, with some historians placing his baptism in Chersonesus, others in Kiev, and with the instatement thereafter of Christianity as Kievan Rus’s religion. For having inducted Rus into Christendom, the church canonized him.

Some medieval Russian sources put it differently: the Russians sent envoys to neighboring lands to assess their faiths for possible adoption. Vladimir rejected both Judaism and Islam—the latter because of its prohibition against alcohol. (“Veseliye Rusi piti est [drinking is the joy of Rus],” purportedly declared Vladimir.) Yet, it was the ethereal, spiritual beauty of the Greek Orthodox liturgy that won over the Russians. Conversion ensued.

In fact, Byzantine Christianity was already making inroads into Kievan Rus and its adoption would have made eminent sense, given Kiev’s trade contacts with Byzantium. However it came about, the acceptance of Christianity by Kievan Rus from the Byzantine Greeks and not the Roman Catholics would have momentous consequences for world history. Ultimately, it placed Russia, spiritually, if not civilizationally, outside Western Europe and fostered a faith-based isolationism, which included the rise of the messianic notion of Moscow as the Third Rome and of Russia as the country destined by God to determine the fate of mankind.

Admiring the pugnacious Vladimir the Great, the atheist Soviets left the statue that Nicholas I erected to him in Kiev, sparing it the fate they reserved for most other monuments glorifying the monarchy or religion. Gazing up at Vladimir’s weathered bronze grandeur, we could not help thinking that the statue looked remarkably Stalinesque. Its baroque laurel wreaths and the bas-reliefs on its pedestal recall Stalinist classicism, which itself derived from Byzantine models. Some have speculated that the bas-relief—just beneath Vladimir’s feet—of a meat cleaver crossed with a torch signifies power and truth, a tribute to Masonic fashions of the nineteenth century.[16] In fact, the meat cleaver and torch bear an eerie resemblance to the Soviet hammer and sickle, which also stood, in their own way, for power and truth. Even Vladimir’s hand, raised to grip the majestic cross blessing the city, conjures up the thousands of statues of another Vladimir—Vladimir Lenin—whose giant marble, iron, or bronze right hands all reached out toward the bright communist future across the Soviet Union. In many places in Russia, they still do. Ever inclined to humor, Russians often joke that what Lenin was really trying to do was hail a cab.

Even at the dawn of his rule over the Soviet Union, Stalin, too, admired the ancient Vladimir. He considered Bulgakov’s The White Guard his favorite novel, presumably because it conveyed the grandiosity of the monarchical attributes of statues, state rituals, and military ceremonies. He read the book numerous times. When Bulgakov refashioned it into a play, the dictator frequented its performances at the Moscow Art Theater. In his later years, and especially after the war, Stalin paid a great deal of attention to the symbolism of the imperial Russian state and desired to root his own Soviet empire in Russia’s historical legacy. Vladimir the Great—Saint Vladimir, the Baptizer of Russia—served as his intermediary with Russia’s distant past. To cement the connection, the statue was renovated in 1953 for its one hundredth anniversary—ironically the year of Stalin’s death.

The Ukrainians now view Prince Vladimir differently, having begun, after the 1991 Soviet collapse, to claim him for themselves. For them, he is the Kiev-born prince Volodymyr, the medieval Ukrainian leader who established Kievan Rus a century before Moscow even existed. In The White Guard, Bulgakov wrote,

The author, in this and other passages, confirms the timeless dichotomy between the Russian center and its rebellious Ukrainian periphery. In the novel, the action unfolds in 1918 in Kiev, before the Bolsheviks took control, and where Saint Vladimir’s Christian legacy was still intact, as opposed to the soon-to-be-Stalinist Moscow, where another Vladimir, Lenin, would become the god of communism.

The themes with which Bulgakov dealt in his work resonated with us throughout our journeys around Russia. Bulgakov, once a journalist who covered politics and human interest news for the Moscow daily Gudok (The Whistle), famous for its satirical pages, in his later fiction addressed the relations between people and state power. How do they react to the sudden replacement of the monarchy with a dictatorship of the proletariat, which transforms them from being subjects of the czar into members of the proletarian masses?

