History must work

I had last Wednesday off, and took a trip down to visit Park Pobedy, Russia's primary war memorial, located down along Kutusovsky Prospekt west of the city center. I went knowing full well that it isn't quite the soundest intellectual experience in the city, but I was curious.

The giant park itself is probably the last real Soviet space -- planning for it began in Soviet times, but it wasn't actually completed until 1995. It sprawls with fountains and paved plazas. And considering the way Moscow's real estate market is developing, this is certainly the last big development here that won't entail a shopping mall, "business center," condos, and underground parking.

The Park Pobedy metro station is one of the system's newest, and you can tell as you step off the train into the gleaming bright halls. Unlike most station, there is no Soviet kitsch hanging around, just simple designs. On the one hand, it feels cleanly modern, but on the other hand it feels a bit like a western European airport.

You pop up on the Prospekt near the 1812 Triumphal Arch, and the park opens up before you. Wednesday happened to be the day to celebrate the Border Guards -- their 90th anniversary no less. Whenever any of the security branches celebrate their name-day, all the veterans don their old hats and medals, invade some prominent public space, get scandalously drunk, and do everything they can think of to embarrass their entire service. The park was full of former border guards wearing their distinctive bright green halo-hats. They were a bit better behaved than the celebrating paratroopers and sailors I'd seen before, but not by much.

The park forces you to walk about half an hour through a vast square lined with fountains and thick with obscure symbolism -- five terraces for the five years of the war, and the like. Soviet public planning and architecture is deliberately about alienation, a conscious effort to make the individual feel useless and absurd in the presence of a space that is designed for no earthly being, and only derives its value from its emptiness, implying that only raw volume alone could possibly fill it up.

Park Pobedy offers the interesting aspect of forcibly shoving in the exact same space the two worst things to happen to Moscow's architecture: Soviet excess and Zurab Tsereteli. The Moscow government's favorite hack sculptor designed the central "Victory Monument," a giant metal obelisk. You'd think that a very tall and perfectly straight pillar would be a hard thing to screw up, but Tsereteli finds a way to do so. It features chaotic etchings all the way up and down it, St. George killing some kind of Nazi dragon at the base, and a giant Nike hanging off the top bearing golden trumpets and laurels that looks like it will snap off and fall to earth one of these days.

The centerpiece of the park is the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War. I dutifully paid my 120 ruble foreigner-rate ticket took a look inside. A very Soviet space, designed around spaces that fit that alienating quality I mentioned -- in this case with lots of square rooms and right angles and plenty of uncomfortable furniture scattered around for no real reason.

But even worse, the space is designed to put history to work. It is not an educational experience, it is an indoctrination. The lower level features the "Hall of Memory and Sorrow," a long, dimly lit hallway lined with vitrines featuring volumes listing the dead. Hanging from the ceiling are million of different sized crystals dangling from thin gold chains -- representing, naturally, the millions of tears shed, etc. The hall eventually leads you up to a secular pieta of a stout Russian woman holding on her lap a deceased soldier.

Surrounding the hall are the dioramas, which sum up the fast hit nature of ideology. I guess I expected something more than the large, dusty paintings I saw, but I was starkly disappointed in what I saw. They start with the Battle for Moscow, showing ranks of new recruits rushing to the front through a snowy landscape. Smoke and fire in the distance, Soviet planes commanding the skies. The next features Stalingrad, which to my amazement depicts Soviet troops celebrating the victory amid a handful of shell-shocked and despondent Nazi prisoners. The diorama about the Leningrad blockade really works the heart-strings, featuring dead babushkas on the street and cultural treasures in flame all around. Other images of the Battle of Kursk and the taking of Berlin are cartoonish in their depiction of writhing men in battle, of dramatically flailing bodies, smoke and wrecked machines. They were taking schoolchildren through all this.

Upstairs features the Hall of Glory, a giant domed space with the names of all the Heroes of the Soviet Union engraved on the walls (interesting fact: seven unrelated men named "Mikhail Borisov" were Heroes). In the center is a typical "Bronze Soldier" kind of statue. Apparently, they swear in new officers there.

I remember a few years ago when the U.S. was in full emotive agitation about "The Greatest Generation" that there was a noticeable backlash against simplifying the very complicated experience of war. I heard some of the strongest doubts come from veterans themselves. That seemed quite healthy to me. I've written a lot about Russia's problematic use of history and ideology, but sometimes I wonder if the enormity of what happened simply makes it impossible to speak the truth.

