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.