A similar question concerned us: Russians, as a rule, adore leaders who flaunt their power—and even deploy it, as did Putin in annexing Crimea. Are Russian subjects subordinating their lives to the greatness of the state? Or are they citizens holding individual rights? Now more than ever, almost a hundred years after Bulgakov’s novel, the conflict between open-minded, liberal-spirited Kiev and imperial, autocratic Moscow rages on, both literally—as in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine—and figuratively, in the Russian mind-set.

Fittingly, the double-headed eagle inherited from Byzantium has been playing into the rivalry. One could say that the Ukrainian head wants to turn toward Western democracy, with Ukraine becoming an enlightened European state. The Russian head, however, remains as it has been for centuries, facing the empire in the east. After all, following the fall of Byzantium, Moscow, not Kiev, assumed the historic mantle of the Third Rome and bore the torch of Christian Orthodoxy. Moreover, since the monument was built for the Russian emperor Nicholas I, St. Vladimir is “ours,” they say, just as Krym nash (Crimea is ours).

In 2014 Putin, upon annexing Crimea, justified Russia’s claims to the peninsula in his address to the State Duma:

From this and similar declarations one may extrapolate the Kremlin’s reasoning: as the European Union supported the Euromaidan—and Germany, once the country of Nazism that the Soviets defeated, is the most powerful state in the Union—Russia and its historical space are essentially under assault from the West, from those bent on destroying Russian supranational identity.

Because Kiev had lurched westward with its protest movement, Putin argued that Ukrainians had betrayed their cultural roots and endangered Russia’s security. After all, a westward-looking Ukraine might join NATO; the alliance’s promise of eventual membership (made in the Bucharest Declaration of 2008) figured in his thinking.

In 2016 Putin, who happens to be Prince Vladimir’s namesake, had his own statue of Vladimir the Great built in Borovitskaya Square, just outside the Kremlin’s western corner walls. In doing so, he was implicitly calling for Russian national unity and the defiance of enemies at home and abroad, just as the prince did a millennium ago. This move dismayed Ukrainians commemorating the millennial of St. Vladimir’s death in 1015. They complained that Russia has misappropriated a key element of their spiritual heritage. After all, Vladimir the Great had no relation to Moscow.

The new monument in Moscow was originally to stand more than seventy feet higher than its prototype in Kiev. The authorities planned to locate it on the Russian capital’s most elevated terrain—Sparrow Hills (formerly Lenin Hills), similar to Vladimir overlooking Kiev. But ecological protests broke out, which prompted municipal authorities to move it to a more prominent—if lower—space a mere hundred yards from the Kremlin.

Another Vladimir, Lenin, is also now separating Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine once had the greatest number of Lenin statues in the former Soviet Union—more than five thousand, according to one count.[19] For the past twenty years it has struggled to take them down. During the Euromaidan protests, Leninopady, or “falling Lenins”—as the demolitions of Lenin statues came to be popularly known—proliferated. Often, Lenins that remained standing were “Ukrainianized”—that is, dressed up in vyshivanki, traditional Ukrainian embroidered blouses. For many Ukrainians, tearing down their granite-and-bronze Lenins symbolized their country’s right to determine its own future. Others opposed the demolitions—especially those who were aging and conservative and valued Russia’s close historical ties to Ukraine—and, most of all, pined for the more stable, if less free, Soviet decades.

Both of us had been to Kiev numerous times before. Jeff first visited in 1985 and kept going back to see his friends and relatives of his wife there. Most notably, though, he sojourned in Kiev after the Orange Revolution and witnessed the deep disillusionment that followed, as President Yushchenko and his prime minister Tymoshenko ignored Ukraine’s pressing problems and became adversaries. At least the Orange Revolution never lost its ability to inspire hope; for a time, people were able to confront Russian pressure and liberate themselves from it.

For Nina, the connection goes even deeper—all the way back to her great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev. Born in 1894 in the Russian village of Kalinovka on the Ukrainian border, he moved at age sixteen to the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka, which is now Donetsk, a hotbed of pro-Novorossiya sentiment following the ouster of Yanukovych and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 1938, Stalin appointed Khrushchev, known for his expertise in agriculture, to be Communist Party Secretary in Kiev and tasked him with returning the republic to normalcy after the devastations of Holodomor. This man-made famine of 1932–1933 had taken between six million and seven million lives and involved state confiscation of grain from Ukrainian and Russian peasants for export, in return for heavy machinery needed for Stalin’s industrialization drive. Khrushchev argued against the Soviet Union’s reliance on Ukraine for a large part of its agricultural production and stressed the need to develop more effective farming elsewhere in the country.

