In Putin's Footsteps

4 ULYANOVSK (SIMBIRSK) AND SAMARA (KUIBYSHEV) ^{CITIES OF THE MIGHTY VOLGA TIME ZONE: MSK+1; UTC+4}

In Ulyanovsk, a medium-size town of 600,000 inhabitants on the Volga River about five hundred miles southeast of Moscow, one senses, in a primal way, Russia’s might. As Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities, the Volga is the mother—matushka—of all Russian rivers. More than two thousand miles in length, the Volga is the grandest river in Europe—it has come to be dubbed Bogynya (the Goddess). It is celebrated in Russian literature and art both for its unfathomable might and the role it has played throughout the country’s history.

From Ilya Repin’s famous nineteenth-century painting Barge Haulers on the Volga (depicting exhausted, disheveled laborers on shore dragging a floating barge by means of ropes tied round their torsos) to Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm (which foretold the Russian Revolution of 1917), the river has inspired the imagination and held a preeminent position in local lore. Wide and mostly tranquil, the Volga turns dangerous during floods and changes in the seasons. It is also a lifeline—a kormilitsa, or one who feeds—connecting the towns and villages along its shores, in part because of Russia’s notoriously bad roads.

Residents of Ulyanovsk maintain that their position just downstream from the confluence of the Volga and the much-smaller Sviyaga tributary subjects their city to powerful magnetic currents that mysteriously influence the area’s climate, population, and culture. The Volga, not surprisingly, figures prominently in how the people of Ulyanovsk see themselves: their city is, as they would say, the “Aristocrat on the Volga,” because of the many literary and noble families in the Russian empire hailing from here. It is perhaps no coincidence that the center of town, which sits on a hill overlooking the river, is called, with an allusion to royalty, Venets (crown). Therein lies a contradiction of a distinctly Russian sort. The city’s original name, Simbirsk, was changed to Ulyanovsk in 1924, to commemorate Vladimir Lenin after his death. Lenin, whose original last name was Ulyanov, was born here in 1870. His family was one of minor aristocrats but not royal. And the regime he led to power ultimately rested on regicide.

Long before Lenin there were other greats from Ulyanovsk. Simbirsk was the birthplace of Nikolai Karamzin, who became known as the father of modern Russian letters under Catherine the Great and Alexander I. The town also boasts of Ivan Goncharov, the renowned nineteenth-century novelist. A major nineteenth-century poet, Nikolai Yazykov, came from here. And so did the Slavophile writer Sergei Glinka, a relative of the famed Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, author of “The Patriotic Song”—the Russian anthem of the 1990s. The Tolstoy and the Vyazemsky families have roots in the region as well.

In the late 1700s Catherine the Great, understanding the town to be a crucial trade and military outpost on the Volga protecting European Russia from invasion from the east, designated it capital of the Ulyanovsk Guberniya (a political entity akin to a state or province) and handed out vast plots of land in the region to loyal aristocrats. The two most infamous peasant rebellions of the 1600s and 1700s (led by Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, respectively) played out in and around Simbirsk. In 1833 Alexander Pushkin visited, searching for stories about Pugachev, who had aspired to replace Catherine the Great as ruler on the Russian throne.

Then came the Decembrists—the Russian nobles who formed a movement against the czar’s absolute monarchy. Their 1825 uprising drew in many officers and was brutally suppressed—some were hanged; others exiled internally, dispatched to the Simbirsk pochtovyi i katorzhnyi trakt (postal and penal servitude throughway), to trudge for months in rain and snow to their Siberian abodes of involuntary residence.

As we strolled down Ulyanovsk’s Goncharov Street on a sunny May morning, Sergei Petrov, an elderly historian, professor, and local celebrity, led us, root and branch, through the family trees of locally born Russian and Soviet luminaries, speaking rapidly and passionately. With his impish eyes, circle beard, and silvery aristocratic coif, Petrov, a voluble raconteur enamored of meandering discourse, seemed to have stepped from the pages of a nineteenth-century Russian play. His gray checkered suit looked too dressy for our morning tour and ill befitted his blue-red cardigan or his tattered brown loafers.

As we progressed down the street, passing by pastel-hued shops with fin-de-siècle facades, every fifteen minutes or so somebody recognized him and stopped us for a chat. Each time we expected Petrov to run out of words, or stories, or even breath itself, he surprised us by producing more facts about the town he so loved. Peasant rebel leader Stepan Razin, he said, was wounded during his assault on Simbirsk; he survived only to be captured and drawn and quartered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. The Volga Germans had always held leadership positions in town, as the drab, redbrick Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary he pointed out would attest. With these Germans often in charge, Simbirsk prospered, which augured ill for it after the 1917 Revolution. “One out of nine people here belonged to the gentry. Imagine what this meant when the Bolsheviks took over!” He paused. “People were burning their title deeds, they were so afraid! Most of them just fled to other parts of Russia.”

We stopped in front of the Simbirsk Classical Lyceum Number 1, where Lenin had studied and where, near the entrance, a plaque showed, in stark Social-Realist style, the iconic revolutionary with Alexander Kerensky, who was also born here and would head the provisional Russian government after the czar had abdicated in 1917.

