Examining the museum’s exhibits, for the first time we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia’s recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, almost devoid of political value now, who has become more a monument than a personage. He serves as a symbol of continuity, if no longer of communism. He represents that important, almost century-long time when Russia was a great country, even a superpower, that made the world tremble. Stalin comes second, after being partly rehabilitated in the mid-2000s when Moscow decided to emblazon his name in gold letters on the ceiling of the Kurskaya subway station and school textbooks began lauding him as a “wise manager of his people” who, instituting the forced-labor camps, acted out of necessity to compensate for a shortage of manpower. In fact, in the last decade Stalin has become more “alive” than Lenin, who was also once lauded as zhiveye vsekh zhivykh (more alive than all the living). The continuous celebrations of the Soviet victory in the war against Nazi Germany render him almost as contemporary as Putin himself.
Leonid Brezhnev is the third leader on record and serves as a convenient bridge between the Stalin and Putin eras. (Putin is the fourth, of course.) Brezhnev can even boast of his own anniversary wing, opened to the public in 2016 to commemorate his 110th birthday. This section displays official gifts, such as his portraits made from grain in Belorussia or knit on a carpet by weavers in Tajikistan. Originally, the museum managers had intended that the exhibit be temporary, but visitors liked it, the young docent explained, so it has become permanent.
And what of the “reformers”—Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it. The museum had dedicated a small corner—“Reformers and Their Reforms”—but addressed them nowhere else.
“What about Khrushchev?” we asked a guide.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“There was no administrative order issued to set up such an exhibit,” she replied.
“Did you ask why?” we pressed.
She walked away, unwilling to answer uncomfortable questions. The reformers have largely disappeared from history in Russia because they don’t accord with the black-and-white view of Russian grandeur, as personified in firm leaders who must always appear unrepentant, despite the scale of the suffering they oversaw or caused. These three leaders showed humane concern for their citizens, which set them apart. As imperfect as their reforms were, they tried to democratize the imperial monolith. Khrushchev denounced Stalin, thus making the Russians doubt their communist czar. As part of his Perestroika, Gorbachev introduced glasnost—a wider dissemination of information, which allowed people to ask questions and hold the state to account. Yeltsin proclaimed Russia a democratic state that should join the world instead of fighting it. Nonetheless, they were products of the same authoritarian culture as the authoritarians preceding, and also following, them, and therefore they never fully succeeded.
Once retired, Khrushchev often reflected on the lack of Russia’s political progress forward. “Russia is like a tub full of dough,” he used to say. “You push your hand through and you reach the bottom. You pull out your hand, and then right in front of your eyes, it is, again, a tub full of dough, without a trace of your hand. Perhaps Russia does need a strong hand to make change happen.” A depressing yet apparently accurate observation.
Some are still striving after change these days. During our visit, Alexey Navalny, at the time a potential rival to Putin in the upcoming presidential elections, arrived to open up his campaign headquarters. In making his quixotic yet laudable bid for the anti-Putin vote, Navalny managed to gather supporters all across Russia, organizing at least fifty regional teams—unprecedented opposition outreach in a country where most political activity of note takes place in Moscow. Ulyanovsk was one of those towns he found most receptive—perhaps because of their affinity with another young radical, born in this little town, railing against the autocratic regime a century ago. It did not matter: the Putin electoral authorities eventually refused to let him register his candidacy on account of alleged crimes of embezzlement and a criminal conviction that many believe was fabricated to keep him out of politics.
Ulyanovsk benefited greatly from the bicentennial celebration, in 2012, of the birth of the novelist Ivan Goncharov, one of Russia’s most famous domestically, though perhaps lesser known abroad. The Goncharov home museum, once the family estate, aims to document how Goncharov helped characterize Russian identity through his 1859 masterpiece, Oblomov. Its eponymous protagonist—kind-hearted, perpetually lazy, languidly aristocratic—remains one of the most endearing and enduring literary embodiments of the Russian predicament so often typified by statements Russians make about the “Russian soul,” namely, “we may be backwards but we”—unlike other peoples, the implication is—“have soul.”
Goncharov Square, next to the museum, features not only a Soviet-era bronze statue of the writer pensively taking notes, but also more recent additions: Oblomov’s “philosophical sofa” (commissioned, a plaque incongruously informs us, by the local firm Commercial Real-estate) and a pair of bronze slippers. (Oblomov rarely changed out of his robe or ventured outside the house.) Both seem to symbolize an often all-encompassing stagnation ever present in Russia and the deep fear of change that underlies it. A quote from the novel encompasses this kind of thinking: “When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next.”[26] The home’s builders, however, seemed to have feared little in designing luxury: the three-story corner brick building, situated a few blocks west of the Volga, stands elegantly trimmed in white granite, with its own clock tower.
Few aspects of life in Russia are divorced from politics: in the museum’s entrance hall hangs a photograph, taken in 2012, of Putin and Sergei Morozov, the governor of Ulyanovsk Oblast, as the former grants the city and the museum an order to celebrate Goncharov’s bicentennial. There is also a certificate announcing Goncharov’s posthumously awarded title, Honorary Citizen of Ulyanovsk. As if the literary titan, a citizen of Russia almost a century and a half before either leader was born, would have cared! The writer lived and died in Simbirsk quite well without this honorific, but Russians cannot step away from the Soviet tradition of showering Russian figures, both historical and contemporary, with ceremonial medals and awards.
Goncharov’s museum showcases what is both marvelous and malevolent about Putin’s country. There are wonderful exhibits—Goncharov’s wainscoted study, pages from a draft of Oblomov, and copies of the novel’s first editions, in addition to the writer’s letters to Mikhail Volkonsky, son of the famous Decembrist revolutionary Sergei—that elevate your spirit and help you appreciate the richness of Russia’s history and arts, the true manifestations of the Russian soul, as it were.
1
Ivan Goncharov,