During the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev served at the Ukrainian front, but once the war ended, he took up his old job again—running the Communist Party in Kiev. In 1956, having assumed control of the Soviet Union, he denounced Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality in his now-famous “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress and began de-Stalinization and the reform policy known as the Thaw. Ukraine celebrated the resulting lessening of repression more than any other Soviet republic.

After Khrushchev’s removal from power and Brezhnev’s ascension, the former fell into disfavor in Moscow, but his name has largely enjoyed respect in Ukraine. Of course, some Ukrainians consider him, despite his revelation of Stalin’s crimes, no less a Soviet oppressor than any other Communist Party leader. But more often than not, people’s faces light up at his mention; they remember that, although he was ethnically Russian, at home he often said that “in his soul” he “wanted to be Ukrainian”; he respected Ukrainians for their work ethic and independent spirit. They recount glowingly how Khrushchev tried to improve life in their republic and at times even confronted Stalin about his neglect and abuse of Ukraine’s agricultural potential. With its relatively warm climate and fertile land, Ukraine had historically been known as the “bread basket” of the empire, Russian or Soviet, but Khrushchev argued it should not be the only one.

When in 1954 he transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, he hoped only to improve the peninsula’s governance. At the time, Ukrainians hardly noticed. (Even Khrushchev’s older daughter Rada, who traveled with her father surveying the area before the transfer, remembered, after the Crimea annexation in 2014, that “At the time they didn’t even want Crimea. Apart from historians, few Ukrainians cared about it as the possible original baptismal place of Kievan Rus or considered it to be theirs.”) Over decades, however, the peninsula did come to represent Ukraine’s competitive spirit with the Russians.

Although for the past fifteen years Kiev has been undergoing something of a Westernizing renovation with loans from the European Union to help, at least for the past few years, the sum effect is still less café cappuccino than café vareniki (Ukrainian dumplings). Andreyevsky Descent, where Bulgakov once lived, has slowly become a bustling market street on which one can buy locally sewn vyshivanki (in sizes promoted as large enough to fit Lenin statues), artisanal pottery, and traditional Ukrainian dresses and blouses superior in quality to if not always as fashionable as, say, Ivanka Trump’s made-in-China brand. A large banner stretched across the road proudly announced, in Ukrainian, that Andriivskii uzviz—tse Monmartr abo Grenich Villidzh Kiiva (Andreyevsky Descent neighborhood is the Montmartre or the Greenwich Village of Kiev).

Down in the city center, we would later walk around Kiev Passage, a pedestrian street off Khreshchatyk. There, high-end designer boutiques—Max Mara, Gucci, Louis Vuitton—give off an air of European chic.

Kiev may be the capital of a country aspiring to join the West, but much about it retains whiffs of the provincial Soviet midsize town. The pedestrian underpasses running beneath major thoroughfares in the center, like the labyrinthine tunnels leading to the subway entrances, recall scenes from the Moscow underground of the 1990s—kiosks of various shapes and sizes sell everything from milk to pastries, stockings and local Ukrainian handicrafts. Patriotically emblazoned in the yellow-and-blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, T-shirts and even kitchen towels also feature portraits of poet Taras Shevchenko, the nineteenth-century anti-Russian nationalist.

We chose to stay in the Hotel Dnipro, which once welcomed Communist Party apparatchiks from Moscow; a convivial and convenient temporary abode, it nevertheless remains unmistakably Soviet. The downstairs bar asks patrons to purchase cocktail nuts from a nearby store; the top floor breakfast room features a black grand piano on which, at seven o’clock in the morning, a musician played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C-Minor; the elegant waiters served food that surely came straight from tin cans. Outside, though, an almost Swiss-style orderliness prevailed and public transport ran on time.

The next day, in Budinok Kavi (House of Coffee), an upscale café tucked away on a placid pedestrian street off Independence Square, we met Bohdan Yaremenko, a Ukrainian diplomat in his mid-forties who had served as his country’s general consul in Edinburgh and as its ambassador in Istanbul. These days, he directs a foreign-policy think tank, the Maidan of Foreign Affairs. Bushy-haired, with a bon vivant’s corpulence and an easy smile, Yaremenko told us that he sees the vestiges of a bygone decade as evidence not of failed modernization, but as characteristics typical of a small country, one whose capital was not striving after the imperial grandeur of Moscow. The recent noise about whose Vladimir statue—that of Kiev or the Russian capital—is bigger and better stirs nationalist pride here.

