One Russia?

The name of Putin’s political party, the ruling party in this country, is Единая Россия– in English, United Russia, or One Russia. I had been to Russia’s current and former capitals before, but this past week I came to doubt the rhetoric of this party’s name more than ever before. Now that I have been three times each to St. Petersburg and Moscow, and have known how it feels to return to Tomsk after time in these cities, I am able to draw a parallel between “United Russia” and the United States: these countries are considered self-contained wholes in terms of politics, but not in terms of experience.

The more I see of Moscow, the more I am struck by its sense of power, wealth, and strength. It seems to me a very masculine city, and it has a kind of masculine beauty about it. It is historical– centuries older than St. Petersburg–and yet it feels as though it is always racing forward, striving for progress at a breakneck pace. Meanwhile, amid all the skyscrapers and $7 coffees and luxury cars (all of which cry out “We are equal to any capital of the Western world”) there are Orthodox churches and ancient women, who wear the hardships of Communist past pulled down over their ears like a well-worn cap.

Official reports tell us that Communism is dead, but any traveler willing to brave the Moscow metro will find that it is alive and well in the city’s architecture. The metro stations themselves (in which it is, annoyingly enough, illegal to take photographs) are monuments to Communist wealth and power, and taking the train a few stops out of the center can make the unsuspecting tourist feel that he has gone back in time a few decades. On a free afternoon, I trekked out to the All-Russia Exhibition Center, whose acronym in English letters is VDNKh. (My Russian keyboard is failing me at the moment, so I can’t type it in Russian.) Outside of the exhibition center stood the Cosmonauts’ Museum, itself a grand monument to the Soviets’ achievements in space travel. There was a walk of heroes featuring larger-than-life busts of Gagarin and his cosmonaut buddies, as well as this priceless vision of Lenin leading the way into space: The All-Russia Exhibition center was, at least externally, an awe-inspiring tribute to Soviet glory. Each former Soviet Socialist Republic was featured in a pavilion whose architecture design represented something about its culture. At least ten other exhibition halls, each the size of a basketball stadium, housed other exhibitions on things like history and commerce… at least that’s what they used to house. I was more than disappointed when I entered the main pavilion, shown below–

–and found a bunch of hawkers selling camera parts and tickets to a sleazy casino/wax museum inside. Clearly, commercialism has beaten Communism even on its home turf!

Whatever else you can say about Moscow, you have to admit that it’s a) big, b) rich, and c) impressive. People in the rest of Russia–in Siberia especially–hate it, mostly for the second reason. They refer to Moscow occasionally as the “big green monster,” sucking up all of Siberia’s natural resources and funneling their profits into the pockets of the capital’s elite. They also associate Moscow with politics that do not put their needs first; indeed, the political structure of Russia is so Moscow-centric that they may have reason to feel the guys up top, nearly 2500 kilometers away, have forgotten about them.

St. Petersburg is another story. It is no more like the rest of Russia than Moscow is–maybe it is even less like the rest of Russia, to be honest–and yet many Russians idolize it. Its self-given nickname, “The Heroic City of Leningrad,” represents how some Russians feel about the city that suffered so terribly for 900 days and is still looking good six decades later.

When I first fell in love with Russia, I really fell in love with St. Petersburg: the moldering pastel facades, the canals, the golden spires, the Neva River, and the never-setting summer sun. It was hard to believe that the city’s colors were real. I was, in short, bewitched.

The thing I feel now, after living in Tomsk, is that St. Petersburg is clearly a great city–but it is anything but purely Russian. The city’s leaders tried so hard and for so long to model the city after Western European capitals that (again, externally) they succeeded.

But the Russian heart beating beneath the streets of St. Petersburg seems to me now at odds with Peter the Great’s vision. A taxi driver in St. Petersburg told me as we drove to the airport, “It’s a beautiful city, but the people don’t live better for all the beauty. Life was better under Communism. Now we are free, but we have no money; we can’t use our freedom! What kind Western of ideal is that?”

I still love St. Petersburg (and like Moscow very much, even if I don’t love it), but living in Tomsk has made me understand the city in a very different light. I was walking along by the Petropavlovskaya Krepost’ (Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress. the place where St. Petersburg was founded) and saw something that seemed to encapsulate the contrast between Russia’s great capitals and her oft-overlooked provinces.

 A single boat, with the name Sibiryak (“The Siberian”) was moored in the shadow of the  great Baroque Cathedral’s golden spire, walled out from the fortress. I am not making the ridiculous suggestion that boats should be allowed in a fortress/museum, but the image struck me as a reflection of the relationship my Siberian friends have to their country’s new and former capitals. Moscow and St. Petersburg are the cities that get all the wealth, all the high culture, all the tourists–but they cannot stand in for the soul of the largest country on earth. No city could do that.