In Putin's Footsteps

5 PERM, YEKATERINBURG, AND TYUMEN ^{THE URALS’ HOLY TRINITY TIME ZONE: MSK+2; UCT+5}

Three towns in the time zone that is second past Moscow—Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen—are major stopovers on the Siberian Throughway (in Russian, Sibirsky Trakt, also known as the Moskovskiy Trakt, or the Moscow Throughway). The throughway was the longest road in the world and for centuries connected Moscow and the Far East, passing through China. The three towns are also main junctions on the Trans-Siberian Railway, forming the trinity of the Urals—the mountain range dividing Europe and Asia.

Perm is the Urals’ culture capital—the “first city in Europe,” we would be told, and the setting for Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Named in honor of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine the Great, Yekaterinburg—known as Sverdlovsk in the Soviet days—is the regional political center and the capital of the vast Ural region. Boris Yeltsin was born in a village nearby. Tyumen is the hub for the region’s oil industry, the industry supporting the Russian state and enmeshed in its politics.

Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, offers us a charming précis of how diet affects character. “Pepper … makes people hot-tempered … vinegar … makes them sour … chamomile … makes them bitter … and barley-sugar and such things … make children sweet-tempered.”

Hard candy confected from barley sugar was for the prim Victorian Brits, of course. For the doughy Russians, Carroll’s Russian translator Nina Demurova’s pronouncement is apt: “ot sdoby dobreyut” (they grow kinder from eating buns). In Russian sdoba (yeast dough buns) and dobryi (kind) share a root.

Perm impresses with its buns and its decorative gingerbreads—Russia’s most famous—and kindness. The city’s bakeries brim with a variety of pastries sweet and savory, with fillings of cheese, fish, meat, cream, and potatoes and coming in various shapes and sizes. The vendors, smiling, make suggestions and offer samples of flavors you have never imagined. Say, an intricately decorated multilayered calf-liver cake with fresh herbs—amazing. Or a salmon turnover with cheese—even better.

After the lean, dour Soviet decades with their empty shelves and shortages, baking has been making a comeback all over Russia. One can buy fine baked goods even in subway stations—but in Perm they are even finer. The Russian soul, they say, dwells in its pastries and pies. Long before Lewis Carroll came on the scene, Russians had their own saying: “A home is not nice because of its decor, but because of its pies.”

Maybe that is why Chekhov and Pasternak chose to memorialize Perm in their work. Chekhov’s Three Sisters tried to salvage their intellectual lives in a “regional garrison town” where they eagerly dreamed of moving to the more refined Moscow. Doctor Zhivago—Pasternak’s novel about a Russian poet-physician in love with another man’s wife—is set in the fictional town of Yuryatin, based on Perm, amid the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution. There love blossoms between Yury Zhivago and Lara. Their meeting place—the nineteenth-century caryatid-decorated house in gorgeous Prussian blue, now on Lenin Street, that once belonged to the wealthy local trader Gribushin—is as important a character as the lovers themselves. They call it the “house with figures” here. In a double literary twist, Yuryatin’s doctor learns that Chekhov’s Three Sisters was, too, set in Perm.

The last city before the Urals, Perm, according to its residents, is “where Europe begins.” Others view it as the last European city—the end of the world, even. The Perm Paradox.

The intoxicating smell of lindens, so rare elsewhere in Russia, wafts over the house from where these trees stand on the nearby Komsomolsky Prospect, adding to the house’s fin-de-siècle charm. Next to it stands a more recent, commercialized sign of the times: a posh Doctor Zhivago restaurant, named in the post-Soviet tradition of pilfering literary texts for marketing memes. Have its customers read Pasternak’s novel? Doubtful—the story is popular in Russia, the book itself much less so. Popular, because the novel’s history is a political ordeal that many Soviet artists had gone through. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech Pasternak wrote a Zhivago romance set at the time of the Revolution, like Bulgakov exploring political themes of Stalinism and religion. The manuscript, forbidden in the Soviet Union—de-Stalinization notwithstanding—was secretly published in Italy in 1957. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Soviets forbade him to travel abroad to receive the honor. Later in life, Khrushchev was embarrassed by this decision he called “despotic.”

Having passed by the house with figures, we continued on Lenin Street, which we assumed would lead to the city’s Lenin statue. We asked two young women for directions, but they didn’t know the Soviet leader’s location. Luckily, we came upon an older man who kindly explained that in Perm, a city of culture, the local Lenin monument was associated not with his eponymous street but with a park, where he stands in front of the stately pale blue Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater.

Music and ballet have always been cultivated here. Sergei Diaghilev, a native of Perm, founded in Paris in 1905 the Ballets Russes—the most famous twentieth-century Russian contribution to European high culture.

A hundred years later, in the summer of 2017, the city continued those cultural traditions. The Tchaikovsky Theater’s orchestra, MusicAeterna, conducted by the Greek (and current Perm resident) Teodor Currentzis, opened the Salzburg Festival with its performance of Mozart’s Requiem, the first time such an honor was bestowed on a non-Austrian company. Many do wonder how this town so off-center can attract world-class artists such as Currentzis. His explanation was that he chose to move to Perm because there he found “the spiritual depth he had been craving.”[28]

Currentzis is not the only one who believes that Perm offers an atmosphere conducive to the creative life. The prominent art entrepreneur Marat Gelman, another native of Perm but known throughout Russia, launched many projects in town, including the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, PERMM.

In the mid-2000s, the young governor of the Perm region, Oleg Chirkunov, had an idea to follow in the footsteps of Diaghilev, Chekhov, and Pasternak, and to turn Perm into the new capital of Russian culture. He was encouraged by Putin’s then pro-European statements, including his BBC interview that “Russia is part of the European culture.” “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. It is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy,”[29] Putin said.

Chirkunov indeed made Perm’s culture prosper, but by 2012 the political atmosphere changed and the governor resigned, effectively ending the period of the Perm “cultural revolution.”

After Putin’s third term as president began in 2012, the Russian government showed itself increasingly intolerant of diverse viewpoints—including in art—and the Kremlin decided Gelman’s creation enjoyed too much popularity among the political opposition. In 2013, the government, or so Gelman contends, deprived him of control of the gallery, though it remains open and still plays an important role in the city’s cultural life, albeit operating under the tighter supervision of the authorities.

Perm’s spirit of the post-Soviet cultural revolt finds expression in the city’s bus stops even today. Famous in his own right as a hip internet designer and a founder of a Moscow-based urban design firm, Artemy Lebedev, son of the writer Tatyana Tolstaya, in the late 2000s designed each stop to creatively reflect themes in Perm’s past. Unfortunately, by the time we visited in July 2017, many of these stops had, in a way, shared Gelman’s fate, and been damaged or defaced with graffiti.

