Chita had the air of a once-beautiful garden gone to seed. Stately pre-Revolutionary buildings were afflicted with crumbling plaster. Old women in fur hats perched along the sidewalk, selling jars of yellow berries and pails of potatoes. A row of Soviet-era seltzer water machines, their communal glasses long gone, sat unused and neglected.[1] With a population of just under 400,000 people, a sizable percentage of which seemed constantly to be cramming itself into the city’s decrepit buses, Chita exuded not so much a mellow vibe as a weary one.
The main attraction on Lenin Street was Lenin himself. Unlike most statues commemorating the Soviet leader, Chita’s was made of pink granite, which took on a warm glow as the sun rose. He presided over a massive square—Lenin Square, naturally—which was bounded on all sides by boxy government buildings. As Gary and I wandered across it, I had the thought that, save for that unexpected splash of pink, this could be any square in any Russian city in practically any decade of the twentieth century.
And then I discovered the Panama City Motel.
Our host on that first trip, Natasha, mentioned it offhandedly one evening. A wealthy oil executive named Valery Bukhner had just opened a hotel just outside the city, she told us, and “all the materials were shipped from the U.S. Everything. Even the toilet paper.” Panama City, Florida, was a mere two-hour drive from my hometown of Pensacola. Was this the namesake of Bukhner’s motel? If so… why? I decided I needed to meet this Bukhner fellow and find out.
The next morning, I took a taxi to the outskirts of Chita. As I gazed out the window at passing rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, a tall yellow and white sign popped into view. MOTEL PANAMA CITY RESTAURANT AND LOUNGE, it said, in both English and Russian. When I stepped out, I found myself surrounded by pert gray bungalows. It was as if an entire development had been lifted by tornado from the Florida Panhandle and deposited intact onto the Russian steppe.
Bukhner couldn’t meet me that day, but an employee let me poke around in one of the rooms. Sure enough, it was equipped entirely with American products—Astroturf welcome mats, pastel motel art, light switches with ON-OFF written in English, and Kenmore refrigerators. There were even Honeywell thermostats graded in Fahrenheit, rather than the Celsius system used in Russia. The motel’s advertising slogan was “a small piece of faraway America,” and it truly felt like that, right down to the New Testament nestled in the bedside table drawer.
I interviewed Bukhner by phone later that day, and he told me he’d decided to build the motel during a 1992 business trip to the United States. “I traveled through seven states by car in two weeks,” he said—including a stop in Panama City, Florida—“so I saw a lot of motels along the way.”
He told me that the motel’s grand opening, appropriately enough, had been on the Fourth of July. By coincidence, U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering was in Chita at the time, and he came by to give a short speech, after which he presented Bukhner with an autographed dollar bill. “I had the dollar framed,” Bukhner said proudly. “And I have a whole album of photos from the ambassador’s visit, as well as a videotape we made. He really liked the hotel.”
Yet the Panama City Motel paled in comparison to Bukhner’s next planned project.
“I want to build a Disneyland in Chita,” he told me. “It’s my own quirky little dream. I want the children of the Chita Region to have the same wonderful amusement parks that children of other countries have.” I held my tongue, not sure whether this very enthusiastic businessman knew just how unlikely it would be for the Disney behemoth to choose little, unknown Chita, 125 miles north of the Mongolian border, for its next theme park.
“I have been to Disneyland in the U.S. and France,” Bukhner told me, “and I love it. It will cost a lot of money to build one here—Disneylands are not cheap. But I’m raising the money for it now. There will be a Disneyland in Chita.”
When I returned to Chita in 2005, there was—spoiler alert—no Disneyland. But the Panama City Motel was still there—only now, it boasted a Chinese restaurant and a couple of yurts in addition to its bungalows. For good measure, the complex had also added a bowling alley, casino, and a few neon-lit palm trees.
David and I spent an afternoon meandering around the motel’s grounds with Pasha, our host in Chita this time around. An energetic 39-year-old, Pasha was an amateur photographer who worked at the city’s Drama Theater. Trim and blond, with a lock of hair that flopped charmingly over his forehead, Pasha would have made a winning Hermey if the theater were ever to mount a production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
We were sharing the two-bedroom apartment with Pasha, his common-law wife Vika, her daughter Dasha and brother Edik, a family friend whose name I never caught, and a dog and a cat. Hosting us at all was an act of astonishing selflessness, but Pasha and Vika also insisted that David and I take their bedroom. We were grateful but embarrassed, so we spent a lot of time outside the apartment, to give the family some space. As we wandered up and down Lenin Street, the sights, sounds, and smells at first seemed very familiar. Gradually, however, I started noticing a few subtle differences.
The pink granite Lenin statue still hailed the rising sun each morning, and the old ladies still sold jars of berries on the sidewalk. There was still an intriguing mix of Siberian cottages, boxy government buildings, and pre-Revolutionary mansions lining the streets. But now there were more stores, and the quality of goods for sale was higher. Lenin Street even boasted a few high-end arts and crafts stores, one of which sold fancy picnic baskets for the unheard-of sum of 4,600 rubles—about $165, or what some Russians earned in a month. There were numerous new computer stores and Internet cafés, and the city’s sidewalks and building fronts had been repaired and renovated.
The people looked different, too—better dressed and healthier than they had ten years before. When I suggested this to Pasha, he said, “Even four years ago, the mood of the people used to be, ‘How can I get through this? What do I need to do to live?’ People would get tired just thinking about things as simple as how to get food. But now, I’ve noticed that people’s faces are brighter.
“Young people—and people in general—are lighter in spirit, because it’s possible to relax more,” he concluded. “You can see it in people’s faces.”
Chita in 2005 felt like a city on the rise. Next to the Soviet-era Udokan movie theater, with its hand-painted movie posters,[2] was the bright new Seeds gardening store. Near the old women selling their produce, the Solarium tanning salon had opened for business. And looming over a tiny Siberian cottage that had been turned into a beer bar was a huge new building housing a “luxe” dentist and the Philosophy of Beauty aesthetic center. Some people clearly had money to spend, and they weren’t afraid to spend it on luxuries.
1
In Soviet times, these were all over the country. People would drop in kopek coins, wait while the water poured into the glass, drink it, then leave the glass for the next customer. Many thousands of people drank from the same unwashed glasses, in a bold display of either boundless societal trust or unhygienic madness. Or both.
2
The main attraction in September 2005 was a film called