“Lenin let him live,” Petrov told us. “I believe they may have shared Christmas goose together when they were growing up. Did he do so because both were born here, in this special town on the Volga? Could Lenin have showed him some compassion for this? I can’t prove it, but I think so. Now you see them together on the same plaque! You will find nothing like this anywhere else in Russia!” Kerensky eventually immigrated to the United States, where he died in 1970.

Petrov conjured up a lost world of landowners, high culture, and even cosmopolitanism—imagine, German gentry dwelling on the banks of Russia’s mighty Volga! That almost no trace remains of any of this mattered not to Petrov, who could verbally resuscitate the lost souls of the world the Bolsheviks destroyed—a world, we sensed, he would have been happy to inhabit.

The next day, alone, we visited the Lenin dom musei (house museum), located on—what else—Lenin Street, in central Ulyanovsk. A modest, two-story graying wooden house with a few bedrooms, a dining room, and a study was the greatest attraction for the seventy-five years of Soviet rule. And it was not just Lenin—other members of his family were revered, too, as studious and serious, the pinnacles of communist morality. His father, Ilya, was an inspector of public schools; his older brother, Alexander, a revolutionary radical, was executed in 1887 for trying to assassinate Czar Alexander III; his younger brother, Dmitry, was a doctor and a writer; his sister, Maria, another revolutionary who studied at the Sorbonne. Millions of people from all over the world had come here to admire Lenin’s childhood home and see the environs in which he came of age.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of communism as a promising ideology, interest in Lenin almost disappeared. The authorities in Ulyanovsk, nevertheless, converted his neighborhood into a historical sanctuary, the Birthplace of Lenin, which encompasses all the landmarks connected to his era. At first glance, this might seem strange. Even the November 2017 centenary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia barely featured Lenin. Instead, festivities focused on centuries of heroism in Russian history and, of course, on the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Why? We can only surmise that Putin, approaching two decades in power, is concerned with preserving it, and therefore is not particularly fond of revolutions. Yet the Lenin sanctuary found unexpected saviors in hordes of Chinese visitors. It now forms part of their “Red Tour”—visits to the landmarks of the revolution’s history. Lenin did not direct the revolution from here, of course, but his sanctuary gives a good idea of what the world he destroyed looked like.

But, as we discovered, even the guides at the Lenin house museum no longer talk much about communism and revolution. They showed us the modest family bedrooms, a dining room that doubled as a game parlor and study, Ilya’s dark office with the dauntingly progressive books on the shelves, including Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s nineteenth-century guide to socialism, What Is to Be Done? As had Petrov, they spoke at length about the intellects the Volga region had produced, among whom just happened to be the intellects of the Ulyanov family. Their home impressed us with its unremarkable, bourgeois interior—a reminder that the man who led the revolution of proletarians and peasants was, by birth and upbringing, neither.

To learn more about Lenin in the town of his birth, we toured the Lenin museum on the eponymous square in the central Venets district. Typically Soviet in its mammoth dimensions, built of pink-red Soviet-era marble, the museum exudes grandeur of a sort and depicts Lenin in historical perspective that began with the role of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. This perspective now emphasizes imperial coherency—centuries of Russian history peopled by firm, formidable leaders from the bygone times of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great (who gave Simbirsk its first coat of arms consisting of a crowned Greek column) to our day, the Putin era. From the double-headed eagle to the hammer and sickle to the double-headed eagle again. Coherency—and elision of all the wild and destructive detours Russia has made to end up where it is today.

The museum’s current account of Russia’s history almost grants Stalin a role as prominent as that of Lenin—something impossible from the time of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the beginning of the Putin era. Today it highlights Stalin’s program of crash industrialization (carried out in the 1930s) and the Soviet victory, under his command, in the Great Patriotic War. Velikiy vozhd i uchitel (the great leader and teacher) announces, without a hint of irony, the caption under one Stalin portrait. This is just what cult-of-personality propaganda called the dictator during his almost thirty years in power. The murderous Holodomor accompanying the industrialization, the devastating political purges, and the Gulag camps merit only brief mentions and are explained away by raisons d’état: to make a country great one needs to take tough—even brutal—measures.

Examining the museum’s exhibits, for the first time we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia’s recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, almost devoid of political value now, who has become more a monument than a personage. He serves as a symbol of continuity, if no longer of communism. He represents that important, almost century-long time when Russia was a great country, even a superpower, that made the world tremble. Stalin comes second, after being partly rehabilitated in the mid-2000s when Moscow decided to emblazon his name in gold letters on the ceiling of the Kurskaya subway station and school textbooks began lauding him as a “wise manager of his people” who, instituting the forced-labor camps, acted out of necessity to compensate for a shortage of manpower. In fact, in the last decade Stalin has become more “alive” than Lenin, who was also once lauded as zhiveye vsekh zhivykh (more alive than all the living). The continuous celebrations of the Soviet victory in the war against Nazi Germany render him almost as contemporary as Putin himself.