Despite today’s reigning conservatism, Perm hasn’t completely lost its magic. Construction sites are ugly everywhere. In Russia, they amount to pathological eyesores, lasting ages, blocked from public view by gray hulks of concrete or drab canvas curtains, casting a pall of gloom over towns. But not in Perm. Since 2011 construction sites have enjoyed the ministrations of artists from a street art festival who paint the surrounding fences according to themes they chose. First, they selected “Perm—a European City,” of course. The year of our visit it was “Perm’s Lengthy History,” in reference to the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era.

We walked alongside a multicolored construction site fence admiring the artists’ work, then asked a young bearded man painting there what else there was to see nearby. He hopped down from his ladder and, wiping a smudge of green color from his forehead, pointed to the linden-lined Komsomolsky Prospect, with its Central Exhibition Hall and its Art Gallery.

“They have a tribute to Marc Chagall and the Bible, a rarity,” he responded. “And the Art Gallery, which is in a cathedral, has an exhibit showing eighteenth-century wooden sculptures. There you’ll see Christ and Saint Nicholas looking more like pagan monuments, with flat cheekbones and slanted, widely spaced eyes.”

Inspired by his detailed recommendations, we rushed to the Chagall exhibition of biblical lithographs. As we bought our tickets, the vendor said, “He”—Chagall—“is a Jew! But even he painted God Russian.”

“He didn’t,” we interjected. “These are not Russian but biblical characters.”

“Doesn’t matter, a Jew portrays Christian religion!”

The Russian Orthodox Church, effectively an institution of the Russian state, was rank with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Distrust of anything perceived as foreign, or at least not Christian—or specifically Orthodox Christian—fueled both the pogroms of the czarist era and discrimination against Jews during the Soviet decades. Thankfully, the bane of anti-Semitism has largely disappeared in modern Russia.

“You’re not from here?” the vendor asked amicably.

“No, from Moscow and New York.”

“From far away, then! Thank you for stopping by. How do you find us comparing to New York and Moscow?”

“Very cordial,” we replied.

The woman could not have smiled more broadly.

Perm’s claims to European civilization buttress its identity and define its history. A banner over the Heroes of Khasan Street, once the Sibirsky Trakt, proudly announces Perm to be the sister city of Oxford.

Never mind that Perm, rather un-Oxford-like, is a nightmare to reach from any of the nearby cities. A two-lane highway, potholed and narrow, serves as the main road into and out of town. On the way to the center, a mess of jewelry and fur stores line the unevenly paved lanes, heralding the Urals and Siberia, where hunters and gold miners once dominated towns. There is a reason for this. In times past, the state dispatched convicts to the region in the hopes that they might hunt for sable to supply the western areas of the Russian Empire with its precious fur. They also dug for gold.

The cobblestone streets and lawns on Perm’s squares may have seen better days, but, we discovered, repairs are under way. Oxford, Perm is not; yet there is an orderliness to this place. Once the village of Yagoshikha—but founded as a city in 1781 under the patronage of Catherine the Great—Perm was strategically planned, which is unusual for a Russian town. A German and an Anglophile, Catherine wanted it to reflect her penchant for order, productivity, and civic awareness (or at least as much as would be permissible in an autocracy).

She may have succeeded. Perm’s European status allows it to evade, to an extent, Moscow’s control and still exude a feeling of a progressive cultural environment.

Many Russian towns, we noticed on our travels, present themselves as the center of something. Which makes sense. When the “power vertical” (as Putin once termed the Kremlin-dominant power structure he was set to reestablish in Russia) dominates all, each place creates its own raison d’être, at least for the purposes of public relations. Ulyanovsk showcases the aristocratic lifestyle and Lenin; Samara, its status as Russia’s wartime reserve capital and the hub of the space industry. Kaliningrad, of course, takes pride in being the sprawling country’s westernmost territory. And Perm, in the midst of the Ural Mountains, geographically, at least, is indeed the easternmost border of Europe.

Oppressed societies often express themselves through humor. In Russia, engaging in satire has enabled people to overcome their fear of the government and feel free of it. “If we can make fun of the Kremlin,” Russians have reasoned, “the Kremlin can’t have complete power over us.” The city of Perm has taken a humorous approach to naming its tourist walkways, for example. A one-ton bronze bear stands in front of the giant, Soviet-era Ural Hotel as the terminus of the Green Line, the town’s main historic route. Russians have never appreciated having the fearsome bear as their informal national mascot. When we asked Permyaks—those living in Perm—about their bear statue, they responded with a cheerful “Stesnyatsya nechego!” (nothing to be ashamed of). The bear stands not only for Perm, they explained, but also represents a subtle, ironic dig at foreigners, who, Russians believe, imagine bears walk around the streets of the country. The Red Line arrows show the way to sites associated with Doctor Zhivago, a love story.

Perm’s pride is the Kama River and its splendidly renovated embankment. The Kama has always figured in the past and present of the city. To the west, it flows into the Volga and is its longest tributary; in the east it connects with the great Siberian rivers, the Ob and the Irtysh. In Catherine the Great’s time, the Kama was famed as a supplier of salt, which was exported west at a great profit. Muscovites even developed a nickname for Perm traders, solyenye ushi (salty ears). Ignoring the condescension, the Permyaks, proud of their roots, erected a monument to that, too.

Of course, “Europeanism” here has a decidedly local tinge. The fashion store Comme Il Faut brims not with haut de gamme threads, but with giant displays of plastic flower arrangements; signs for the festival mini-Avignon display photos of the Kremlin in Moscow; and the Wonder Woman Pizza shop—where we stopped for a bite—was eerily empty, its servers busier with their phones than with us. We were almost the only customers. Nevertheless, the pizza shop’s owner was at least gender-aware, choosing for its theme a female superhero, and not Superman or Spider-Man or some overtly masculine figure. This was unusual in patriarchal Russia. Though we saw signs saying Administratsiya po Blagoustroistvu (administration for civic renovation), streets and squares have been under construction for years, we were told. Perm’s airport was one of the worst we saw during our journeying—jammed with disgruntled passengers and their screaming babies, with little flight information available, and a waiting lounge area resembling those of bus stations in provincial Soviet cities. Yet, unusually for Russia and very socially consciously—which is also unusual—many billboards here denounce the wearing of fur. This in the fur-producing Urals and despite all the fur shops lining the Heroes of Khasan Street.

When it underwent a cultural awakening of sorts in recent decades, Perm also began to champion the values of civil society, at least for a while. Hence, on a sunny July morning, we rode out to Perm-36, once a Gulag labor camp but now a museum, just outside the village of Kuchino, some sixty miles northeast of the city. The countryside through which we passed, with its undulant green hills empty of human habitation, recalled the Scottish Highlands, if under a cloudless azure sky.