“But Ukraine,” he went on to say, “should concentrate on genuine European integration, a desire for which was at the center of the Euromaidan revolution, rather than make remodeling Kiev the goal of reforms. The symbolism of Europe is attractive, but the country needs to do a lot before it gets there. Ukraine’s power system needs to change and function not so Kiev can look like Europe but because a bankrupt and corrupt society cannot form a part of Europe.”

In Yaremenko’s view, an inversion of goals has allowed Ukraine’s post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko to consolidate power in preparation for the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2019. Yaremenko worried that although Poroshenko, the wealthy owner of the Roshen candy company, is the opposite of Putin, a former KGB colonel, he has augmented the role of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Service. Some reforms—those concerning the judicial system, the pension fund, and the state bureaucracy—are slowly making their way through the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s often tumultuous parliament. Others, including those dealing with public health care and land reform, have stalled. Moreover, the government’s unwillingness to tackle corruption—the principal obstacle to the country’s westernization—has proved a major matter of contention between Kiev and the European Union.

“I am very unpopular in some quarters,” Yaremenko declared, “because I don’t cheer for the European Union granting us visa-free travel and approving the full implementation of the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.” (Yanukovych’s refusal to sign this accord sparked the Euromaidan revolt.) “The government here,” he added, “thinks that the West won’t abandon Ukraine, because of the wounds Russia has inflicted on us. But before elections it will be even slower in pushing through austerity measures to improve the economy and curb corruption.”

Yet Yaremenko saw reasons for cautious optimism.

“Ukraine should be able to do better,” he said. “Even though the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had more Lenin statues than Russia, Ukrainians do not believe state power is sacred, as they do in Russia. There the Kremlin is the center of the state that people serve. Here those on top of the political ladder are just the hired hands of the people.”

This difference in how leaders are perceived, in his view, accounted for the relative restiveness of Ukrainians. “One of the reasons for our revolutions, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan revolt of 2013,” Yaremenko explained to us, “is that the authorities here upset people by thinking they can do anything with no accountability. Yanukovych managed to make a lot of people angry. Here the rich are upset about things that Russian oligarchs tend to tolerate. Yanukovych, like Putin, thought that he was the only one with any rights.”

Yaremenko added that during the Euromaidan even his usually apolitical mother was angry at how the authorities dealt with protesters and spent nights preparing Molotov cocktails for them in her apartment in central Kiev. These days, however, such revolutionary fervor has given way to apathy. Just as what happened following the Orange Revolution, politicians at the top are now squabbling with one another, leaving the people’s priorities unattended.

Two opportunities for fundamental change in ten years wasted! It all sounded hopeless. We asked Yaremenko what could be done.

“Snap elections,” he replied. “Change at the top could come though frequent snap elections. In one election, you can’t replace all the politicians from the past,” but frequent elections, called without warning, would prevent the “ossification of power” and keep everyone on their toes.

What did he think of Ukraine’s giant neighbor to the north?

“Relations with Russia will only get worse,” he said matter-of-factly. “But more than just diplomacy will come to an end. The sense of Slavic brotherhood we once shared will disappear, too. Before, of course, Moscow called the shots, and Ukraine grudgingly accepted it, and still considered the Russians ‘brothers.’” No longer.

If Ukraine ever did join the European Union, Yaremenko insisted, it would present no threat to Russia, even if it became a member of NATO. (A Kremlin strategist might beg to differ. After all, having elements of the world’s most powerful military alliance just five hundred miles from Moscow would change Russia’s strategic situation in an unprecedented way.)

The real threat, said Yaremenko, came from the example an enlightened, democratic government in Kiev would set for Russians living under the Putin model of a semiauthoritarian corporate state unfriendly to the West. For the occupants of the Kremlin, it is a matter of life and death that their former communist neighbor never present Russian citizens with an alternate, more attractive model of governance. If Ukraine successfully manages to join Europe, it may well end up sounding the death knell for Putinism—the political mythology that casts Putin as successor to all the imperial autocrats peopling Russian history, including Nicholas I and Stalin.

