Building the Future of Russia

1997 will be Moscow’s year, when the capital celebrates its 850th birthday. But 1996 is surely the year of Nizhny Novgorod. This month, Russia’s third largest city is 775 years old. What is more, the city is also celebrating the centennial of a most unique historical event — the Great All-Russian Exhibition. Managing Editor Robert Greenall traveled to Nizhny and brings back this look at commercial life in the city, past and present.

Anyone arriving in Nizhny Novgorod in the late summer of 1996 will see a city preparing for something big. Battalions of cranes and bulldozers, road resurfacing work, or just plain lumps of concrete strewn around the city’s sidewalks are reminiscent of the construction boom which has astounded recent visitors to Moscow. If anything, the urgency here is greater — much of the work is due to be finished this month.

The most feverish activity is at the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka (Fair) building, the commercial hub of the city and scene of regular national and regional exhibitions. This revived trade complex, now run as a private company, is the main focus of festivities for Nizhny’s double jubilee. Running from September 1-9 under the name ‘The Future of Russia,’ the annual Yarmarka will attempt to recreate the spirit and national pride which colored the events of 1896. Now as then, Russian business will look back at its achievements and forward at its prospects as it moves into the next century.

The histories of Nizhny Novgorod and the Volga Yarmarka both go back to the Middle Ages, the former as a fortress on Russia’s eastern borders, the latter as a meeting of Eastern and Western trade routes, originally conducted by native peoples of the area. Nizhny’s importance as a merchant city grew — as a result it became known as ‘the pocket of Russia.’ And, in the late 15th century, Moscow’s Prince Ivan III started a Russian Yarmarka,  breaking the Tatar influence on trade in the area.

In 1641, Tsar Mikhail (Romanov) decreed that the Yarmarka be set up permanently outside the Yellow Water Monastery at Makaryev, an influential religious center some 200 kilometers downriver of the city.

In trade rows beneath the monastery wall, merchants from China, Central Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe converged in a unique gathering of worlds and cultures. Inevitably, though, the concentration of capital  here was not to everyone’s tastes, notably those of Alexander Pushkin and his hero Yevgeny Onegin:

“...Makaryev bustles feverishly,

Boiling with its plenty.

Hither an Indian brings his pearl,

A European sells his imitation wines,

A factory owner drives from the steppe

A herd of defective horses,

The cards player comes with his pack

And a heap of obliging bones,

A landowner brings his grown-up daughters,

And they last year’s fashions.

Everyone fusses, and lies through his teeth

And the mercantile spirit is everywhere.”

By the beginning of the 19th century, the growing importance of Nizhny and the relative isolation of Makaryev made the removal of the Yarmarka to the city inevitable. In 1816, the Makaryev Yarmarka burnt to the ground (quite possibly because of an arson attack by interested parties from the city). The Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka was born.

In its new location, the Yarmarka grew with renewed vigor, and in a matter of decades had become one of the five largest in the world. For two months of every year, many world prices, notably grain, were fixed here.

So powerful was the organizational base of the Yarmarka that in 1893 Tsar Alexander III decreed the 16th All-Russian Exhibition be held on its grounds (also, by this time the Yarmarka was in decline, and needed a boost of this kind). Considering that the 15 previous exhibitions were held in turn in the ‘capitals’ of Moscow, Warsaw and St. Petersburg, this decision was a coup for the provincial city. What was more, with the end of the century approaching and the industrial revolution in full swing, this Exhibition (Vystavka) was the first to be billed as ‘Great.’ And, as a Gosudaryevo Delo (Tsar’s business), it was fully financed by the government.

“It was the summing up of the century: what Russia had come to at the end of the 19th century, and with what it was going into the 20th,” explained current Yarmarka Press Secretary Irina Marycheva. “That was the idea behind the Exhibition.”

Larger than all of the previous 15 Exhibitions, and larger territorially than the International Exhibition held in Paris the previous year, it spread through a huge park with fountains, and filled 172 pavilions lit entirely by electric lighting and served by a special railway line. It was opened in May 1896 by the new Tsar, Nicholas II, on what was his first trip to a provincial city. Over the four months of its existence, the Exhibition attracted over a million visitors.

As the Exhibition was intended to boost Russian industry in the face of foreign competition, it was made up exclusively of Russian products and creations. Sensations included rides in the first Russian car, a balloon flight over the Oka river and one of Russia’s first cinema showings.

Pavilions were extravagant and often entertaining. In the Far North pavilion, live seals and native tribesmen in national costumes were demonstrated against a background of panneaux of nature designed by the artist Konstantin Korovin. Visitors to the Asia pavilion, meanwhile, were treated to tea and lemonade among silk and carpets in the surroundings of an oriental bazaar.

Artists like Korovin both worked on the design of pavilions, and provided works for the arts section, another major part of the fair. Among the exhibits was Mikhail Vrubel’s Princess of Dreams tapestry, now in the Tretyakov Gallery. However, the art establishment of the day did not consider Vrubel’s works art, and he was forced to exhibit in a special pavilion outside the grounds arranged for him by industrialist Savva Mamontov.

Another hit of the Exhibition was Mamontov’s opera troupe. It was here that the great Russian tenor Fyodor Shalyapin first made his mark, beginning a career that spanned several decades.

Such a festival of the cream of Russian talent was bound to achieve high acclaim, even from critics of the state. Despite his radical views, Maxim Gorky, who covered the Exhibition for the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Listok, called it “a vital national cause, a cause for the whole state.”

