“If you have the right technological ‘know-how,’ you can make Russia work,” he stated, tossing in a bit of English. “Surely, it’s tough to govern a country with territory stretched out all the way to Kamchatka, but if the setup is horizontal with local governments working to full capacity, then the problem of communication between the regions could be resolved.” Something similar to America’s electoral college might help people in sparsely populated outlying regions—and in Russia, these are many—defend their rights against the center.
We told Ponomarev that, for our book, we were looking at Russia through the prism of its geography. “Does Russia need to give up its empire to develop further?” we asked. In such a gigantic, sprawling country effective local governance has rarely been possible, whether under the Soviets or post-1991, because of the strongly centralized nature of the state.
According to Ponomarev, this centralization developed from the way Russia took shape, with cities, especially in Siberia, beginning as military and trade outposts of the empire. Then under Stalin they became industrial centers, with forced labor through the detention camps system, the Gulag, making up for a shortage of manpower. Russia’s hinterland regions are sparsely populated and ill served by transport; picture a spiderweb, with almost all threads leading to the Kremlin.
Even today one gets a sense of this while traveling around the land. From the Ural Mountains to the Far East, relatively few population centers spot the vast, often unvarying landscape of forest, rivers, and steppe. After the Soviet collapse, Russia’s regions acquired a good deal of autonomy, taking it at President Boris Yeltsin’s urging, but Putin has managed to reimpose a degree of centralization. He divided the country into eight federal districts and eighty-five smaller federal subjects, with the local authorities once again primarily serving the center and loyalty to Putin a necessary attribute for regional leaders.
To help put an end to this centralization, Ponomarev suggested designating cities in remoter areas as regional capitals. For example, West Siberia’s de facto capital could be switched from Tyumen to the much smaller city of Khanty-Mansiysk. Both are oil boomtowns, but the undersize Khanty-Mansiysk needs more state support to draw visitors and capital. That’s one way, said Ponomarev, for a big country such as Russia to democratize its expanses and make people feel at home there, with a stake in their development. Better roads and communications would follow.
Well, yes. But Ponomarev’s ideas sounded somewhat Leninist; his communist predecessors have already tried them. It was Bolshevik policy to populate as much Soviet territory as possible. Just as in a classless “dictatorship of proletariat,” no one group of people would enjoy privileges others did not, and in theory all regions of the country would be equal. By this logic, living in Tyumen should be as wonderful as living in Moscow. But the problem with such grand theoretical visions is that they rarely survive real-life implementation.
“And what about Crimea?” we asked. “Should it be Russian?”
“Yes,” he replied, “even though it was annexed illegally.”
So, even the one State Duma deputy who voted against Crimea’s becoming a part of Russia believes it should be Russian!
Before we left Kiev, we visited the city’s main memorial to the Holodomor. For decades, the Great Famine, in part a result of the forced collectivization of agriculture, was a state secret; estimates of its death toll—from starvation, mostly, but also from cannibalism—have ranged from three million to ten million lives. What’s known is that in 1932, at the start of the Holodomor, Ukraine’s population stood at about 33 million, but just before Khrushchev took over in 1938, the number of inhabitants had dropped to 28 million—a decrease of more than 10 percent—a literal “decimation.”[22] Of course, Stalin’s infamous purges also contributed to the fatalities.
Ukraine’s Rada in 2006 passed a law recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In 2008 Kiev raised a commanding monument in Pechersk Hills, near the eleventh-century Monastery of the Pechersk Caves. The whole Holodomor complex—its park, its subterranean Hall of Memory—stands just a few yards away from another memorial—to World War II—that is filled with fresh flowers and people paying their respects. Contrary to post-Crimea nationalistic Russian assertions that the Euromaidan protests were intended to bring German rule to Ukraine and defy the victory won in the Great Patriotic War, Ukrainians do appreciate what the country, among other countries, suffered in World War II. They just no longer want to be Russian vassals.
We stood in front of the Holodomor memorial, built to resemble a church steeple with, at the top, an eternal flame fashioned out of bronze, and listened to its somber, solitary chimes—one chime for each life lost. Near its base, golden storks—rustic symbols of prosperity (Khrushchev used to say that a stork nest on your home’s roof meant good luck) spread their wings atop cast-iron grids representing prison bars. This magnificent architectural monument to the famine is perhaps the truest indicator of Ukraine’s desire to define its past and control its future—a tall order, even according to Bohdan Yaremenko, but the most laudable one imaginable.
3
ARKHANGELSK, SOLOVETSKY ISLANDS, SAINT PETERSBURG, AND MOSCOW
KREMLIN TIME, OR RUSSIA’S CLOCK OF CLOCKS
TIME ZONE: MSK; UTC+3
Those who doubt Putin’s vital role in the victory of the Great Patriotic War, simply do not understand his essential role in the Baptism of Russia.
Kiev may be the mat gorodov russkih, mother of Russian cities, but Moscow is the mother of cities in Russia. It is the principal metropolis of the former Russian Empire, then of the Soviet Empire, and now of the Russian Federation—the (Third) Rome to which all roads lead.
The Moscow time zone, the Greenwich Meridian for Russia, stretches, in the south, from the border with Ukraine north to the oft-frozen shores of the White Sea in Arkhangelsk, and beyond, all the way to the Barents Sea of the Arctic Ocean.
Some 760 miles from Moscow, Arkhangelsk, a city on the White Sea that owes its origins to the czar Ivan IV, popularly known as Grozny, the Terrible (better translated as Formidable or Fierce). In the 1500s, Ivan concluded the “gathering of Russian lands”—the de facto reconquest—from their local Russian rulers and Tatar-Mongolian overlords. He created the czardom of Muscovy and initiated Russia’s expansion eastward, into the Urals and Siberia. In the next century, under Peter the Great, the first Russian emperor, Arkhangelsk became Russia’s first and, at the time, only naval port. Although icebound for most of the year, it served as a key outpost against the Norwegians and Swedes competing for influence in this remote northern region. It also bestowed upon Russia Mikhail Lomonosov, who would become one of Russia’s preeminent scientists and men of letters, the founder of Moscow University in 1755. Lomonosov came from a relatively modest background, born to a family of pomory (local sea fishermen) and farmers in a village in Arkhangelsk’s vicinity.
Today Arkhangelsk is a depressed industrial city with a port that fell into disuse when Peter the Great began restricting trade along Russia’s Arctic coast to boost that of the Baltic Sea, following his construction of Saint Petersburg. In recent years, Arkhangelsk has been losing out to the Crimea’s Sevastopol, the warm-water port on the Black Sea.
7
William Henry Chamberlin,