In Perm-36, hapless prisoners engaged in logging—one of the most brutal forms of hard labor. Among them, struggling to survive the inhumane conditions for which the camps eventually earned worldwide infamy, were prominent dissidents, including the long-suffering writer Vladimir Bukovsky and Gleb Yakunin, the late priest and member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

The fate of the Perm-36 museum is, unfortunately, typically Russian. Opened in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin was eager to expose the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism, the establishment for two decades was affiliated with Memorial, a human-rights organization dedicated to keeping alive Russia’s history of political repression. At the time, Perm-36 was more than just a museum; its mission was to inspire social consciousness. The site was a special one—it survived Khrushchev’s Thaw and was operational as a political prison into Brezhnev’s 1970s. The expositions contextualize how Perm-36’s inmates lived with displays found in its white-walled barracks, a hall used for meetings and showing films, a forge, a sawmill, and a repair shop. A green watchtower overlooks its rusting barbwire perimeter, beyond which stretch empty fields and scraggly forest.

After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the connections between Soviet repression and the modern Russian state’s current aggressive nationalism became too obvious to ignore. The museum was almost closed; its annual gathering devoted to human rights, Pilorama (Sawmill), ceased to convene after complaints of dubious sincerity from former prison guards and nationalistic Stalinists about its supposedly “antipatriotic” stance. The Kremlin, however, decided that closing the Gulag site would only give ammunition to Putin’s critics. So, instead the government took over Perm-36 as a historical project under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Culture and replaced the museum’s Memorial founders with new state appointees.

To control the message, the institution is now less about this site as a once horrible camp; it has become about the Gulag as a whole. It focuses less on political prisoners, the purges of Stalin’s Great Terror, or Stalin himself. It nevertheless continues to display the details of the prisoners’ stark life, their bare barracks and their plank beds, and a chillingly simple interrogation room furnished with only two chairs, a table, and single lamp—all presented in the context of the Stalin regime’s efforts to industrialize Russia. The message is curated: traveling to the faraway region of Perm to see all this isn’t even necessary; the museum’s website offers a virtual tour.

Eager to see Perm-36 in person, we took a tour led by a flaxen-haired woman in her thirties with a businesslike demeanor. She instructed visitors on how to think about the inmates’ life of misery and deprivation: it is just a part of Russia’s great history. Sacrifices must be made, she told us. This broadly means that while undertaking the creation of a mighty country with a new social order, you should expect a few negative, unintended consequences. By this logic, our marvelous, if somewhat flawed, leaders had the state’s best interest in mind. “The great utopia when all was possible,” one display poster declares, with no hint of irony. Moreover, “enemies of the people”—including religious objectors who gouged out the eyes from portraits of Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet signatory of the 1939 nonaggression treaty—were driven by their “primitive” private interests with no understanding of the state’s mission for the good of all. That was our guide’s party line, also delivering the ultimate Kremlin message: embracing our past makes Russia great.

A jolly older man in a sailor’s striped shirt and a blue-and-white sailor’s cap soon joined our group.

“Aren’t you lucky that this man, who used to be here, can tell you all about the camp?!” the guide exclaimed.

We assumed him to be a former zek (labor camp inmate). But no, it turned out that he served as one of the guards and now works as a mechanic at the museum. He bemoaned the hardships of his job now in the same breath as he regaled us with tales of the prisoners’ plight. He was bearing out the words of Anna Akhmatova, one of the Soviet era’s most famous poets. Akhmatova, after Stalin’s death and the beginning of Khrushchev’s Thaw, mused that the two Russias—“odna, kotoraya sazhala, i drugaya, kotoraya sidela” (one that was putting people in prison and the other that was sitting in those prisons)—were finally “going to look into each other’s eyes.” That was almost happening around us—almost, because the members of our group were far too young to know how the Stalinist labor camps came about. No one objected or showed discomfort about the way the story of mass incarceration was being told.

In this, the Putin state was successful in diverting attention from the horrors of the repressions by presenting them as one of the tools for creating a great country.

“How have things changed here since the museum became part of the state?” we asked.

“They haven’t,” the docent replied with a strangely perky smile. “We have the same exhibits. We just put them in the proper historical context.”

That’s the genius of the Putin regime—opposing or controversial views are not always forbidden, but their “context” is manipulated for the benefit of the Kremlin.

Even though Perm-36 tells the story of the Gulag, it fails to present Stalin as the Kremlin’s chief murderer. And, as we had seen elsewhere, Khrushchev does not figure into the story told; his post-1956 mass rehabilitation of Stalin’s prisoners is absent. In the prisoners’ movie hall, a wall displays a long array of official portraits of high-level Soviet political figures, but the out-of-favor premier is nowhere among them.

“How come?” we asked. The woman replied, “Oh, right, I never noticed. Perhaps it’s because our museum is not political.”

The Gulag system was not political? How could this be, given that the greater part of those who did time here were political prisoners?

Khrushchev’s omission told us a lot about Russia. As our tour finished and we boarded our taxi to leave for Perm, we concluded that in Russia, despots are understood better and admired more than reformers; their harshness is justified as having served the good of the state. Reformers, on the other hand, are considered weak. When despots kill, they do so to save the country; when reformers try to bring justice, it must be because they have ulterior motives, and patriotism is not among them. At the start of Gorbachev’s Perestroika the ailing Molotov explained this state of mind: “With Stalin we followed the directions of a strong hand; when the hand got weaker, each started to sing his own song.”[30] More than two and a half decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, this mentality still holds. “Singing one’s own song” remains dangerous insubordination to the state’s “power vertical.”

Our next stop east was Yekaterinburg—the Ural’s capital and throbbing heart and the onetime stomping ground of Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Traveling by car, a dozen or so miles out of Perm, the “first city in Europe,” we noticed something we had missed on our way to the labor camp: an artfully designed bus stop bearing a sprawling, faded banner: “Glory to Dear Stalin for the 70th Anniversary of Our Great Victory 1945–2015.”

We were glad to be on our way.

Approaching Yekaterinburg by the Moscow Thoroughfare, we drove by another memorial erected in honor of victims of Soviet political repression, a giant diptych in bronze authored by the artist Ernst Neizvestny. The monument displayed two faces—one, a mask of suffering with closed eyes; the other, a visage encased in what seemed to be concrete blocks. The message was indicative of Russia’s split-personality disorder: one half of the country was imprisoned, with the other half guarding it. Russia still cannot decide what it wants to honor. It cannot decide what it is: a European nation or a country that glorifies its despots.

Yekaterinburg is the only city in Russia that fondly memorializes Boris Yeltsin, the bearlike, reform-minded Czar of Russian Democracy—he sought to embrace the aura of czarlike power on the top of a postcommunist system. Born in 1931 in the local village of Butka, Yeltsin attended the Ural Polytechnic Institute, preparing to lead Russia’s industrial heartland. That he did, in the mid-1970s becoming the regional Communist Party Secretary. He moved to Moscow to become its mayor in the 1980s and to join the Politburo—a Soviet parliament of sorts. Rising from the regions Yeltsin became a powerful figure in the collapse of the Soviet Union and led the Kremlin afterward.

