“Whom are we planning to invade?” Khrushchev wondered aloud as he inspected a military base outside Moscow in September 1964. “Nobody! Yet we have all these weapons, and because of the exuberant cost of our military people are losing their pants.” Brezhnev, however, returned the parades to their Stalinesque glory. Proud of his past as a war hero, and expanding the Soviet military and acquiring the rank of marshal long after the war ended, Brezhnev, in white parade uniform, enjoyed the spectacle of thousands of troops marching in front of him on Red Square.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with Russia no longer a superpower, Yeltsin discontinued such costly ceremonies altogether. Yet in 2005 Putin started them up again for the sixtieth anniversary of World War II. Then, with the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and other Western countries sharing the podium with Putin at the parade, Russia still seemed to have a global future.
With the international community much less on Russia’s side now, the Victory Day parades are becoming ever more breathtaking in their grandiosity. Last May Red Square witnessed more than ten thousand troops and 114 units of tanks, missile defense systems, and armored vehicles, including the new monstrous, white-camouflaged Arctic defense machines, with polar bears painted on their sides, that are able to operate in minus-fifty-degree weather.[25] Led by Shoigu, the troops and tanks passed before President Putin to the loud cheers of the crowds. Such military might be, at least theoretically, deployed against European powers and the United States. According to curator Anastasia, Defense Minister Shoigu’s tastes in perfume from that very Europe, which Russia is potentially planning to attack, should inspire the admiration in the rest of us.
As we looked over the wares on offer, we chitchatted with Anastasia about Russia’s heroic past. She asked if, the previous week, we had gone to the Patriot Park on the outskirts of Moscow in Kubinka to watch as two thousand people dressed as Soviet soldiers reenacted the 1945 storming of a mock-up of the Reichstag by the Red Army. Part of the Magic World of Russia site, this patriotic Disneyland of sorts, appropriately designed by a Hollywood firm, had Shoigu along with five thousands spectators watching period tanks and weaponry, explosions, gunfire, and men dressed as Nazis falling to the ground in flames.
Anastasia said that she was “excited” when she watched the event on television. Today officials like Shoigu and even more so Putin himself are not just leaders, they are celebrities. Shoigu won national popularity the previous decade while running the Ministry of Emergency Situations and has since been prominently featured in media coverage as a savior in military garb. Russia suffers from aging infrastructure, illegal construction, and professional negligence—movie theaters burn, retirement homes collapse, trains derail. But who doesn’t like a man in uniform!
And we do not need to remind anyone that the world can’t get enough of Putin’s own James Bond exploits: his 007-ish flying planes, diving in submarines, and riding horses bare-chested. For the Russians, he is their national hero; for the West he is an equally entertaining anti–James Bond villain.
Despite all his chastising of the West for its supposedly hegemonic objectives, Putin surely understands that there is no other choice than for Russia to join it. Does Russia’s current animosity toward the West stem from a desire to re-create a militaristic state along Soviet lines, or is it truly a quest for the renewed role in the world as a superpower? Or is it simply a call for respect and recognition—for “imperial status,” so to speak, if nothing else? Russia’s behavior vis-à-vis Europe and the United States may amount to less a sign of aggressive intent and more a defensive reaction to the fear of encirclement. After all, NATO has expanded to Russia’s borders and plans to one day induct Ukraine and even Georgia, another former Soviet republic, the Western aspirations of which the Kremlin tried to suppress in 2008. Such fears of “Europeanization” run counter to Russia’s imitation of Europe since Byzantine times. Of course, they have been borne out by history with, three times in the past 210 years alone, the country having suffered invasion from the West.
Putin, however, surely would like to enter the history books not as a dictator, but as the leader of a country he has guided out of impoverished backward chaos into modernity and relative wealth. Modern Russia, he must know, cannot afford isolation, with one aspiring satellite, Serbia, and one alliance of convenience with China, along with a number of unsavory clients in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. If Russia does become a monolithic imperial state, it will betray its true ambition—to fulfill its European aspirations of finally joining the modern world and becoming a part of the West.
4
ULYANOVSK (SIMBIRSK) AND SAMARA (KUIBYSHEV)
CITIES OF THE MIGHTY VOLGA
TIME ZONE: MSK+1; UTC+4
In Russia, there is a thousand-year-old tradition—the same dream is transferred from generation to generation, from father to son, from one political system to the next—that in the country so rich with natural resources people will live well one day.
In Ulyanovsk, a medium-size town of 600,000 inhabitants on the Volga River about five hundred miles southeast of Moscow, one senses, in a primal way, Russia’s might. As Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities, the Volga is the mother—matushka—of all Russian rivers. More than two thousand miles in length, the Volga is the grandest river in Europe—it has come to be dubbed Bogynya (the Goddess). It is celebrated in Russian literature and art both for its unfathomable might and the role it has played throughout the country’s history.
From Ilya Repin’s famous nineteenth-century painting Barge Haulers on the Volga (depicting exhausted, disheveled laborers on shore dragging a floating barge by means of ropes tied round their torsos) to Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1859 play The Storm (which foretold the Russian Revolution of 1917), the river has inspired the imagination and held a preeminent position in local lore. Wide and mostly tranquil, the Volga turns dangerous during floods and changes in the seasons. It is also a lifeline—a kormilitsa, or one who feeds—connecting the towns and villages along its shores, in part because of Russia’s notoriously bad roads.
Residents of Ulyanovsk maintain that their position just downstream from the confluence of the Volga and the much-smaller Sviyaga tributary subjects their city to powerful magnetic currents that mysteriously influence the area’s climate, population, and culture. The Volga, not surprisingly, figures prominently in how the people of Ulyanovsk see themselves: their city is, as they would say, the “Aristocrat on the Volga,” because of the many literary and noble families in the Russian empire hailing from here. It is perhaps no coincidence that the center of town, which sits on a hill overlooking the river, is called, with an allusion to royalty, Venets (crown). Therein lies a contradiction of a distinctly Russian sort. The city’s original name, Simbirsk, was changed to Ulyanovsk in 1924, to commemorate Vladimir Lenin after his death. Lenin, whose original last name was Ulyanov, was born here in 1870. His family was one of minor aristocrats but not royal. And the regime he led to power ultimately rested on regicide.