Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | My Russia: One Reporter's View of Life After Communism, page 5 (low bandwidth)

One night, not far from Yuri Filippovich’s apartment, a man spotted a suspicious car near his building and people unloading sacks into the basement. He raised the alarm and the building was evacuated. Residents were kept from their homes all night thinking they had been a hair’s breadth from death, only to have the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, praise the operation as a successful training exercise. They said the sacks were dummy bombs. Conspiracy theorists still hold that the FSB was somehow connected to all of the bombings as part of a secret effort to bring Putin to power, but this idea, also, remains only a speculation.

Ryazan’s chapter of Memorial, a nationwide human rights network formed at the height of perestroika to record and rehabilitate victims of Stalinism, tried to investigate the thwarted bombing, but without success. Like chapters across Russia, it does everything from hold protests against the Chechen war to help the destitute with housing or legal problems, and never loses sight of its main mission: that Russia never again experience the kind of atrocities that were the hallmark of Josef Stalin. (Twenty million people are thought to have been victims of Stalin’s purges.) Local activists continue to track down Stalin-era mass burial sites and arrange proper funerals. So far the “memorial book” of local victims has 5,000 entries and is expected, eventually, to include 17,000 names.

“People don’t really remember these things,” says Sergei Romanov, a prominent activist. “And kids don’t know about it at all. At most, they’ve heard something vague about repression.”

Yuri Filippovich, though, has never forgotten. At night in his chilly apartment, he types memoirs and short stories about prison life on a prehistoric computer. Filed away among his papers is a letter from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saying he’s included some of this material in his library of memoirs, which gives Yuri Filippovich some comfort.

For me, Yuri Filippovich embodies many of Russia’s contradictions in its struggle to reconcile past and present. He’s not too troubled by Ryazan’s restoration of its main Lenin monument, which was dismantled in 1991, smiles sardonically at city streets bearing dual Soviet and pre-revolutionary names, and strangely, is not fearful of Putin. In fact, he sees Russia’s salvation in him, because he is young, energetic and religious.

But now, he breaks down when he reads a passage about “Iron Feliks” from his memoirs about a meeting in Moscow, years later, with a greatly admired fellow Gulag prisoner. “We talked about how hard it is to be second-class citizens,” he reads, tears welling. “He would get into the metro and follow the flow. He approached ‘Iron Feliks.’ He could bear it in the daytime, but at night he remembered hell.”

Imperial Capital
St. Petersburg is the city where Russia’s past, present, and future converge most symbolically. Founded on a swamp in 1703 as Peter the Great’s “window to Europe,” cradle of the revolution that brought down the tsars, its upcoming 300th anniversary is the impetus for a vast construction project to restore it to imperial glory. It is also Vladimir Putin’s hometown.

Facades are being given facelifts, roads repaired, vast sums are being spent to restore the 1,000-room 18th century Konstantinovsky Palace as Putin’s official residence in St. Petersburg, which he has turned into a center for receiving foreign dignitaries. George W. Bush was his guest at Tsarskoye Selo, which had once been a summer palace of Russia’s tsars.

Misha Pikalov was my guide to St. Petersburg and its transformation. I met him when the city was still called Leningrad. (St. Petersburg became Petrograd during WWI and Leningrad after the 1917 Revolution; in 1991 its original name was restored.) Misha is a village boy who studied philosophy at Leningrad State University but read the Bible instead of Marx. While working as a fireman he learned to manipulate ropes and ladders and latched onto the idea of repairing roofs and ceilings without scaffolding which, in St. Petersburg, made him worth his weight in gold.

As we drove through the city, he pointed out the buildings on which he has worked, which include every church and palace of note from the Hermitage to his pride and joy, the Cathedral of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Aleksandr II, the “tsar liberator,” who Misha clearly admires, was assassinated in 1881. Misha has been working on the restoration of the cathedral, which has nearly 7,500 square meters of mosaics, for nearly 30 years. The cooperative of 20 he founded during perestroika has grown to a company of 100 builders and artisans who do the finest, most painstaking work.

Nowadays, Misha is in a state of perpetual motion. His mobile phone rings constantly to the theme from Mission Impossible. He took up photography several years ago and snapped countless photos of the burial of the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family in 1998, 80 years after their murder by revolutionary henchmen. His photos of the city are part of a St. Petersburg promotional tour that went to London last year and will be in the U.S. next fall.

Misha’s main workshop is at the exquisite Marble Palace, built by order of Catherine the Great. From 1937 to 1992, the palace housed the Lenin Museum, but has now been given to the Russian Museum, which has the world’s largest collection of Russian art. Misha’s team restored the palace’s glittering White Hall, now used for summit meetings, conferences and concerts. A statue of Tsar Aleksandr III on horseback has replaced Lenin’s famous armored car that used to dominate the courtyard.

A statue of “Iron Feliks” still stands in front of what was once a building belonging to Leningrad’s secret police. In St. Petersburg, the imposing likeness of Dzerzhinsky was never torn down. As we passed by, Misha said he wondered why anyone in Moscow would want to put their version of “Iron Feliks” back on his pedestal.

“Why put up a monument to an executioner?” he asks.

One Step Ahead
As I caught up with these old friends of mine, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, it seemed to me that though their personal situations had for the most part improved, corruption and economic uncertainty were so widespread that the parents among them often talked of sending their children off to live somewhere else where life would be better and easier. Their children, though, were mostly indifferent to the idea; perhaps because they didn’t feel trapped in Russian society in the way that their parents had in the past. Tanya Tabak says that maybe this is because young people like her daughter, Masha, have had the opportunity to travel freely outside the country; something that was impossible for the preceding generation raised under the Communist yoke.

The Slonims and their friends still gather in the woods to sing songs, but now they travel by car instead of on a rickety train and call each other on their cell phones as they go along their way. Though everyone seems to be trying to adapt to the new opportunities—and new dangers—in this new Russia, risen from its own ashes, still, in this remarkable, energetic, enigmatic, frustrating and unruly country, so much seems to be left half said and always, half undone.

Here’s a perfect example: Jury trials—introduced by Tsar Aleksandr II and banned by Lenin—were scheduled to be instituted on January 1 of this year. When I called the administrative headquarters of one region on January 9 to inquire about progress, I was told by a lawyer, “Maybe something will be happening in another six months,” and by a judge, “No, we don’t have any jury trials scheduled because no one has asked for them.”

I gather, then, for now, there will be jury trials only when a defendant asks for one—and only if he or she has ever heard of such a thing. And that, I think, is the perfect metaphor for Russia at the beginning of this new century: everyone wants change, but they’re suspicious of it when it comes, and think that maybe it should be parceled out only if you ask for it. Only if you believe that even if you fall two steps backwards, a better future really can be just one step ahead.

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