Posthumously, this son of the Urals serves as Yekaterinburg’s main attraction, with the Yeltsin Center rivaling in majesty any American presidential library. The center is a giant, ultramodern cubist complex that lauds the defunct head of state as—oddly, or perhaps not—a new Lenin of sorts, presenting to its visitors a version of the former president no less mythologized than a Bolshevik revolutionary. While visitors swarm throughout the glass and steel complex, television crews are at work filming the displays.

We were to meet with the center’s deputy director, Lyudmila Telen, but she was away in the capital during our visit. In her place, she had kindly arranged a tour for us with the center’s director of archives, Dmitry Pushnin, a tall, balding fellow in his forties. From the complex’s central circular hall (reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim), where a bronze Yeltsin sits ruminating on a bench, our eloquent guide led us to the first exhibit: an exposition of the future president’s early job as the First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for the Sverdlovsk region, a position that put him in control of one of the most important industrial zones of the Soviet Union. Thanks to Yeltsin, Pushnin told us, the mighty, highly industrialized Soviet-era Sverdlovsk (named after Yakov Sverdlov, a Bolshevik revolutionary) retained its glory as the new Yekaterinburg. Now with almost a million and a half inhabitants, Yekaterinburg is the fourth largest city in Russia after Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.

“This seems a bit like Ulyanovsk and Lenin. When the Kremlin leader is from a certain place, the place gets a lot of mileage from it,” we remarked.

Pushnin bristled at such a comparison, saying that Yekaterinburg was much more exciting than Ulyanovsk and had always been.

“It is,” he explained, “the real center, Russia’s window into Asia,” occupying, as it does, a crucial spot in the Urals, with territory both in Europe and Asia.

Established in 1723 under Peter the Great to process metals mined from the nearby mountains, the city bears the name of the towering emperor’s wife, Yekaterina, or Catherine I (not to be confused with the later empress, Catherine II, the Great). Yekaterinburg came into being more than 150 years before Novosibirsk, the current unofficial capital of Siberia. On orders from Catherine II, in the eighteenth century Yekaterinburg joined the Perm guberniya. In the Soviet era, Yekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk (with the surrounding territory renamed the Sverdlovsk Oblast, a designation it has retained). Message intended by the administrative move: Sverdlovsk was becoming more important than Perm, far surpassing it in both size and in the number of vital industries based there. Once the Soviet Union fell, Sverdlovsk became Yekaterinburg once again.

Pushnin pointed out a display showing black-and-white photographs of Ipatiev House, in the basement of which Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Soviets in 1918. The Bolsheviks’ brutal act and how Yeltsin responded to it would mar the future president’s legacy. In the 1970s, the Ipatiev estate was supposed to be transformed into a museum. Instead, in 1977, Yeltsin, then the region’s Communist boss, quietly ordered its demolition. By the late Brezhnev era, as the myth of soon-to-arrive communism was fading, the Ipatiev House became a destination for pilgrims wishing to honor the murdered czar’s memory. Yet the Yeltsin Center presents Yeltsin not as a seasoned Soviet apparatchik conducting the Party’s business but as an unwilling political “executioner” of Moscow’s will.

Few who know Soviet history would argue with this assessment. But Pushnin’s subsequent comment—“we displayed the controversy as accurately as we could”—also suggested a savvy public relations move to control the key message: Yeltsin was different from other Soviet leaders, who played up their successes and never admitted making mistakes. In tearing down the Ipatiev House Yeltsin betrayed himself as a true Soviet indeed. But he was different, too—as president of the new Russia he allowed the rehabilitation of the czar’s family to happen on his watch. Was it an act of repentance, a feeling of guilt? Did he succumb to the social pressure from the public? Fed up with atheist communism the country was ready to love their czars again.

Pushnin didn’t say.

The next exposition detailed the return of the remains of the czar and his family from Yekaterinburg, where they had been discovered in a shallow grave in a nearby forest, to Saint Petersburg in 1998. It displayed photographs of the construction, on the spot where the Ipatiev House had once stood, of the Church on Blood of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land. Work on the house of worship began during Yeltsin’s terms in office but was completed only in 2003, with Putin taking credit for the return of the last czar.

As did so many former communist leaders, Yeltsin went from advocating Soviet policies that resulted in the destruction of churches and the persecution of religion to the post-Soviet building of cathedrals almost everywhere imaginable. A new chapel even rose on the premises of Moscow’s School for the Ministry of the Interior—perhaps the most ungodly institution of the Russian state, with a history of punishing opponents dating back to 1802, to the reign of the authoritarian Alexander I.

After the Soviet collapse, the rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church has allowed it to play an outsize—and growing—role in the country’s political life. For instance, Patriarch Kirill instilled himself in politics by telling Russians, just before the bitterly contested presidential elections of 2012, that Putin revived Russia after the disastrous 1990s through a “miracle of God.”[31] Russia’s main problem is its propensity for veering from one extreme to the other. In this case, the swinging pendulum—from fervent Orthodox faith to virulent, anti-theistic communism—of Russians’ allegiance has destroyed millions of lives. First it was a justification of serfdom, then of purges and forced labor camps. Yet for all the Putin government’s stridently expressed views, at times embodied in legislation that seems intended to mollify the church, including a law prohibiting the “gay propaganda” of the “corrupt West,” the state has, by and large, persecuted relatively few. A sager approach to governance in Russia shows that the ruling elite has learned at least some lessons in moderation.

We stopped by a trolleybus on display. In many Russian cities, trolleybuses still play a major role in local transport. But this was the trolleybus Yeltsin took to work in 1985. After becoming the head of the Communist Party of Moscow (which essentially made him the capital’s mayor) Yeltsin, famous for his fight against privileges accruing to those in power, rode it to show that Politburo members should live no better than did ordinary Soviet citizens. His fight, we might add, did not last long. After he became president, the number of privileges he enjoyed skyrocketed; those with access to power would become richer, those without, poorer.

We then came upon an exhibit devoted to a wildly popular television show of political satire, Kukly (Puppets), showing Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the post-Soviet Communist Party leader. The display was meant to showcase Yeltsin’s open-mindedness. Unlike his chosen successor, Putin, Yeltsin did tolerate his critics on the airwaves. They found in him an easy target: by the time he resigned, on New Year’s Eve of 2000, his popularity had sunk to 2 percent. Kukly didn’t last long after Yeltsin’s departure. The Kremlin’s new master did not like his puppet, fashioned after E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1819 character Zinnober, from “Little Zaches, Great Zinnober.” Seemingly more insecure, and a former KGB operative, Putin apparently thought it inappropriate that the Russian public should watch a televised mocking of his person. Hoffmann’s description was not exactly flattering: “An unobservant eye would discover little about the face, but if you look more closely, you discover a … a pair of small, darkly flashing eyes.”[32] Moreover, Hoffmann’s character had questionable credentials, just as Putin did, many thought. And yet, as Hoffmann has it, Putin’s puppet, “for most people,” was “a perfect gentleman, poet, scholar, diplomat, and lover.”