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Since I was in the neighborhood, I walked from the park up Ulitsa Barklaya to Gorbushka, the great emporium of all things technical, pirated, and copied. As goes Russia, so goes Gorbushka. What had begun as a dodgy set of stalls selling all kinds of products of dubious provenance, the market has been tamed and moved indoors. The lower levels are pretty much like any other appliance store, full of plasma televisions, washer/dryers, microwaves, and stoves. The upper level was once jammed with small stalls of whatever you could possibly hope to find for jawdropping prices. But each time I go back, there seem to be fewer of these, and more and more "respectable" places, with legitimate prices. One more chapter in Russia's voyage to the global economy closes.

Stuff on teevee

Very busy couple of days here in Moscow. To my real amazement, it seems the Champions League final at Luzhniki on Wednesday really did go off without any trouble. The cops even put on their dressy uniforms, with the dress jackets and clean white shirts rather than their day-to-day paunch-enhancing light blue blouses.

The game was on western European time, so it didn't get underway until about 11 p.m. here, and didn't wrap up until nearly 2 a.m. as a result. Then I had to write my column about it all. I had already written something about Saturday's Russia Cup final between CSKA Moscow and Amkar Perm -- specifically about the way it ended in a penalty shoot-out. But since the big game ended the same way, I felt there was no way I could avoid hashing it in. (UPDATE 5/24: I wish I'd had more time to think through my column about the game. The commentary about the nature of these kinds of events has been very interesting, like this and this. I think I may be on to something.

It very much feels like we are going through a great clump of big events right before the slow, dull dacha season arrives. For example, this weekend we have the Eurovision finals in Belgrade. Last year, I was able to watch my first Eurovision, and was swept away by its unapologetic cheesiness, circus-like nationalism, and phenomenally curious voting patterns.

Alas, this year, I'm a bit depressed about it, especially since Ireland's entry -- a singing turkey puppet named Dustin -- was dismissed, I don't see anyone carrying the torch for us ironically-inclined viewers. Plus, I've actually heard that Russia's Dima Bilan is tipped as the favorite, which makes my head hurt. For those of you who don't follow Russian pop closely, Dima is the owner of Russia's most famous mullet -- which is saying quite a lot in this mullet-mad nation. He is very popular with teenage girls -- and apparently with certain kinds of older men thanks to some risque photo shoots in his impressionable youth.

The very fact that he became Russia's selection this year demonstrates the scandalous web of influence-peddling and nepotism that ruins the spirit of competition and international friendship behind this long-running event (pfff... tryin' to keep a straightface). Dima already had his chance in 2006, and brought shame and dishonor to the Russian people with his embarrassing second place finish. This year is nothing more than his management's effort to make another futile push into the wider European market.

I hope it doesn't work. This song, which I've seen a couple times on the music channels, is so awful that it stops being funny. It is in English, but that kind of Eastern European cheese-pop English that you don't recognize unless someone tells you, "hey, I think this song is in English!" I can't tell what the hell the lyrics are about, but judging by the video, it is about a very sick and incredibly picturesque little boy. Judging Dima's interest in him and the obviously Western quality of care at the hospital where he is staying (no nurses demanding bribes for painkillers, the floors look like they've been cleaned since the Andropov era, etc etc), I guess he is the son of a well-placed oligarch, but that's neither here nor there. The point is he is awfully sick, in a Dickensian sort of stoic heart-stirring way, and Dima organizes a "beneficent" concert for him at a hockey arena. He performs this song about hope and shit with some dude pretending to saw away on a fiddle and a fashion photographer hovering around. The coup de grace that makes this about everything wrong with today's Russia arrives when jackass ice skater Yevgeny Plushenko makes an appearance and twirls around to inspire everyone or whatever.

And this thing is tipped to win the whole thing. I am so profoundly disillusioned that I almost can't be ironic anymore. I think I'll skip the crappy songs and just watch the voting -- which seriously ought to be the subject of a colloquium at the Council on Foreign Relations or something. Fareed Zakaria ought to write a book about it.

And you know who definitely can't be ironic? Russia's state-run First Channel, which will broadcast the final. They've been running a promo with a definite message. It shows the Russian national hockey team winning the World Championships in Canada last week, plus Zenit St. Petersburg winning the UEFA Cup this month, and ends with Dima's quest for glory. So you see, Eurovision -- just like international sports -- is really about proving the amazing super-awesome glory of Russia over all the suckahs. Take that Estonia! Shove it Ukraine!