Leonid Brezhnev is the third leader on record and serves as a convenient bridge between the Stalin and Putin eras. (Putin is the fourth, of course.) Brezhnev can even boast of his own anniversary wing, opened to the public in 2016 to commemorate his 110th birthday. This section displays official gifts, such as his portraits made from grain in Belorussia or knit on a carpet by weavers in Tajikistan. Originally, the museum managers had intended that the exhibit be temporary, but visitors liked it, the young docent explained, so it has become permanent.

And what of the “reformers”—Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it. The museum had dedicated a small corner—“Reformers and Their Reforms”—but addressed them nowhere else.

“What about Khrushchev?” we asked a guide.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“There was no administrative order issued to set up such an exhibit,” she replied.

“Did you ask why?” we pressed.

She walked away, unwilling to answer uncomfortable questions. The reformers have largely disappeared from history in Russia because they don’t accord with the black-and-white view of Russian grandeur, as personified in firm leaders who must always appear unrepentant, despite the scale of the suffering they oversaw or caused. These three leaders showed humane concern for their citizens, which set them apart. As imperfect as their reforms were, they tried to democratize the imperial monolith. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, thus making the Russians doubt their communist czar. As part of his Perestroika, Gorbachev introduced glasnost—a wider dissemination of information, which allowed people to ask questions and hold the state to account. Yeltsin proclaimed Russia a democratic state that should join the world instead of fighting it. Nonetheless, they were products of the same authoritarian culture as the authoritarians preceding, and also following, them, and therefore they never fully succeeded.

Once retired, Khrushchev often reflected on the lack of Russia’s political progress forward. “Russia is like a tub full of dough,” he used to say. “You push your hand through and you reach the bottom. You pull out your hand, and then right in front of your eyes, it is, again, a tub full of dough, without a trace of your hand. Perhaps Russia does need a strong hand to make change happen.” A depressing yet apparently accurate observation.

Some are still striving after change these days. During our visit, Alexey Navalny, at the time a potential rival to Putin in the upcoming presidential elections, arrived to open up his campaign headquarters. In making his quixotic yet laudable bid for the anti-Putin vote, Navalny managed to gather supporters all across Russia, organizing at least fifty regional teams—unprecedented opposition outreach in a country where most political activity of note takes place in Moscow. Ulyanovsk was one of those towns he found most receptive—perhaps because of their affinity with another young radical, born in this little town, railing against the autocratic regime a century ago. It did not matter: the Putin electoral authorities eventually refused to let him register his candidacy on account of alleged crimes of embezzlement and a criminal conviction that many believe was fabricated to keep him out of politics.

Ulyanovsk benefited greatly from the bicentennial celebration, in 2012, of the birth of the novelist Ivan Goncharov, one of Russia’s most famous domestically, though perhaps lesser known abroad. The Goncharov home museum, once the family estate, aims to document how Goncharov helped characterize Russian identity through his 1859 masterpiece, Oblomov. Its eponymous protagonist—kind-hearted, perpetually lazy, languidly aristocratic—remains one of the most endearing and enduring literary embodiments of the Russian predicament so often typified by statements Russians make about the “Russian soul,” namely, “we may be backwards but we”—unlike other peoples, the implication is—“have soul.”

Goncharov Square, next to the museum, features not only a Soviet-era bronze statue of the writer pensively taking notes, but also more recent additions: Oblomov’s “philosophical sofa” (commissioned, a plaque incongruously informs us, by the local firm Commercial Real-estate) and a pair of bronze slippers. (Oblomov rarely changed out of his robe or ventured outside the house.) Both seem to symbolize an often all-encompassing stagnation ever present in Russia and the deep fear of change that underlies it. A quote from the novel encompasses this kind of thinking: “When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next.”[26] The home’s builders, however, seemed to have feared little in designing luxury: the three-story corner brick building, situated a few blocks west of the Volga, stands elegantly trimmed in white granite, with its own clock tower.

Few aspects of life in Russia are divorced from politics: in the museum’s entrance hall hangs a photograph, taken in 2012, of Putin and Sergei Morozov, the governor of Ulyanovsk Oblast, as the former grants the city and the museum an order to celebrate Goncharov’s bicentennial. There is also a certificate announcing Goncharov’s posthumously awarded title, Honorary Citizen of Ulyanovsk. As if the literary titan, a citizen of Russia almost a century and a half before either leader was born, would have cared! The writer lived and died in Simbirsk quite well without this honorific, but Russians cannot step away from the Soviet tradition of showering Russian figures, both historical and contemporary, with ceremonial medals and awards.

Goncharov’s museum showcases what is both marvelous and malevolent about Putin’s country. There are wonderful exhibits—Goncharov’s wainscoted study, pages from a draft of Oblomov, and copies of the novel’s first editions, in addition to the writer’s letters to Mikhail Volkonsky, son of the famous Decembrist revolutionary Sergei—that elevate your spirit and help you appreciate the richness of Russia’s history and arts, the true manifestations of the Russian soul, as it were.