We had serious questions for the chief archivist about Yeltsin’s term in office. What about his 1993 shelling of the Russian parliament, then called the Supreme Soviet, which is housed in a building known as the White House in Moscow? What about the constitutional crisis it had provoked by abolishing the legislative body? At the time, Yeltsin was locked in combat with a government accusing him of the corrupt and incompetent management of the economy that had given rise to the oligarchs and had drained the country’s coffers. Yeltsin dissolved the parliament, arguing that the communists, who held a majority, would bring back the Soviet Union. The dissolution was illegal, as was the shelling of the parliament, of course. But in the 1990s, the words “the threat of communism” were magic and excused all excesses. And here at the Yeltsin Center, we learned, they still do, at least according to our guide.

Pushnin both lamented and celebrated the fact that many pro-Putin public figures—including the highly educated and fervently Orthodox Christian Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov and the retrograde Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky—have declared the center a “rassadnik inakomysliya” (a hotbed of dissident thinking).

“Such attacks on us are good,” Pushnin stated, “for our reputation in other circles. And let’s face it. The Kremlin needs us to create the impression that it’s allowing freedom. Just by our existence, the center upholds the constitution, which guarantees freedom of thought and expression and prohibits censorship.”

Once again, the Perm-36 phenomenon—the Kremlin’s appropriation of the opposing views to promote its nonautocratic reputation. But whereas Perm is no longer a mass destination for the liberal luminaries who used to attend the annual Pilorama, the Yeltsin Center is still a must-visit for prominent artists, journalist, writers, and European diplomats. Perm-36 and the Yeltsin Center are, in short, the last holdouts of Russian democracy.

Although the Yeltsin Center denounces Stalinism and lauds Khrushchev’s Thaw in its historical displays—in contrast to the Lenin museum in Ulyanovsk—the exhibitions do not dwell on the questionable acts of Yeltsin’s reign. Still, when viewed in retrospect from the Putin era, the hardships and errors of Yeltsin’s presidency appear more acceptable than they were at the time.

One of the most glaring of these errors was the 1994 invasion of Chechnya—in what would become known as the First Chechen War—when Yeltsin rejected the demands of the Chechen Republic for a separate state. In the 1990s, as the Soviet empire was crumbling, Russia unequivocally pronounced itself pro-Western and democratic, for free markets and free choice. The Chechens, not surprisingly, declared independence in 1993, under the leadership of their president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former air force general. In January 1994 Yeltsin responded by sending Russia’s armed forces to besiege the Chechen capital of Grozny. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his Russian imperial predecessors.

Chechnya, a tiny Muslim republic in the mountains of the North Caucasus, has posed a problem for Russia for centuries. In 1810, under Czar Alexander I, Chechnya’s leadership “voluntarily” joined the Russian Empire. That immediately triggered a guerrilla war as locals sought to regain the independence their leaders had supposedly surrendered willingly.

During the decades of conflict that followed—with the Chechens continuously oppressed by the Russian state—a succession of Russian writers ventured into the mountains to write about the war, winning fame through the literary brilliance they manifested. From Pushkin’s poem “A Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1821) to Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of the conflict in his novella Hadji Murat (1912), these works of literature romantically acknowledged that the Chechens, hot-blooded warriors that they were, could not be fully conquered.

The twentieth century was hardly kinder to them: Stalin, fearing that ethnic minorities might rebel against the Russian majority following the Nazi invasion, initiated a policy of “population transfer,” a Soviet version of ethnic cleansing. Through operations conducted by his murderous secret police chief Lavrenty Beria in 1944, the Chechens, and other peoples of the Caucasus, were deported to Central Asia and Siberia in unheated cattle cars in the dead of winter. About a quarter of them died. The Chechens’ doomed struggle, in particular, was commemorated in Anatoly Pristavkin’s The Inseparable Twins (1981), a powerful narrative about two boys, a Russian and a Chechen, who became brothers of a sort in the crucible of forced national relocation. The main message of Pristavkin’s tale: the Chechens cannot be conquered; hence, they must be freed.

No one can understand Russia without understanding its literature, yet Russian leaders often fail to contemplate its lessons. Yeltsin and now Putin, who launched the Second Chechen War of 1999–2009—by then a battle with militants of various Islamist groups—learned that Chechnya may be pacified for a while but not vanquished. Putin has resolved this dilemma for now by allying with Chechnya’s current strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov: in return for remaining within the Russian Federation, Chechnya receives generous state subsidies, with Kadyrov allowed to run his republic as his own private estate—an outwardly Islamic state, in fact.

The Yeltsin Center tackles none of these political questions. A skillfully laid out display of the First Chechen War letters from Chechens and Russians makes clear the terror overhanging the bloody conflict. Its message, not exactly controversial: war is a curse on everyone.

“How do you reconcile Yeltsin’s involvement in the war with his democratic aspirations?” we asked our guide. He evaded the question and instead stressed the emotion expressed in the letters, and how “so very openly” the center decided to display them without taking sides.

Pushnin then led us to a stunning, sun-drenched hall—the Hall of Democracy. There ceiling-high windows opened onto the city, bathing in light a sky-blue mural entitled Svoboda (Freedom) painted by a well-known dissident, the Yekaterinburg-born artist Erik Bulatov. The word “freedom” emblazons not only the mural, but also the hall’s mirrored columns. Freedom—the aspiration of the new, liberal Russia Yeltsin helped birth.

For a moment, we felt carried back in time, to the era when Yeltsin’s Russia—chaotic, corrupt, and fearful—was still heading toward a freer future, a future in which Russia would, at some point, become part of Europe rather than what it is, de facto, today: a world of its own. Leading their tour groups, upbeat guides in their early twenties reminded us of the promise of the 1990s, when Russia’s talented, hardworking citizens were going to transform the post-Soviet space from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka.

Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, also known as the “father of Russian privatization,” once planned to accomplish this glorious transformation “in three ‘shock’ years,” following the dictates of neoliberalism laid out by mostly American advisors. This was a transformation “the rest of the world spent three hundred years achieving,” as Chubais said in a television interview back in 1994.