UPDATE (5/25): Ungh. Dima's "live" performance, and the nationalist backwash here the morning after, have been even more loathsome than I had imagined. The 12-year old girls of Europe have let mankind down. I voted last night -- only because how often do I get to vote in the Eurovision finals? -- and was ready to go with Azerbaijan, whose entry included men dressed as angels and a guy sitting on a throne pouring fake blood on a writhing dancer. But I chose to go with Spain's entry, which seemed in the light-hearted spirit appropriate for things like this.

A little more on Vladimir...

I tried to sum up some of my thoughts about our experience in Vladimir in this month's installment of my "Letter from Moscow" column in the Berkshire Eagle. (It'll only be up for a few days though...)

A trip to Vladimir, part two

The main street, with its belching buses and long blocks of Stalin-era housing, is not the best way to see the city. We discovered running exactly parallel Herzen Street, which is a classic small provincial town street, lined with often brightly colored wood houses, and with stray dogs running around with impunity. Below is a building at the corner of Herzen and Chekhov streets.

Above is the city of Vladimir’s department of handicapped and invalid services (where they put the elevator is a good question…). You can’t really see its other plaque, but it was also the home of N.N. Zlatovratsky, a realist Russian writer of the late 19^th century who specialized, apparently, in presenting the lives and troubles of peasants. On our trip, I’d brought along a copy of Chekhov’s letters, and the day we saw this house I happened to read the letter in which Chekhov briefly mentions that he doesn’t like his work. This was apparently a happening part of the city in the 1890s – across the street lived one Fedoseyev, who is credited on a plaque as being the first Marxist revolutionary in the district, and who Lenin came to visit in 1893.

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This strange thing on Lower Moskovskaya Ultisa is a monument to the victims of the Chernobyl Disaster.

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At the western end of downtown is the Golden Gate, one of the original seven gates in the medieval city’s walls (you can see what is left of the walls in that green hillock to the right). Mila found it a good place to make her own temporary impression on the sidewalks of Vladimir.

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The downtown is located on a long, steep hill over the Klyazma River. Considering the flat expanse of Russia, it creates some dramatic views. You can almost imagine seeing the Mongols riding up.

A trip to Vladimir, part one

Earlier this month, we spent a week in the city of Vladimir while Olga was doing some fieldwork. This is the nearest “big” city on the main rail line going east, about three hours or so. Getting away from Moscow’s urban overdrive is always a relief, and just rolling along on the train through the flat fields is a relief, even if you are shepherding a toddler up and down the aisles!

Vladimir has about 316,000 people, and it doesn’t take very long to realize just how different Moscow is from the rest of country. Everything in Vladimir feels dustier, poorer, more broken. It is a relief to get away from all the elitny baloney, but there remains an almost palpable sense of despair and isolation in the provinces.

And of course, it is hard for someone from America in particular to get his head around the idea of a place who best days were more than 800 years ago…

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Vladimir was founded in the 12^th century as one of the far flung principalities that would eventually come together as “Russia.” Its heyday was relatively brief, but enough to lead to some breathtaking stuff.

The center of the city is Cathedral Square, where sits Assumption Cathedral. Construction began in 1158 on this iconic Russian building, which is said to be the model for the more famous Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin.

The church sits on a bluff of land over the Klyazma River, with an unbroken view into the far distance. One can see why it would have been an attractive place to build a fortified town. Like many sacred Russian buildings, it is patrolled by a platoon of mean old women who specialize in frightening children and harassing visitors. Once you get past them, the church is amazing. The interior feels cave-like, with thick walls, deep shadows broken by flickering candles, and lots of little chambers and lonely places. The real treat are the frescoes by Andrei Rublev of the Last Judgment, which were painted in 1408. They are a little worse for wear, but unmistakeably powerful and haunting.

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Nearby is St. Dmitry’s Cathedral, a smaller and less imposing structure but amazing all the same. The outside is covered with incredibly detailed images from the life of King David.

The hard thing about visiting UNESCO world heritage sites with an 18-month old is that you have to keep one eye on the priceless architectures and reliefs, and the other on a running around 18-month old.

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The great thing about travel is going through all the effort to put yourself in a strange situation, and then taking it for granted long enough that you are surprised when you realize just how weird everything has gotten. This is an awkward way of saying that we passed this scene nearly every day not far from our hotel,along the main street, Lower Moskovskaya Ulitsa. The building, like many old wooden ones of its era, is leaning one way. Behind it is an Old Believers’ Church, that is apparently off the tourist beaten track.

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Residents apparently can’t put much faith in their local government, but happily, there is a political party that can help! Putin’s United Russia graciously sponsored a playground in the center of town where we frequently went to play.