Yet the grumpy museum attendants suspiciously followed us everywhere and barked at us for attempting to explore on our own, without their vigilant supervision. Instead of answering our polite questions about what we were looking at, they gruffly instructed us to read the information sheets beneath the exhibits and visit the rooms in strictly clockwise order. “Nelzya! Vam tuda!” (It is forbidden to go this way. You have to go that way!)

Never mind. Overwhelmed by the richness of Goncharov’s life and work and by Ulyanovsk’s literary heritage—the town was also a place where Pushkin and the Decembrists resided—we wanted to buy Goncharov’s books, and Oblomov most of all. So we approached a table strewn with souvenirs at the exit.

There was no one there. The guard barked at us, confirming the obvious: “The ticket lady has stepped away.” When she would return he would not or could not say.

If we learned anything visiting museums across Russia, it was that those who sell tickets or souvenirs are often absent from their stations when you need them most. Sometimes a lack of visitors might be to blame, but there is a deeper problem: even after two and a half decades of capitalism, customer service, at least outside Moscow, is not a priority. The Goncharov museum might stand as a monument to Russian high culture, but the recently renovated restrooms lacked toilet paper, paper towels, and soap, even as its clean white tile walls bore illustrations of blue swans and pink flamingos. After examining for hours the stately home of one of Russia’s literary giants, one wonders why one’s tour must end on a note of exasperation and personal humiliation. Perhaps, however, this humiliation has a point in a country where people are subordinate to the state. If the authorities don’t believe citizens deserve rights, citizens, accordingly, don’t believe they have a right to civilized comfort. The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was notorious for its deficit in toilet paper, and citizens resorted to using yesterday’s Pravda newspaper pages instead. Incidentally, in Stalin’s times this was a grave crime, which made the use of the restrooms a truly trying experience.

Wet hands or not, we were nevertheless determined to buy a Goncharov souvenir. The souvenir stand lady returned. We asked for a copy of Oblomov.

“We don’t have one.”

“Why not?”

“They are not available.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “The municipal authorities have not issued the relevant order for us to sell such books here.”

Selling postcards of Ulyanovsk was one thing, but the classics of Russian literature, presumably for lack of demand, quite another. The saleslady sent us to the bookstore nearby. We followed a muddied path to a sign reading BUKINIST (secondhand bookseller). We entered the dilapidated, disorderly shop, with tomes old and new strewn on a table, stacked on the floor, and piled on the stools—a bibliophile’s dream, one would think. But before long, the disheveled shopkeeper was apologizing to us. No, he had no copies of Goncharov’s works, either.

“Try the basement,” he suggested. “They have school textbooks down there.”

Downstairs we found no Goncharov. However, pasted to the door under a sign reading ADMINISTRATION was a portrait of Putin, cut out of a calendar. Along the wall stood stacks of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. We finally asked the female shopkeeper how we were to obtain a copy of Oblomov.

“Try online,” she said, barely lifting her gaze from a computer screen.

The next morning was cold and gray, unusually so for a May day. We ventured down to the Volga embankment to take a tour along the river. The port was open, yet empty, with no boats scheduled to run. Vendors still peddled (to whom, we wondered) the souvenirs of the area—tiny magnetic portraits of Lenin, Karamzin, Goncharov, and even Stalin (even though the dictator had no relation to Ulyanovsk), and, of course, Putin.

We approached the ticket office inside the dock building.

“Two tickets for a boat tour, please,” we asked the woman behind the window. She shook her head: there were no boats running.

“The weather is bad,” she added, in a friendly but basically indifferent way, “but if you want to rent the whole vessel for six thousand rubles [about $100] for yourselves, you can.” We decided to do just that and were quickly ushered aboard an old cruise ship meant to take as many as 120 passengers.

Our cruise ship was a remnant from the Soviet days. The remaining craft are half a century old, but many have been modernized and refurbished. In 2011 one sank near Kazan, another Volga town, and more than sixty people lost their lives. The ships have been better managed since then. We hoped ours would be.

Under leaden skies, chilled by a wind ruffling the pewter-hued surface of the water, we pulled out from the port, passing a gloomy junkyard—or, rather, docked passenger ships, including the former giants of Soviet waterways, ones with hydrofoils that lifted the hulls out of the water, allowing them to reach speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour. Now they sit as rusting behemoths. It was painful to remember that during Soviet times and even as late as the 1990s, these winged craft circulated among all the Volga’s major towns, including Kazan, Samara, and Nizhny Novgorod.

Denizens of the Volga, of course, have always used the river to get about. But in 1956 the river became Khrushchev’s special project—as anticapitalist as he was, he was also searching for ways to improve people’s lives after the harsh Stalin decades. At the time over three thousand hydrofoil vessels coursed the country’s major waterways at high speed, ferrying people quickly and easily to their destinations. Inspired by the Soviet state space program, the craft were emblazoned with names like “Rocket” or “Meteor.” But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Yeltsin government abandoned industrial projects and public services in favor of privatization. That killed the shipyards producing the hydrofoils and left the speedy craft known as meteors to rust away in their nautical graveyards.

A mechanic on our boat told us that he used to pilot the meteors from the Khrushchev era, but then, he said, they were declared cost-ineffective, so he was compelled to switch to excursion craft running at more leisurely speeds. His eyes dreamy with nostalgia, he listed at least seven routes those meteors used to run in the region.