Pursuing such a utopian goal did not bring about the desired results of capitalism and democracy; instead it sowed disillusionment and mistrust. That feeling of both high hope and bitter disappointments was, perhaps, best captured by one exhibit, an orange sweater, a birthday gift from the late Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s onetime prime minister and, later, a leading member of the opposition to Putin. The orange color, Nemtsov’s undated note says, is “a reference to what Russia is missing today,” that is, freedom, a nod to the prodemocracy movement in Ukraine that brought about the Orange Revolution of 2004.

No doubt, the center, as do presidential libraries, aims at highlighting its namesake’s victories and downplaying his defeats. A replica of his Kremlin office, complete with a decorated Christmas tree, does take one back to December 31, 1999. Then, Russia’s first-ever president, at age sixty-eight, looking exhausted and slurring his words, addressed the country and announced he was resigning and ceding power to Putin, whom he had handpicked to replace him. Yeltsin had reason to do so: he needed to ensure that his family’s riches remained intact following the presidential elections, scheduled for 2000, which he surely would have lost. His less than laudable motives notwithstanding, Yeltsin became the only Soviet-era leader who voluntarily left office. The now sixty-six-year-old yet ever-youthful Putin is staying in power at least until 2024. In 2000 Russians complained that Yeltsin’s riches were calculated at fifteen million dollars, a meager amount compared to Putin’s projected worth, counting palaces, yachts, watches, cars. The total has come to some 40 to 70 billion dollars,[33] although his annual Kremlin salary is about 8.9 million rubles ($137,000).[34]

“This is a lesson in civics—giving up power when it’s time,” our guide told us, having mentioned nothing of the complicated circumstances surrounding Yeltsin’s resignation. “We teach kids who come here to learn about democracy, societal responsibility, political literacy, and so on.” The young guides listening in ardently nodded, their eyes shining with a conviction rarely seen elsewhere nowadays. They seemed to belong to the hopeful 1990s, when Russia, by leaps and bounds, was advancing toward something better. What a contrast they presented to the museum guides in Ulyanovsk—tired, scolding elderly ladies with beehive hairdos who seem to have stepped out of the Soviet past. The Yeltsin Center’s young people were indeed guides to the future.

In a way, despite its remote location, Yekaterinburg has been progressive. It gave birth to Russian hard rock. Now iconic bands—Nautilus Pompilius, Chaif, and Agata Kristi—with their revolutionary Ural Rock style and philosophical lyrics—first reflected the hopes and struggles of Soviet-era Perestroika and then of the disorderly, yet free, 1990s. In front of one of the city’s business centers stands a statue of Vladimir Vysotsky, the Soviet bard known for his brutally honest, wry depictions of Soviet life. A local skyscraper—“the most northern skyscraper in the world,” locals say, is even named after him. Vysotsky, a James Dean of sorts, died in 1980 and is celebrated all over Russia as “the heart of the nation.” He sang about the hardships and heroism of the everyday people in lyrics delivered in his signature raspy voice. His simple heartfelt words provided an alternative to dry socialist realism—the officially approved artistic style of the Soviet Union. Vysotsky was a Muscovite, yet the people of Yekaterinburg, and elsewhere in Russia, recognize his spirit as akin to their own.

The sculptor Ernst Neizvestny was also from Yekaterinburg. In his work, Neizvestny, approaching his craft by following his individualistic, original inclinations, challenged the artwork borne of socialist realism, with its themes always relevant to the workers’ state and that state’s politics. In 1962 at the Manezh exhibition he heatedly disagreed with Khrushchev’s criticism of avant-garde art. Yet in recognition of the achievements of the Thaw, Neizvestny made his most recognized creation, the former premier’s grave memorial in Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery: Khrushchev’s bronze head between two jagged pieces of white marble and black granite—he is both the anti-Stalin reformer and the Soviet reactionary.

After saying good-bye to Pushnin, we spent the rest of the day walking around this well-kept city, which has a cool, Chicago feeling about it. It is a mighty manufacturing metropolis with skyscrapers, diverse outdoor exhibits of art, its own music, and a lively nightlife. It even passed our café culture test with flying colors. Not only are coffee shops many, they are lively and open late into the night, welcoming curious and hungry passersby.

Though with Putin having scored a record-breaking win in the presidential elections of 2018, the Kremlin has apparently decided to disregard effective governance as a crucial factor in maintaining control over some of Russia’s cities and oblasts. Now in his nineteenth year in office, Putin expects Russia to surrender to him. The more homogeneous and devoid of any potential discontent the country is, the longer he may stay in power. If the public begins to demand a renewal of political blood, obedient governors and mayors should be prepared to suppress any related discontent. Such logic runs counter to the Kremlin’s own long-standing argument that the economically better developed regions should offset the less developed ones.

Until recently Yekaterinburg had skillfully managed to balance serving both its people and Moscow—an increasing rarity in Putinland. In 2014 Yevgeny Roizman, a charismatic politician of the Just Russia party beat a candidate from the ruling United Russia, and has been, since then, resisting Kremlin-backed contenders for regional power. At the beginning of Putin’s fourth term, however, he resigned in protest against the new rules aimed to cancel direct local elections.[35] Stifling changes to the vibrant city are probably to come, but during our visit in July 2017 the pulsating energy of the metropolis that never sleeps was still manifest.

The new café Makers, on Malyshev Street, off Moskovskiy Throughway, sits just a few blocks from Yekaterinburg’s Lenin Square. Its bright pink refrigerators and green-jungle-leaves wallpaper make it look as though it could have been a hip destination in Brooklyn. Typewriters sit on each table offering visitors a chance to pound out their views and suggestions; pencil cases are meant to hold your coffee bill, and once paid, your banknotes; pencil cups serving as tip jars—all are fun and clever, but not pretentious. Plus, their espresso is out of this world.

Not all shops around town, however, cater to modern tastes. Two streets, Chelyuskintsev and Sverdlov, are lined with fur stores emblazoned with a potpourri of names, from the banal to the patriotic—Squirrel Furs, Czar’s Fur, Russian Furs, Furs of Siberia, World of Fur, and so on—selling mink and shearling, beaver and chinchilla. Fur coats, the ultimate apparel of status and achievement, have always enjoyed primal popularity among Russians, even during the socialist decades. Here, too, they unite Europe and Asia; from the Urals and Siberia, fur has been traded west from time immemorial.

After perusing them, we readied ourselves to depart for our next destination, further east. On our minds would weigh, with a certain degree of sadness, the lost promise of the Yeltsin years—a time when in Russia almost anything seemed possible, as the soaring glass ceilings of the Yeltsin Center reminded us.

On a warm, clear July morning after a five-hour journey by rail through ragged deciduous forest and marshy clearings, our train slowed and stopped by the platform. The brilliant afternoon sun reflected off the metal-and-glass station festooned with a sign proudly announcing, WELCOME TO TYUMEN. The building, one of the major stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad, had been recently renovated, as was apparent in its ever-changing electronic tableaux announcing arrivals and departures, its spotless, mostly white modern interior. The Russian Railways have become a billion-dollar business with competitive prices; clean and comfortable cars; efficient services; and modern, well-kept stations. The station and service to Tyumen were no exception.

