Apart from gauging local opii on, Sedov's assignment in Taganrog was to nvestigate the circumstances surrounding the death of its late mayor, who was shot as he got out of his chauffeured car late one evening in October 2002 by a gunman using a converted stun gun fitted with a silencer. The first few hours of his visit were not exactly auspicious:
I arrived in Taganrog an hour before the funeral of the former town boss. Instead of a city guide all I had rolling around in my bag was a volume of Chekhov's stories. 'To the high street!' I shouted at the taxi driver, fearing I would be late. He stepped on the accelerator and. . . immediately drove into a pothole. The wheel of his little Zhiguli gave a mournful screech and fell off. The taxi drwer slumped into a numbed silence. 'I hear your mayor was murdered,' I said in an attempt to distract him; 'why was that?' 'I would have murdered himself myself for roads like these. With my bare hands,' he snapped Half the town had gathered to bid farewell to the mayor. One could sense the hand of a competent organizer. There were buses standing around witn 'Shilo's funeral, such- and-such institute', 'Shilo's funeral, such-and-such factory'.
At che funeral, the governor of the Rostov-on-Don region shouted into che microphone that the murder was a shocking event in such a peaceful place. 'Villains have penetrated the quiet Don,' he declared, echoing the title of Sholoknov's famous novel set in the area of the slow-flow lg nver. The head of police, meanwhile, declared that the murder was shock tig because Taganrog was the 'quietest and most stable city in Russia', with a crime defection rate" of 90 per cent. After doing some research for his story, Sedov wondered whether the high incidence of reported suicides had anything to do with this high figure, desp te the fact that many of this number seemed myster Dusly to have been restrai led before their deaths (as was the case with the president of the local arbitra1 .on tribunal). Sedov himself was somewhat alarmed when the concierge at his hotel warned him not to stray off the main street after nine o'clock ;n the evening.
The unvei.mg of a new statue to Alexander I had been one of the highlights of the three-hundredth anniversary of Taganrog m 1998 (zealous Bolsheviks had ordered the original to be melted down in the 1930s). In his speech, Mayor Shilo had particularly praised Alexander I for establishing a nineteenth-century version of a 'free economic zone' by supporting local merchants.4 Mayor Sh;lo's great idea for Taganrog was also the creation of a 'free economic zone' Certainly, it was a little disappointing for local officials to learn that the American bank they approached was not enthusiastic about their proposal that it loan the city a billion dollars against the value of its property. But the oligarchs who carved up former state-run concerns profited handsomely, even if they did have to start driv'.ig around in armoured jeeps. And a wealthy Greek Cypriot entrepreneur had been able to buy a bankrupt factory in Taganrog; so what if local officials had continued asking him for money when he thought he had already paid for everything? The paperwork for creating this free economic zone, it turns out, had necessitated the employment of 568 members of staff in the mayor's office; perhaps slightly excessive for a city with a population of 300,000. But at least Mayor Shilo could not be accused of lack of patriotism. When the Bank of Russia issued a 500-rouble note showing a statue of Peter the Great in Arkhangelsk that was identical to the one in Taganrog, he caused such a fuss that it made the news on national television. Why Arkhangelsk and not Taganrog? Peter had originally planned for Taganrog to be hi? new capital, after all. Many citizens of Taganrog still feel aggr'eved that he changed his mind and chose St Petersburg nstead.
A 500-rouble banknote issued, in 1997, showing Antokolsky's statue of Peter the Great in Arkhangelsk
Despite his patriotism and professed love of Chekhov, Mayor Shiio had not felt it incumbent upon himself to support any of the museums dedicated to Taganrog's most illustrious native; the Chekhov museums are funded by regional money. As vvell as being able to boast the first legally registered millionaire in Russia, the city must certainly have some of the most loyal - and worst paid - employees anywhere in the country. But desp'te receiving a rouble salary equivalent to $25 a month, none of the staff at the town's three Chekhov museums was interested in becoming involved in the 'Adequate Pay' campaign in 2002, which had been driven by the harsh economic concL.ions of post- Soviet Russia. Evgenia Konopliova informed Andrei Sedov that elderly women should spend their time making cakes for their grandchildren instead of shouting their heads off at meetings. Ticket revenue certainly cannot bring much income for the Chekhov museums, but perhaps the friendly lady with the s'lver lame shawl and orange lipstick who sits by the old ceramic stove in the ticket office at the 'Chekhov Cottage' does a roaring trade in the busts of Chekhov and Peter the Great, matrioshka dolls, and porcelain purines of nude ladies and Father Christmas wl ich are on sale with the scholarly monographs about Chekhov, their print-run in the low hundreds.
After visiting the Chekhov museums in Moscow and Taganrog, and perhaps even venturing as far as the Ukrainian town of Sumy where the tamUy's dacha on the former Lintvaryov family estate stands, frozen in time, the intrepid literary pilgrim might wish to retrace the steps of Chekhov's Siberian odyssey and visit the little wooden house in the town of Alexandrovsk on Sakhalin, which serves as the museum commemorating his stay on the island. But a trip to the Crimea is more inviting, especially in the spring when the air is fragrant with the scent of lilac and acacia blossom. The preservation of the White Dacha in the twentieth century was due to the tireless dedication of Chekhov's sister Masha. She had been used to showing the house to curious admirers even before Chekhov's death, and it became such a famous landmark that it was featured on Yalta postcards.
Chekhov had bequeathed the White Dacha to his s ster in his will, and it was she who ensured the interior of the house was left precisely as it was when her brother left it in May 1904, still hoping to return She could not bear to change anything, and moved permanently with her elderly mother to Yalta after the Revolution. Evgem'a Yakovlevna died in 1919 and was buried in Yalta. Maria Pavlovna became che first director of the raemor'il museum estab1,-shed in the White Dacha in 1921, and undertook a hazardous trip to Moscow that year in order to secure the Chekhov archive, which she had left in a safe. The train journey took her three weeks. Only by noticing a little boy reading 'Vanka' in the cramped compartment she was traveling n, and by explaining who she was, did she save herself from being thrown off the train as a bourgeois 5 But these were difficult ti nes. The house was searched many times during the Civil War, and at one point an order was even put out for Maria Pavlovna's arrest. Her younger brother Misha later moved down to Yalta in order to help n preparing a catalogue for the museum, and when he died in 1936 he was buried next to their mother, as Masha herself would be in 1957, having lived со the age of ninety-four. By the time of her death, the White Dacha had survived an earthquake, two and a half years of Nazi occupation, and damage caused by the final bomb raid which was the Luftwaffe's parting gift in 1944. Faithful to the cause, Masha had refused to be evacuated during the war; she put up pictures of the German dramatist Hauptmann on the wall but refused point-blank to let a German officer take up residence л her brother's rooms. As a result, nothing went missing.6