“Now people smarter than us own them,” he declared sarcastically. “Our speedboats are being used as far away as Vietnam and China. You can find some still gliding down rivers in Canada, Greece, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Thailand, and Turkey.” He paused. “I rue for what we had and stupidly destroyed.”

The mighty matushka Volga, spreading away on both sides of us, should have been breathtaking, yet what struck us was the shambolic, neglected shoreline that has only recently begun reviving. Still, for an hour and a half we had a large, majestic Volga liner on the river all to ourselves—something impossible to imagine anywhere else, at any other time, and at so little cost.

The sun finally appeared, right after we sailed under Ulyanovsk’s recently built President Bridge—one of the longest in Europe, the mechanic told us. It is one of the two bridges in Ulyanovsk, and with a typically Russian story behind it. By 2009, work on the structure had been stalled for over two decades, but then Putin came to town and voiced his displeasure at the delay. In quick order, the bridge was completed. Another, older bridge we passed beneath bore the name Imperial. It dated from the 1910s, when Emperor Nicholas II visited Ulyanovsk.

In Russia, where the welfare of the state takes precedence over the needs of the citizenry, public works are often enacted to meet the exigencies of the bureaucracy rather than to help people live more comfortably. The President Bridge, indeed, has been a necessary improvement, lessening traffic bottlenecks in the region, but functioning waterways would be an even bigger improvement. A demand for them has yet to reach Putin’s desk, it seems.

Even though we were the only two passengers aboard, the barwoman in her middle years, Lyudmila, stood at her post ready to serve us and to talk. Fixing the scarf covering her henna-red hair, she offered us peanuts, instant coffee, and bottled water. She marveled at our foreignness. She had seen foreigners before but never really talked to one. She had never ventured beyond the Volga region but did enjoy traveling along the river. She told us that while working as a janitor at the train station, she liked to watch the trains arriving from or heading out to distant, enigmatic destinations—Moscow, Minsk, Saint Petersburg. But “the Volga pulls me in, and I had to come here,” she said, displaying a mouth filled with gold teeth. In the old days, such teeth were a manifestation of an achieved or an aspired-to status, mostly found in men and mostly those men coming from the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. She had a son, who was about to graduate from the Suvorovsky Military Academy in Moscow. She worried that he would be sent to war in Ukraine or, even worse, in Syria. “The curse of war,” she sighed.

In Russia where wars—fighting, winning, or preparing for them—are a big part of the Kremlin propaganda of the country’s superior heroism, Lyudmila’s sad comment showed how the horrors of war scar society despite the upbeat patriotic message.

Lyudmila was upset about how life along the river had changed. She could no longer walk around the port, she said. “It’s all very strict now, all fenced up. The area became private property after a rich guy bought it to make money, but it turned out to be too much trouble for him to do anything.”

After the Soviet Union collapsed, markets became a priority, and the state abandoned publicly funded river transportation in almost all Volga towns and elsewhere in Russia. Businessmen bought ports and the crafts berthed in them, but all this required investment, and the new owners, unsure of quick returns, proved unwilling to provide any.

We checked with Lyudmila if there was a way to get by water from Ulyanovsk to Samara, our next destination. A boat trip theoretically would last only a couple of hours, while by car it would take at least five on a crowded, potholed two-lane road, stretches of which were under construction.

“No such luck,” Lyudmila said. “You have to travel by taxi or bus.” She went on to recount to us how she used to run to the piers to buy the world-famous black caviar from Volga sturgeon. “Now there are few boats and no black caviar.”

As the boat trip drew to a close, we tried to tip our chatty bar host, but she refused to take any money. “We were told not to take bribes,” she explained. In a country where so many state employees do take bribes, from the plumber to the president, Lyudmila was the best the country has to offer—kind, cordial, hardworking—and uncorrupted. The kind of Russian Goncharov described in Oblomov:

Ever keen to tout Ulyanovsk’s status, our local historian Petrov had grudgingly admitted to us that their part of Povolzhye (as the territories adjacent to the Volga have been historically called) had been transferred to the Samara time zone down the river. As he reminded us, Simbirsk was once the capital of a guberniya that prestigiously shared the Moscow time, but now clocks in Ulyanovsk run in synch with those of downscale Samara further east.

The next day, after a hot, bruising five-hour car ride (to cover a mere 150 miles!) instead of the pleasant two-hour boat trip we would have enjoyed in previous decades, we pulled into Samara. With a population of 1.2 million and known in Soviet times as Kuibyshev, Samara, with its traffic jams, high-rises, and busy shopping malls resembles something like a Moscow-on-the-Volga. The old wooden huts, some almost fallen to the ground, still abound—something Moscow has not seen in decades—but the local offices of Gazprom banks affiliated with it, and the giant state-owned Sberbank look formidable and palatial. They are second only to buildings that belong to the municipal administrations and the security agencies. Such structures, despite what they symbolize—the Russian state’s dependence for its survival on its bounty of natural resources and the unceasing labors of its police force, both covert and overt—do rescue the city from anything resembling a provincial air.