Founded in 1586, Tyumen, the current hub of the Russian oil industry, has had an even shinier look than most. After all, 64 percent of the region’s oil reserves, as well as nine-tenths of its natural gas, lie nearby. The Antipinsky Refinery alone, for example, processed almost eight thousand tons of oil in 2016. Moreover, Tyumen, population 750,000, is the capital of the vast Tyumen Oblast stretching from the border with Kazakhstan to the north, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Compared with much of the world’s vision of oil in the deserts, Russia is different once again—its oil country is nestled in the mountains and steppes of western Siberia.

Some of the largest international oil companies maintain offices in Tyumen, and Tyumen residents enjoy commensurately higher incomes—in fact, they have the highest standard of living in the Russian Federation.

No matter how sleek Tyumen’s train station was inside, though, upon debarking we confronted a motley crowd selling everything from furs to meat and cabbage pies to ice cream and pungently salted fish—a scene familiar along many stops on the Trans-Siberian. In Soviet days when consumer goods were available in limited supply, travelers loved jumping down onto the platform and perusing the creams or cakes or flowers on offer. In the Yeltsin era, when the economy collapsed, many in the outback found the only way to survive was to trade just about anything of value they could cart onto the platforms—from cups of tea and pastries to family heirlooms. Today, despite the much-improved economy, private trading of this sort persists, as prosperity is still a distant dream for many.

The origins of Tyumen’s name remain obscure, though it probably derives from the Tatar tumen (“ten-thousand-strong army”), which makes sense for a settlement that in the Middle Ages was a military stronghold—an ancient, prominent town belonging to the Tyumen Khanate of the Golden Horde, Khingi-Tura, on the Tura River. Tyumen stood on the old caravan route connecting the Povolzhye (lands along the Volga) with Central Asia. In 1580, Cossacks, pushing eastward to win territory for the czar, wrested control of the town from the Tatars. A few years later, Russians established their own fort there, the first Moscow outpost on the eastern side of the Urals. Tyumen found its status augmented when, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the government decided to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Tyumen. For political reasons it bypassed the more elegant town of Tobolsk, a famed place of exile for the Decembrist revolutionaries, the crème de la crème of the Russian aristocracy. During the Russian Civil War, the last czar’s family hid out here for a while, sheltered by the troops of Admiral Kolchak, until the Reds overtook them in January of 1918. During the Great Patriotic War, Lenin’s body was moved from the Red Square mausoleum to the blue-and-white nineteenth-century college building here that now holds the State Agrarian Academy. In the 1950s, government prospectors discovered major oil fields all around the Tyumen Oblast, which transformed this region into an industrial hub. Tyumen quickly became an administrative and educational center, with its renowned Tyumen State Oil and Gas University being founded in 1956.

Its history and prosperity notwithstanding, this town with its oil-boom ambiance resembles a Russian hybrid of the Klondike and Las Vegas, populated with modern-day prospectors and those who service them. People visit jewelry stores more than cafés; café culture is not Tyumen’s forte, yet garish restaurants abound. Zolotaya Lavina (Gold Avalanche) jeweler serves double duty as both a workshop for gold and diamond goods and, of all things, a bridal salon. Its large windows feature Siberian belles gracefully modeling wedding gowns. Nothing looks permanent; everything has something of the flashy, slapdash about it.

We couldn’t help wondering, where did Tyumen’s four-hundred-year history go? The new has obliterated the old. Even though it boasts the highest standard of living, the city revolves around oil revenues and buying things—furniture or fur or jewelry—not around enjoying life’s comforts, such as, say, having a cup of coffee or a relaxing meal.

Yet in this Vegas-cum-Klondike we discovered incipient signs of change to come. Although some of the restaurants serve reindeer meat and sour cream–smothered pelmeni, the Double B Coffee and Tea (a café from a Moscow franchise) employs a barista sporting a fashionably scruffy beard and a man-bun; he deployed the panache of a true artisan in making us an espresso, taking a full twenty minutes to do so. “How cool am I, creating this real European drink in this real coffeehouse that has its headquarters in the Russian capital!” his mien seemed to tell us. Outside, fashionably dressed young men and women strode down clean, well-paved sidewalks, glancing at their reflections in store windows. Tyumen folk project a cool, tough demeanor: they live in an oil-rich town and take pride in being Siberians; one may even say they have created what amounts to “Siberian chic.” The display of toughness, though, seems too ostentatious to be real. Perhaps it is no wonder that Grigory Rasputin was born in a nearby village. A notorious fraud, Rasputin wielded tremendous influence over Russia’s last empress, Alexandra, the wife of Nicholas II, for his seeming ability to alleviate her son’s hemophilia.

Souped-up motorbikes with oversize tires roar about Tyumen, showcasing their owners’ excess of testosterone and spare cash, and muscle cars shoot by with their camouflage paint-overs, perhaps signaling a readiness to fight for the country. Many display both the red flags and Russian imperial Saint George ribbons, which in the Putin years have come to represent Russian nationalism. They became especially popular after Russia’s lightning takeover of Crimea. Some of Tyumen’s store windows display huge posters, inviting tourists to “Crimea, the Holy Origins of Russia,” in reference to Vladimir the Great’s 988 baptism of Kievan Rus, which according to some sources took place in Korsun, present-day Chersonesus, in Crimea.

During the Stalin decades of Soviet classicism, the government built grand statues, opulent parks, and elaborately designed subway stations—“people’s palaces,” as it were—to compensate, at least in part, for the austere nature of life. Even now, in Tyumen, public displays of state wealth spent on the “needs of the people” seem to matter more than encouraging the private investment that would flourish in the café culture we saw developing elsewhere in Russia. Here the cafés were almost empty. We detected further evidence of this in the city’s large pedestrian zone in the center, along Tsvetnoy Boulevard (named after a famous street in Moscow); there, those out for a stroll wander across several squares with fountains and pose for photos beside the jets of water, line up to enter museums, and visit the circus.

Public displays of state wealth lavished on the people also lend an official imprimatur to individuals the state selects as convenient for its image. On Tsvetnoy Boulevard stands a tribute, sculpted in bronze—a helmet and motorcycle gloves—to the local bikers’ band, Siberian Hawks. When we visited, it was surrounded by admirers. Tyumen Oblast governor Vladimir Yakushev has been a vocal supporter of the Hawks. Yet he is not entirely original in this. Putin, famously, has been riding with the right-wing nationalist group, the Night Wolves. These biker gangs became synonymous with Russia’s intense displays of militant patriotism and machismo in the wake of Moscow’s confrontation with Ukraine.

