In Putin's Footsteps

Nikita Khrushchev’s great granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, and an expat living and reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since 1993, Jeffrey Tayler, offer a poignant exploration of the largest country on earth through their recreation of Vladimir Putin’s fabled New Year’s Eve speech, which he aspired to deliver at midnight in all eleven time zones.

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 of 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.

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 lookalikes—at great inconvenience to residents—under the pretext of beautifying the city, just as he once did in Tyumen.9 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 cofers!

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.

Excerpted from In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones, by Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler. © 2019 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.