Indeed this has always been so, and thus Soviet planners selected Samara for a unique honor, as we would see.

Upon arrival, we stopped by the city’s museum of ethnography. In contrast to the Ulyanovsk museums, the Samara display is not supposed to be political, but exhibits about the history and customs of local peoples quickly give way to yet another tribute to Russia’s imperial grandeur. The museum is mostly dedicated to Stalin and his victory in World War II, with due coverage awarded to Lenin and the czars—Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Nicholas I and II, Alexanders II and III, and so on. And then there was Czar Putin, promoter of the double-headed eagle and all it stood for.

In the far corner, next to an exhibit of the region’s prehistoric era and mock dinosaurs, we found a small section devoted to Stalin’s purges. Yet if you didn’t know the history of all the bloodshed and imprisonment in his day, you might come away with the impression that the bosses of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the precursor agency of the KGB), not the dictator himself, were to blame. One cannot understand Russia’s history without comprehending the atrocities of the Stalin era and how they inevitably grew out of unbridled one-man rule and the need to eliminate—physically—any possible contender to the throne.

In Samara stands a far more impressive relic of Stalin’s era and that of the war he prosecuted victoriously: the famed Stalin Bunker.

As Nazi troops rapidly advanced toward Moscow in 1941, most of the USSR’s ministries, foreign diplomatic missions, and political families (including those of Stalin and Khrushchev) departed for Samara (Kuibyshev in those days), which was to serve as a makeshift reserve national capital in the early war years. The city also hosted facilities critical for the Soviet military—aviation and engineering plants and higher education institutions, including a relocated Moscow University. A massive riverbank bunker was built for Stalin just in case he had to be evacuated, too.

Though open to groups, visiting it as individuals would be, it turned out, no easy task. First, we tried to book a tour from Moscow. The website urged us to reserve tickets by phone, but when we called, we were rudely informed that we could not get in unless we were part of a group.

“Leave your names and call the day of your arrival. Maybe you’ll get in,” we were told.

We did as advised. That morning, Nina made the calls.

When she finally got through, a man’s crackling voice answered.

“Deistvuyshyi obyekt gosudarstvennoi oborony. Dezhurnyi po obyektu” (Active facility of state defense. Facility officer on duty speaking.)

“I am Nina Khrushcheva, and I’ve called a few times before. We want to make sure we are let in to the bunker.”

“I remember your name. That Khrushchev, I’m no fan of his.”

“Why?”

“I’m sick of him. He wrecked too many things (mnogo ponatvoril). Just take Crimea. Your name, Nina, is even the same as his wife’s, blyad,” he cursed, using the Russian word for “whore.” “But fine, come on over.”

The man never even asked if Nina was related to the former Soviet premier. It took nothing more than hearing the name to set him off.

We took a cab to the bunker, located at 167 Frunze Street and concealed beneath a nondescript apartment building. At a nondescript plain back door, a crowd of some forty eager visitors stood waiting for admission, some, no doubt, worried as we were that they would be refused entry if they were not part of a group. But ultimately the guards let everyone in. They still operated according to the tried-and-true Soviet precept of managing public places: even if they have to let you pass, you will have to suffer for it.

An almost cubist stained-glass portrait of Stalin puffing on his pipe welcomed us in. We climbed twelve stories down a steep staircase to the Generalissimo’s quarters: a conference room with a large map of Russia, and a wooden oval table surrounded by twelve chairs; and a living room office with a white sofa, a desk covered with a musty piece of green felt, and a red emergency phone line, all watched over by an austere portrait of Alexander Suvorov, one of czarist Russia’s greatest military heroes. The last Generalissimo of the Russian Empire, Suvorov inspired the first Soviet one.

The cheerful guide, a blond woman in her forties, couldn’t hide her excitement about how roughly Stalin treated all those who were tasked with defending the Motherland. “One of the local factories,” she said, “which was producing munitions during the war, at first made less than required.” Stalin reprimanded them. “You can’t make just one bomb a day,” he bellowed. “You have to make hundreds, thousands a day!” Fearing for their lives, they did just that.

She finally delivered the punch line—“Stalin actually never stepped foot in the bunker, remaining in Moscow all through the war”—but mentioned nothing about Stalin’s key role in starting the war. Fearful of being undermined by capitalist France and Great Britain, and even more afraid of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin was eager to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, in 1939. This, in effect, permitted the Third Reich to take over Europe without worrying about a Russian response. After the Nazi invasion of the western areas of the Soviet Union, Stalin, in the early stages of the war, blamed massive Russian defeats on his countrymen’s unpatriotic behavior. But the military failures owed much to inexperienced officers who assumed their duties after the NKVD had wiped out the gifted old officer corps, accusing them of being “enemies of the people.”

The bunker, our guide told us, was built in nine months and cost 19 million rubles ($324,000 in 1942)—more than $5 million today. We overheard two men, perhaps father and son, walking in front of us down the clean, cold spiral staircase.

“Imagine that, they built it so quickly, but nobody stole anything!” said the young one.

“Of course not,” the older man replied. “You would not steal under Stalin.”