Of course, influence can travel both from the capital to the provinces and from the provinces to the capital. Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin was once governor here. Since assuming office in 2010, he has been busy transforming Moscow into a grander, if more congested, version of Tyumen. (As one might imagine, this has not gone down well with urbane Muscovites.) In particular, he has broadened many sidewalks downtown to, in places, forty-six feet across, which has constricted roadways and worsened Moscow’s already horrific traffic jams: an example of Sobyanin’s know-how gleaned from his years in provincial Tyumen, where he also broadened sidewalks. If it is unclear why a provincial city like Tyumen would need outsize sidewalks, it is even less comprehensible in Moscow, which is, after all, first and foremost a city of cars—small sporty Italian cars, glistening black Audis and Volvos, boxlike Mercedes SUVs. Besides, frequently inclement weather discourages pedestrians, in both cities.

Famously partial to cobblestones or, to be exact, their cement equivalents, Sobyanin is rumored to have once declared, “Asphalt is not native to Russia.” He has, thus, been turning Moscow upside down every summer, tearing up thousands of miles of asphalt walkways (1.5 million square miles at the summer 2017 count) and laying down chunky concrete cobblestone look-alikes—at great inconvenience to residents—under the pretext of beautifying the city, just as he once did in Tyumen.[36] Few Russia watchers would be surprised to learn that his (now former) wife Irina and her firm Aerodromstroi (Airport Construction) were involved in installing such faux-cobblestones in Moscow and elsewhere. In her native Tyumen, Irina was known informally as Irina Bordyur (Curbstone Irina). Cobblestones, if laid poorly, can become a menace to pedestrians, and are, after all, at least as foreign to Russia as asphalt is. No matter: during the eight years of Sobyanin’s tenure, the city has refurbished walkways with Curbstone Irina’s bricks. Imagine the wealth flowing into Aerodromstroi’s coffers!

Nevertheless, the slickness, artificial though it may be, that Sobyanin has brought to Moscow (and once to Tyumen) seems to be going down well with the Kremlin. In fact, just as Stalin’s favorite architectural style, socialist classicism—exemplified by wedding-cake skyscrapers with intricate facades—found itself replicated in major Soviet cities today, Sobyanin’s broad sidewalks have become commonplace all over Russia. A political message lies within these walkways: down their broad expanses a content, imperial, and patriotic citizenry is expected to stroll, grateful for the largesse of their government in making their time on the pavement more pleasant.

Tyumen residents, as far as we could tell, take pride in their proliferating array of Russian Orthodox churches. In recent decades and partly during Sobyanin’s tenure as governor, the city, as a taxi driver named Mikhail admiringly (and with some degree of exaggeration) joked to us, “exceeded the Kremlin plan by erecting twenty thousand new places of worship, churches, chapels, and so on.” A macho fellow in a sleeveless T-shirt exposing his biceps, tattooed with images of the Kremlin, Mikhail explained while driving us around town: “Putin is good because he represents power! He uses his office as head of state—a sacred office—to show Russia’s greatness. Russia will be saved through pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost”—the Orthodox faith, state power, and the people, those pillars of Russianness introduced by Nicholas I. “It will flourish through the expansion of its empire, its messianic, civilizing influence over other cultures. We would be nothing without our size.”

“What about other empires? Do they also have a civilizing influence?” we asked.

“Ha, they are truly evil. Those European settlers, when encountering Native American tribes early on in North America, gave them smallpox-ridden blankets to eliminate them, using illness as a means of biological warfare. That’s how they conquered North America, through death. What kind of empire is that?!” He contrasted how Russia spread east across Siberia. “We’re tough and strategic here. The Russian people expanded to the east for freedom and to spread its influence, and that’s how our national character was built,” Mikhail exclaimed proudly, though his toughness seemed a little too much on display, as though he had to strike a patriotic note in speaking to outsiders.

He was not entirely wrong about the Americans, but he was also not quite right about the Russians—their expansion was not benevolent, either. In fact, he confirmed just one truth: all imperial conquests are problematic.

In the center of Tyumen next to the City Administration on Lenin Street stands Patron (“cartridge,” as in ammunition), a store catering to hunters and outdoorsmen. In addition to guns and fishing tackle, Patron also displays a dark green cannon on wheels. Manly hunters, one presumes, are also patriotic and ready to defend the Motherland. A block away, next to the imposing local affiliate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, across from the Lenin statue in Central Square, we spotted yet another hunting store, Bagira—as in Bagheera, Mowgli’s panther protector, from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, still immensely popular in Russia. Through its tinted windows we saw posters lauding “Military Tourism in Crimea”—here is Crimea again, nowadays the pinnacle of all things Russian. Patriotism, firearms, and guns, all amalgamated into flashy advertisements displayed as much for the money they would generate for tour companies as for the increase in revenues the state has hoped to generate for its newest region, reliant, since czarist days, on summertime visitors for much of its annual income.

Yet not only hunting shops manifest fervent patriotism here in Tyumen; local cats are enlisted in this noble task, too. Tyumen may be the only city on earth boasting a Siberian Cat Park (Skver Sibirskikh Koshek), laid out to honor feline service during the Great Patriotic War. Then, local authorities rounded up two hundred tough Siberian cats and dispatched them westward, to save Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum, in which marauding rats were damaging priceless works of art.

Even fashion here is of a distinct Tyumen style we had not encountered elsewhere in Russia (in recent years, at least; such attire was common in summertime Moscow in the early 1990s). Young women strolled down their city’s wide sidewalks draped in flower-print dresses—rather common, yes, but they reach to the ankle, resembling a mixture of a ball gown meeting casual Friday threads. In a coffee shop, we couldn’t hide our curiosity and complimented a young woman on her dress, which was festooned with prints of large red roses.

She replied, “We in Tyumen like to wear nice clothes. To dress up, if you will.”

“What kind of fashion is it?”

“Siberian fashion!” she answered combatively.

No patronizing Muscovite visitors were going to impugn her taste, motivated, at least in part, by the pride Siberians take in their home region. During the chaotic Yeltsin years, Siberians often referred to European Russia as “the continent”—implying that the turmoil in Moscow belonged to another land.

Impressed with such conviction, we smiled and got our coffee.

After passing through the Urals and entering Siberia, we recalled a line from Nikolai Gogol’s famous play The Government Inspector: “From here you can ride for three years and won’t reach another country.” It took the exiled Decembrists over a year to march to this province. Nowadays, Tyumen is only a thirty-hour train ride (not much, by Russian standards) from Moscow, but here, for the first time, we began to ponder, “What happens when you cross into another time zone? Does more than scenery change? Do people change?”

Almost imperceptibly, we felt Russia’s spirit changing—into something more expansive, infused with the grandeur of a land whose geographic boundaries, as well as the human cruelty they have witnessed, exceed our capacity to comprehend.