“Moscow,” Yaremenko added, “has more to lose with its Byzantine fantasy. If Russia doesn’t develop, it will lead to China, the new global superpower, swallowing whole the Far East and Siberia. A vastly weakened Russia will then also lose the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region to their growing Muslim populations. Kaliningrad may again become German.”

Fresh from Kaliningrad, we smiled. “There is no evidence of that.”

“Either way,” Yaremenko continued, “if Russia loses some of its eleven time zones, it would then no longer be able to position itself as the ‘Great Russia.’ The remaining lands might have no choice but to attach themselves to Ukraine. Moscow might return to its historical origins as a remote northern principality, shorn of territories to its south or east of the Urals.”

Ukraine supplanting Russia, Kiev replacing Moscow as the nexus of power for the East Slavic peoples? This, however improbable, was something to think about.

These days, Kiev functions as a hub of exile for some in the Russian opposition, who carry on their business in Ukraine without the surveillance and constraints that would bedevil them at home. One such opposition member is forty-two-year-old Ilya Ponomarev, formerly a State Duma deputy of the social democratic party Spravedlivaya Rossiya (Just Russia) and a member of the Left Front. The son of longtime Communist Party functionaries, Ponomarev hails from the Novosibirsk Oblast—arguably the most advanced part of Siberia, owing to the world-class scientific community it has in Akademgorodok, a town specifically dedicated to advanced research. A charismatic communist with a spotty reputation in opposition circles, he alone among the State Duma’s 450 deputies voted against the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. After this, he sojourned in the United States for two years, and then moved to Kiev, where he was enjoying a lifestyle free of the responsibilities with which his former position in the Duma saddled him.

We met Ponomarev in a café by our hotel, taking seats before picture windows offering unobstructed views of the ever-busy Khreshchatyk. His neat beard and red cardigan added maturity to his youthful looks. As a Duma deputy in Moscow he earned the nickname “butcher of the internet” among his critics—in 2012 Ponomarev controversially voted for strengthening state control of the web to prevent the dissemination of “content that may harm children’s development.”[20] That law gave way to the following year’s ban on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations around minors”—colloquially known as the “gay propaganda” law,[21] the Kremlin’s socially conservative project meant to endear it to the Orthodox Church. This time Ponomarev abstained from the vote, but the damage to his reputation had been done.

However, in Kiev Ponomarev insisted that with access to information comes democracy. Despite being, as it were, a declared enemy of the Russia-wide popular annexation of Crimea, he was at ease. He objected, he said, because the annexation would bring animosity, even bloodshed (he was right, as the war in eastern Ukraine had demonstrated), and eventually dislodge Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence (as indeed it has). It would give the West a reason to ceaselessly criticize Russia and, moreover, justify plans to expand NATO further eastward.

“Before Crimea,” Ponomarev stated grandly, “our country was an example to the world. Now Russia acts just like the United States—aggressively interfering in other countries’ affairs when they disagree with those countries’ politics.” In his criticism of the United States he differed dramatically from views espoused by most in Ukraine and the majority of the Russian opposition.

In philosophical terms, he argued that Russia’s “problem is one of an ideological construct—an undiversified, large-scale vertical economy.” Unlike Yaremenko, however, Ponomarev told us that geography is not Russia’s handicap.

“Isn’t Russia too big to function coherently?” we asked.

“Obviously,” Ponomarev replied with a laugh, “Russia has two afflictions: plokhiye dorogi i duraki”—bad roads and morons. He was reprising an apocryphal saying (often attributed to Nicholas I and Russian writer Nikolai Gogol) that is routinely used to lament Russia’s poor highways and infamously capricious bureaucrats. “But even though its regions are not well connected to each other, it does not change the reality that a country can be both big and prosperous.”

He went on. Russia’s borders would disintegrate not because of the country’s size, but because the vertikal vlasti, or “power vertical”—the highly centralized system of government Putin managed to institute—robs the country of its potential. Disintegration would originate not with those opposing Putin, but from Putin himself, because he does not allow politicians to develop.