“But with Khrushchev, you could!”

“Oh, that Khrushchev!”

After much climbing up and down claustrophobic stairs and passing through innumerable steel doors resembling those aboard a submarine, the tour ended and we reemerged at street level. We went over to introduce ourselves to the two duty officers. Both looked to be in their eighties—still too young to have fought in the war but, judging by their bearing and mannerisms, quite likely former police or KGB officers. They were also clearly devoted Stalinists and were exited to meet Jeff, the American.

“Trump has sent you to see what power Russians have!” said one. “Tell him that we are peaceful people, but we won’t be pushed around!”

We asked which of them had been so rude to Nina on the phone earlier that morning. Both denied having spoken to her, alleging, oddly and irrelevantly, that their German was better than their English, so there must have been some misunderstanding. This statement made no sense, as she had spoken to him in Russian. Whatever. Since Jeff had introduced himself as an American journalist, we could only conclude that they feared he would report on how angry Stalinists had mistreated his “minder,” and they wanted to avoid any scandals.

We walked back out into the glorious spring day. After listening to our guide expound on the heroic nature of the Soviet Union’s most infamous mass murderer, we needed some air and a drink. The bunker lies just a couple of blocks from the Volga’s shore. Samara sits on the river’s left bank. The rocky Zhigulevsky Mountains on the right bank dominated the view from the bench on which we sat.

Pleased with such stunning scenery, we nevertheless recoiled at the bunker guide’s de facto glorification of totalitarianism and repression, which, in the twenty-first century, run counter to everything Europe stands for. Russia is not Europe, many would say. Yet Europe is and always has been Russia’s main point of reference, the standard against which, willingly or not, it both judges itself and finds itself judged. This held true even deep inside the Stalin Bunker. There, our guide had proudly informed us that it was Europe’s deepest (121 feet); which is more than twice as deep as Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and, of course, far deeper than Winston Churchill’s piddling dugout in London.

We spoke English as we sat drinking the cans of Zhigulev beer we had just acquired from the centuries-old famous local brewery of the same name. The brewery’s on-site store offers numerous varieties of beer on tap and salted-fish treats to go with them, all traditionally much beloved in Russia, but long gone from Moscow’s posh environs.

Soon we found ourselves the object of curiosity of high school students sitting on a nearby bench. This was, it turned out, their graduation day; their cohorts strolled past us, dressed in stylized Soviet-era school uniforms—plain brown dresses and laced white aprons for girls, dark blue woolen suits for boys. Those were the uniforms that Lenin’s unfashionable wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had adopted for schoolchildren in the 1920s. Hated for their dullness in Soviet days, they have made a comeback as a festive school outfit for special occasions such as graduation and evoke nostalgia in those pining after the now-defunct communist superpower.

Hearing us speaking English, the young Russians on the next bench were curious about the foreigners visiting their town: “Do you need help?” they asked in good enough English. “Would you like to have something translated or explained?”

Switching to Russian, we expressed our pleasure at seeing how well kept the Volga’s embankment was here—families strolling, one of which appeared to be same-sex, children running, teenagers skateboarding. Crowded even on a weekday, the embankment stood in contrast to the neglected wasteland along the river in Ulyanovsk, and we told the students this. They proudly explained, “Ours is the longest river embankment in Europe!”

“Is Russia Europe?” we asked.

“Well, no,” one of the boys answered. “But Samara, as the country’s reserve capital during the war, is now the capital of the oblast and needs to look the part. Even though Nizhny Novgorod [another Volga town] has taken over as the unofficial capital of the Povolzhye, we are going to catch up.” The others voiced their agreement.

Samara had languished in disarray for decades, but in recent years it has been trying to revive its riverine transportation business. From here speedboats—the meteors that we saw rotting away in Ulyanovsk—run to the larger industrial cities on the Volga, including Kazan, Tolyatti, and Syzran.

Our new friends described how the river loops around the hills, creating a peninsula encompassing a reserve of tens of thousands of acres of national forest that, before the Revolution, used to be farmland. In the decade preceding the Great Patriotic War, factories began encroaching on it as the Soviet Union, fearing attack from the West, prepared for potential evacuation eastward of industries in European Russia.

In Soviet times Kuibyshev was, like Kaliningrad, a “closed city” owing to its defense-related industries. It also became, eventually, the “space capital” of the USSR, producing rockets and much else the country’s space program required. (The city was also famed as the producer of the Pobeda (Victory) timepieces—a Soviet Rolex of sorts.) Our young interlocutors complained that these days the Russian space industry relies on foreign-made equipment and is being neglected.

Yet the space museum remains one of the city’s prominent landmarks, featuring, as it does, exhibits of the war. It was Khrushchev who presided over the Soviet Union’s space program, long after Stalin’s death. The Sputnik satellite circled the globe for the first time in 1957, twelve years after the war ended. Yury Gagarin made mankind’s first journey into space, when Stalin was thoroughly expunged from the Soviet pantheon. And yet here he is again, the dictator rehabilitated. The museum presents the momentous achievements of the Space Age—some of the Soviet Union’s most momentous—as the direct consequence of Stalin’s era.

