One of the last people we interviewed, a taxi driver named Mikhail, seemed dismissive of such stereotyping. A self-described “pure-blooded Tatar,” he told us, “I went to kindergarten and school with Chechens, Tatars, Russians, everyone. We all got along. Listen, there are no bad nations, only bad people. You can’t generalize.” Compared to what we’d been hearing, this felt like a refreshingly progressive sentiment. Then he added, “Although, I really don’t like Azerbaijanis. They’re rude, disgusting, and don’t keep their word.”
Kazan was full of surprises. In 2005, the city was celebrating the 1,000-year anniversary of its founding; the buildings downtown had been beautifully restored, a new subway system had just opened its doors, and busloads of tourists chugged past billboards proudly proclaiming the millennial jubilee. Yet as we later learned from Vladimir Muzychenko, the 1,000-year number was, to put it kindly, a guesstimate. In fact, in 1977, city officials had spent months preparing for an 800-year anniversary. The celebration never materialized, though souvenir pins were made.
So, how did Kazan manage to age two centuries in just 28 years? Some people believed the 1,000-year anniversary was a political gift from Russia to Tatarstan. The evidence for this was twofold: not only had Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaimiev managed to wangle enough money from the Russian government to completely spruce up the city, he’d also persuaded Putin to allow Kazan to declare itself 150 years older than Moscow—a political concession unthinkable in Soviet times.
But Niyaz Khalitov, an archaeologist at the Kazan kremlin, revealed that there was actually some scientific reasoning behind the new millennial date. In the mid-1990s, he told us, archaeologists here unearthed two coins that dated from the tenth century, indicating that the city was at least 1,000 years old. “Kazan is probably even older,” he said, “but a decision was made to mark it as a thousand years.” The city had hoped to hold its celebration in 2000, but “it took time to clean up the city and make souvenirs. Then, we thought we might do it in 2003, but St. Petersburg was celebrating its three-hundred-year anniversary that year. So we decided on 2005”—science by committee.
The following day, David and I set out to find Zhenya’s mother, Natalya. The family didn’t have a phone in 1995, so all I had was their address; we’d have to just show up, as the first time. We caught a taxi to their neighborhood in the north of the city, yet somehow I couldn’t even find their street, much less their apartment.
The taxi driver drove around and around as we tried in vain to figure out where their building was. Nobody seemed to have heard of their street, which was bizarre. It was like a bad dream, and both David and I were boiling with frustration by the time we learned the problem: the street name had been changed in the late 1990s. We were in the right place, but had no way of recognizing the building, as all the apartment blocks were identical gray boxes.
I rang the bell, and Vladimir, Natalya’s husband, opened the door looking exactly the same, except that his hair had turned white. He looked at me blankly, and I said, “Hello. I’m Liza, an American journalist who was here ten years ago. Do you remember me?” He smiled, a casually confident little grin that I suddenly recalled from 1995. “Yeah, I remember you,” he said. “Come in.”
Natalya didn’t recognize me, but once she realized who I was, she took me into the living room to show me the photo of Zhenya. It was still prominently displayed, now with a medal he’d been awarded posthumously—the Medal of Courage.
We sat at the kitchen table, which Natalya proceeded to load up with food and drink—a beef-and-potato casserole, salted tomatoes, brown bread, a basket of chocolates and cookies, and shot glasses that Vladimir filled with vodka. We toasted our meeting, and Natalya began to tell me what had changed, and what hadn’t, over the previous decade.
Natasha K., Zhenya’s fiancée, still came to visit, though she was married to another man and had a daughter now. “She still goes down to the cemetery,” Natalya said. “I sometimes see flowers she’s left. Her husband has even taken her there.” She thought for a moment, then added, “She had to move on; I’m not sorry she did. We’re glad she’s happy.”
Zhenya’s brother Denis was 22 now, and I asked whether he’d been drafted into the army. “They can’t draft him because of Zhenya,” Natalya told me, “but twice a year, every fall and every spring, they try to anyway. We call and tell them, ‘His brother died in Chechnya! He’s exempt!’ but they always want us to send more paperwork.”
Denis was a young businessman, buying and selling goods and splitting his time between Kazan and the Moscow suburbs. He was out of town, so we didn’t get a chance to see him, but I got the impression that even when he was here his parents didn’t see much of him. “He’s different than Zhenya was,” Natalya told me. “He’s got his own friends and his own life.”
Time had eased Natalya’s pain. In 1995, she seemed always on the brink of tears, her eyes puffy and red. Now she was able to talk about Zhenya with a kind of warm melancholy, rather than the piercing sorrow of those early days.
“On New Year’s Eve,” she said, “exactly a year after he died, we had more than a hundred people here for a celebration. Everyone came, all his friends, to remember him.” She smiled. “It’s gotten easier. Life goes on. But of course, we miss my Zhenka.”
And now the tears welled in her eyes. “The pain doesn’t go away,” she said. “He was my son.”
Ten years later, as I was making my way across Russia for the third time, I almost couldn’t stand the thought of reaching out again to Natalya. By 2015, her son had been dead for longer than he’d been alive; was I really going to ask her to dip into that well of grief again? The one saving grace was that I now had a cell phone number for her, so at least I wouldn’t just be dropping in on the family again. Even so, arriving in Kazan, I decided to put off the call for a day, and instead took a stroll around the city.
A man on the train had told me I wouldn’t recognize Kazan now, that it had become like a European city. I assumed he was exaggerating, but walking down central Bauman Street, I had to admit he had a point. Kazan was gorgeous. The Italianate-architecture buildings were brightly painted and spotlessly clean, the vibe was prosperous and calm, and scores of inviting shops, museums, and theaters lined the street. Short of St. Petersburg, Kazan is the most beautiful city I’ve seen in Russia.
Like Vladivostok, Kazan had a new bridge—the Millennium Bridge, erected in celebration of the anniversary, with a superstructure in the shape of an “M.” And across the Kazanka River from downtown, a new Palace of Weddings had been built in the shape of a giant cauldron—arguably not the most appropriate choice of wedding imagery.
Downtown, Western stores and restaurants abounded, from Emporio Armani to Cinnabon to Coyote Ugly. Students from the nearby Kazan Federal University strolled around wearing backpacks, popping into cafeterias serving Tatar staples such as dried horse meat, rice pilaf, and a honey-glazed fried dough confection called chak-chak. In 1995, I’d noticed a number of people wearing traditional Tatar clothing of long coats and round hats, but now—at least in the city center—this was a rarity.