This is very peculiar to me, and reflects just how profoundly party politics here is nothing more than a matter of branding. The brand creates all the fun stuff, like playgrounds, while the “serious” business of cleaning up trash and fixing potholes is up to the government. It is a sign of severe decay in the civic infrastructure when these two endeavors – politics and government – are considering completely separate in the eyes of most Russian subjects.

Victory Day

On our recent trip to the city of Vladimir, I noticed that nearly every large public building in the city center had a plaque like the one above on it. It reads that during the Great Patriotic War, the building served as a hospital. I suppose that as the nearest big city on a major rail line from Moscow and the front, it was a natural place to send the wounded. But walking around this medieval city, you realize that for awhile, it was a gigantic hospital ward.

Victory Day is probably the most important Russian holiday these days, much much more than anything like Memorial Day or what we have in the West. It manifests itself in clear ways -- the orange and black ribbons people started wearing a few years ago -- and it serves as the sort of unofficial start of the warmer months, when everyone starts getting their dacha into habitable condition again. It also happens to be when television seems to show nonstop for two weeks old Soviet war movies (and, I would dare to hope not coincidentally, a few American ones two. This week I saw Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Saving Private Ryan on national t.v. This is a big deal considering that in the popular understanding is that Russia defeated Nazi Germany, but Westerners insist on taking all the credit).

There was a big parade this morning on Red Square, which made quite a fuss because Russia decided once again to include tanks and ICBMs and other hardware in what is assumed to be a throwback to Soviet military showing-off. I watched the parade, and it was honestly not as impressive as in the old days, in large part because they closed off one of the main entrances to the Square. I hate to say it, but compared to what we see from North Korea, it wasn't that scary (what are scary are these redesigned uniforms by Valentin Yudashkin. Sorry to beat this again, but this jackass' great improvements are to add gold arm tassles and to make the clownishly oversized "halo" hats even taller and pointier. More proof that as a nation and a culture, Russia may have completely lost any sense of taste it may have had).

Anyway, there is something very unsettling about Victory Day. Selective history at work on this scale is never pretty, but the degree to which Russia self-edits can't be good. There is no mention now of the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler, the invasion of Finland, how the incompetence of Soviet leadership frequently compounded the misery for everyone, and about what the Red Army did to the civilian population when it finally reached Germany.

Part of it seems to be out of respect for the remaining veterans and their memory, but it is hypocritical. Young Russian proudly wear their ribbons, and indulge in some patriotic self-congratulation, and then on May 10 return to ignoring the pensioners in their midst, who continue to live on meagre pensions, in inadequate housing, with incredibly poor health care.

Everything I've seen of this country suggests to me that these willful myths are destined to become core components of the national character. The unimpeachable heroism of the war will go right up there with the "Tartar yoke," the murderous treachery of Poles, the insistence that Russia must be whipped into shape by a "strong hand."

The simple fact is that the fight against fascism is one of the most heroic and important moments in human history. The sad fact is that the Soviet Union at the time was perhaps the only society sufficiently familiar with hardship, cruelty, and injustice to make the sacrifices demanded to defeat the Nazi war machine.

Catching up

It's been an eventful spring for me to have taken this unscheduled hiatus, and I'm trying to slowly get back in the swing of things. Been snowed under a pile of copyediting, copywriting, and toddler-care, but hopefully things will perk up a bit in the coming weeks.

About yesterday's inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev as the third president of the Russian Federation, I don't have a lot to add about the geopolitical implications. But the teevee show itself was amazing in that it couldn't have been better stage-managed if the Kremlin's production team had just decided to chuck it all and CGI the whole thing.

The sweeping boom camera shots, the panoramic aerial shots over an eerily deserted central Moscow, nothing was left to chance -- they even threw in a few real digital CGI effects. And whenever you have a fortress as your seat of government, you get remarkable control of media access. So every media outlet on earth was stuck with the Kremlin's single, unified vision, with each and every shot completely managed.

And yet... I don't know if it just got overlooked in the shuffle or they just didn't think it was important enough, but the whole thing was still horribly boring -- In marches the flag, in marches a deluxe edition of the Constitution, Mironov and Gryzlov slink on stage. It was pure catatonia. The most interesting part were the new tsarist uniforms designed by fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin, which are, I dunno, over the top? And in keeping with the general television spectacle theme, the thing abruptly ended and regular programming returned, and everyone was shooed back to their regular routine. By nightfall, I saw news websites that had bumped it down in favor of a story about Poland's talks with the U.S. about missile defense.