“What is Samara really good at?” we asked the new graduates.

“Industries, of course,” they replied.

“But you say factories are being neglected here.”

“Well, Samara is more a trade town these days. As a major river town, we’ve been always good at trade, too.”

After saying good-bye, we walked back up toward Kuibyshev Square, breathtaking in its size. “It’s the largest in Europe!” said a passerby, noticing our fascination.

“Are we in Europe?” we asked him.

“Well, not exactly,” he replied, chagrined.

The square’s ever-mutable name reflected the historical epochs through which it, and Russia, had passed. In czarist Orthodox Christian Russia, it was called Sobornaya (Cathedral) Square, for the huge house of worship that once graced its northern reaches. The Soviets dynamited the cathedral and designated the square Kommunalnaya (Communal) but eventually changed that to Kuibyshev, in honor of Valerian Kuibyshev, who ran the planned economy under Stalin. In 2010, a municipal commission recommended switching the square’s appellation back to Sobornaya, but the mayor nixed the move. The young people we had spoken to on the riverbank didn’t know who Kuibyshev was, but, in any case, they insisted that “At thirty-seven acres ours is the largest square in Europe.” Again, Europe. Where we were not. But to which Russia looks.

Trapped between the double-headed eagle and the hammer and the sickle, Samara straddles the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the communist and the capitalist.

Ramshackle, centuries-old wooden buildings decorated with intricately carved eighteenth-century latticework stand next to high-rises of glass and steel. Samara is a city of contrasts that even in Russia one rarely sees.

On our way back to the hotel, as we sped past the wooden houses, we asked a friendly cabdriver named Nikolai, “What are you going to do with the old huts, renovate them with contemporary amenities? Only a few, we saw, have been redone that way.”

“No,” he laughed. “The city got 26 million rubles [at the time $500,000] to drape painted tarps over walls facing the street. Just like the old Potemkin villages! Two hundred years later, Russia still has not changed!”

The Potemkin reference goes back to the summer of 1787, when Catherine the Great set out to inspect the recent additions to her vast empire, including the Crimean Peninsula, annexed from the Ottomans four years earlier. Catherine’s lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the governor-general of her new southern provinces, knew shabby land- and cityscapes would displease the Germanic empress, who set high standards for order. So he saw to it that roadside buildings along her route would be lined with cheerful, prosperous facades, to hide the reigning squalor of rural poverty. On her return to Saint Petersburg, Catherine announced she was pleased with her new territory’s bucolic riches.

Centuries later, the authorities still carry out renovations to impress visitors, be they czars or presidents. The current Potemkin program in Samara owed its origins to the 2018 World Cup, because along with ten other cities in Russia, it was picked to host a number of the tournament’s matches. This time, the local government has decided to hide Samara’s unseemly side not from the president, but from foreigners.

“At least in the USSR the authorities knew how to make life better. We made rockets and watches, we had boat rides on the Volga,” Nikolai said.

We were curious: Kuibyshev was the reserve capital during the war, and the Soviet space industry capital after that. Yet the authorities have not managed to change the look in many downtown spots.

Just a few feet away from the wooden shacks on Vilonovskaya Street stands a fancy yellow building showing elements of Classical Stalinist style. There dwelled the Khrushchevs, the Stalins (his children, that is), and other political families evacuated from Moscow. Nina grew up hearing stories about the privileged wartime abodes within.

Nikolai had no answer as to why even the city center seventy years later still falls short of the “second capital” designation, except to note that Putin was working on it. Which did not mean that he was necessarily a fan of Russia’s current ruler.

“With capitalism,” said Nikolai, “there is no money for anything good for the people. And our governor is almost a communist,” he announced, referring to the regional chief Nikolai Merkushkin. Officially a member of the dominant Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia) party, Merkushkin has racked up a notoriously long list of complaints among his electorate, all the while making strident statements about the West’s plot to destroy Russia. “Of course, things take a long time,” our cabdriver said. He was speaking before Putin’s elections in March 2018. “We’ll see who will replace the governor.”

“But didn’t you say communists did everything well before Merkushkin, who was also a communist?” we asked.

“Those were good Soviet communists, but now they are bad capitalist communists,” Nikolai replied.

Before the presidential elections, a sort of “musical chairs” was taking place across Russia, with mayors and governors being dismissed and others nominated in their stead to assure that Putin’s de facto party, United Russia, would fill all the most important positions with the most reliable—that is, loyal—people. Just a few months after our visit, in September 2017, Merkushkin resigned “voluntarily” and was replaced by Dmitry Azarov, a local politician with a better economic pedigree.

For comparison, the Kremlin powers that be spared Ulyanovsk’s governor Morozov such a fate in his Lenin-famous hometown. His good standing with the Kremlin has helped assure the longevity of his position. Even though Ulyanovsk could certainly use more sprucing up, Morozov has done well navigating local and national political, social, and cultural currents.

The farther east we would travel, the more we would see the well-being of a city, a whole region even, relying on the local government for its prosperity, while that prosperity was dependent on the regional authorities’ cordial relationship with the Kremlin.