Another commentator of the day went further:

“Those million people who visited the Exhibition will retain good memories of it. And they will take their knowledge and impressions of it all over the world and to all corners of Russia. Unnoticed, without the calculation of accountants, they will return those millions spent on its construction, with some to spare.”

But while the Exhibition gave a boost to Russian industry and Nizhny Novgorod in particular, it was unable to change the course of history. In fact, some see it as an indirect mystical cause of the ills that befell Russia the next century. The tragedy at Khodynka fields in Moscow, when hundreds were trampled to death after celebrating Tsar Nicholas’ coronation (a terrible omen for the new tsar) was believed to have resulted from the removal of the 1882 Exhibition’s Royal Pavilion to Nizhny, making the ground in the area boggy and uneven.

In both 1905 and 1917 Nizhny Novgorod was a hotbed of the revolution that ultimately destroyed the Yarmarka. As for the exhibitions, the 17th was set for 1917, and of course it never happened.

The Yarmarka soldiered on. In the 1920s, it had a brief revival during the New Economic Policy. In 1930, it was finally buried by the Stalinist leadership “in connection with the strengthening of the plan [i.e. socialist] principles of the economy.”

Over the next 60 years, the spirit and memory of the Yarmarka somehow remained, as Nizhny’s name was changed to Gorky (meaning bitter) in honor of the writer and the city took on a grey, industrial hue. Meanwhile, “[the central Fair] building was always used a shop of some kind,” said Marycheva, “because it never entered anyone’s head to use it as anything else.”

After a spell as the city’s main children’s department store, in 1991 the Yarmarka’s old premises were taken over by a joint-stock company intending to revive the tradition. A craft fair called ‘The Prologue of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair’ opened the way for its return.

Unlike the old Yarmarka, which served purely as a large market for retail and wholesale producers, its reincarnation is a fair in the modern sense — a fully-fledged exhibition and business center. Its growth has been so rapid that  it is due to hold almost 70 exhibitions next year, ranging from a summer book salon to its biggest draw, ‘Weapons, Military Technology and Conversion,’ held every autumn.

In view of the Yarmarka’s new status, it seemed appropriate to kill two birds with one stone. Thus, the yearly Yarmarka has become, briefly, a repeat of the Great Exhibition. Many features are similar — major government investment (45 bn rubles — just under $900,000 — out of a total of 115 bn), expansion of exhibition space tenfold, visits from the Head of State and also Romanov Princess Leonida Georgiyevna, and an arts program including the Sakharov Music Festival (Named after Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist and human rights campaigner, who was exiled to Gorky in 1980 because of his opposition to the Afghan war.), opened this year by Mstislav Rostropovich. Pierre Smirnoff and Co., vodka producers who won a gold medal here in 1896, are hoping to repeat their success and raise their prestige battered by legal wrangling with Russian heirs to the company.

But, while the 1896 Exhibition was purely Russian, the 1996 version has two major sideshows for foreign companies, Britain’s Brinntex ‘96 and Intercontact ‘96, involving 22 other countries. US companies are thin on the ground, though the local American Business Center (ABC) is hoping for increased interest as Nizhny’s reputation as a business city grows.

“The place is booming, especially after the elections,” said ABC Business Development Officer Tim Tarrant. “Moscow and St. Petersburg are saturated by investment. This is the next frontier.”

However, despite the almost universally recognized dynamism and talent of Regional Governor Boris Nemtsov, American firms still run up against Soviet-style problems. After decades as a closed military-industrial city, the metamorphosis of Nizhny is not yet complete, and the city administration remains obstructive and even at times xenophobic.

Perhaps as a result of this, Nizhny still suffers from a measure of provincial obscurity. “There are a lot of American firms that just don’t have an idea of the existence of Nizhny Novgorod,” lamented Rick Walker, ABC Nizhny Novgorod Director. Perhaps ‘The Future of Russia’ will change all that at last.

In all the triumphant rhetoric of this year’s Yarmarka, one little objection has been raised. This massive artificial boost for the fortunes of a private company (i.e. the Yarmarka) has angered many in the city who see its claims as heirs of the glory of the Exhibition as false. Why should a relatively new and already profitable organization receive government funds and tax breaks when the city and many of its inhabitants are still floundering in economic hardship?

Supporters of the Yarmarka, however, maintain that, without it things in the city would be very much worse, and that it is the Yarmarka that is largely responsible for Nizhny’s reputation as a city capable of riding out economic crises.

“[The Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka] is  no longer a Nizhny VDNKh (Russian acronym for Exhibition of Economic Achievement, a Soviet era display in many large cities of the ‘achievements of socialism,’ often seen rather as an escape from its realities.), but a real,useful market mechanism.,” said Mayor Ivan Sklyarov. “I would even say that without the fair today life here would be very tough.”

Yarmarka supporters claim also that it is they who have made the Exhibition possible.

“If the Yarmarka didn’t exist in Nizhny Novgorod,” noted Irina Marycheva, “no one would ever think of holding an exhibition here. To hold a national exhibition at this level, a base, a tradition has to be set up so that people will come to the city. No one will go to an open field, even if 172 pavilions have been built on it... Today the Yarmarka is that base. We’re not trying to grab something which does not belong to us. For 400 years we have been investing in order to hold this exhibition today.”