“If you have the right technological ‘know-how,’ you can make Russia work,” he stated, tossing in a bit of English. “Surely, it’s tough to govern a country with territory stretched out all the way to Kamchatka, but if the setup is horizontal with local governments working to full capacity, then the problem of communication between the regions could be resolved.” Something similar to America’s electoral college might help people in sparsely populated outlying regions—and in Russia, these are many—defend their rights against the center.

We told Ponomarev that, for our book, we were looking at Russia through the prism of its geography. “Does Russia need to give up its empire to develop further?” we asked. In such a gigantic, sprawling country effective local governance has rarely been possible, whether under the Soviets or post-1991, because of the strongly centralized nature of the state.

According to Ponomarev, this centralization developed from the way Russia took shape, with cities, especially in Siberia, beginning as military and trade outposts of the empire. Then under Stalin they became industrial centers, with forced labor through the detention camps system, the Gulag, making up for a shortage of manpower. Russia’s hinterland regions are sparsely populated and ill served by transport; picture a spiderweb, with almost all threads leading to the Kremlin.

Even today one gets a sense of this while traveling around the land. From the Ural Mountains to the Far East, relatively few population centers spot the vast, often unvarying landscape of forest, rivers, and steppe. After the Soviet collapse, Russia’s regions acquired a good deal of autonomy, taking it at President Boris Yeltsin’s urging, but Putin has managed to reimpose a degree of centralization. He divided the country into eight federal districts and eighty-five smaller federal subjects, with the local authorities once again primarily serving the center and loyalty to Putin a necessary attribute for regional leaders.

To help put an end to this centralization, Ponomarev suggested designating cities in remoter areas as regional capitals. For example, West Siberia’s de facto capital could be switched from Tyumen to the much smaller city of Khanty-Mansiysk. Both are oil boomtowns, but the undersize Khanty-Mansiysk needs more state support to draw visitors and capital. That’s one way, said Ponomarev, for a big country such as Russia to democratize its expanses and make people feel at home there, with a stake in their development. Better roads and communications would follow.

Well, yes. But Ponomarev’s ideas sounded somewhat Leninist; his communist predecessors have already tried them. It was Bolshevik policy to populate as much Soviet territory as possible. Just as in a classless “dictatorship of proletariat,” no one group of people would enjoy privileges others did not, and in theory all regions of the country would be equal. By this logic, living in Tyumen should be as wonderful as living in Moscow. But the problem with such grand theoretical visions is that they rarely survive real-life implementation.

“And what about Crimea?” we asked. “Should it be Russian?”

“Yes,” he replied, “even though it was annexed illegally.”

So, even the one State Duma deputy who voted against Crimea’s becoming a part of Russia believes it should be Russian!

Before we left Kiev, we visited the city’s main memorial to the Holodomor. For decades, the Great Famine, in part a result of the forced collectivization of agriculture, was a state secret; estimates of its death toll—from starvation, mostly, but also from cannibalism—have ranged from three million to ten million lives. What’s known is that in 1932, at the start of the Holodomor, Ukraine’s population stood at about 33 million, but just before Khrushchev took over in 1938, the number of inhabitants had dropped to 28 million—a decrease of more than 10 percent—a literal “decimation.”[22] Of course, Stalin’s infamous purges also contributed to the fatalities.

Ukraine’s Rada in 2006 passed a law recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In 2008 Kiev raised a commanding monument in Pechersk Hills, near the eleventh-century Monastery of the Pechersk Caves. The whole Holodomor complex—its park, its subterranean Hall of Memory—stands just a few yards away from another memorial—to World War II—that is filled with fresh flowers and people paying their respects. Contrary to post-Crimea nationalistic Russian assertions that the Euromaidan protests were intended to bring German rule to Ukraine and defy the victory won in the Great Patriotic War, Ukrainians do appreciate what the country, among other countries, suffered in World War II. They just no longer want to be Russian vassals.

We stood in front of the Holodomor memorial, built to resemble a church steeple with, at the top, an eternal flame fashioned out of bronze, and listened to its somber, solitary chimes—one chime for each life lost. Near its base, golden storks—rustic symbols of prosperity (Khrushchev used to say that a stork nest on your home’s roof meant good luck) spread their wings atop cast-iron grids representing prison bars. This magnificent architectural monument to the famine is perhaps the truest indicator of Ukraine’s desire to define its past and control its future—a tall order, even according to Bohdan Yaremenko, but the most laudable one imaginable.