Even though we were the only two passengers aboard, the barwoman in her middle years, Lyudmila, stood at her post ready to serve us and to talk. Fixing the scarf covering her henna-red hair, she offered us peanuts, instant coffee, and bottled water. She marveled at our foreignness. She had seen foreigners before but never really talked to one. She had never ventured beyond the Volga region but did enjoy traveling along the river. She told us that while working as a janitor at the train station, she liked to watch the trains arriving from or heading out to distant, enigmatic destinations—Moscow, Minsk, Saint Petersburg. But “the Volga pulls me in, and I had to come here,” she said, displaying a mouth filled with gold teeth. In the old days, such teeth were a manifestation of an achieved or an aspired-to status, mostly found in men and mostly those men coming from the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. She had a son, who was about to graduate from the Suvorovsky Military Academy in Moscow. She worried that he would be sent to war in Ukraine or, even worse, in Syria. “The curse of war,” she sighed.
In Russia where wars—fighting, winning, or preparing for them—are a big part of the Kremlin propaganda of the country’s superior heroism, Lyudmila’s sad comment showed how the horrors of war scar society despite the upbeat patriotic message.
Lyudmila was upset about how life along the river had changed. She could no longer walk around the port, she said. “It’s all very strict now, all fenced up. The area became private property after a rich guy bought it to make money, but it turned out to be too much trouble for him to do anything.”
After the Soviet Union collapsed, markets became a priority, and the state abandoned publicly funded river transportation in almost all Volga towns and elsewhere in Russia. Businessmen bought ports and the crafts berthed in them, but all this required investment, and the new owners, unsure of quick returns, proved unwilling to provide any.
We checked with Lyudmila if there was a way to get by water from Ulyanovsk to Samara, our next destination. A boat trip theoretically would last only a couple of hours, while by car it would take at least five on a crowded, potholed two-lane road, stretches of which were under construction.
“No such luck,” Lyudmila said. “You have to travel by taxi or bus.” She went on to recount to us how she used to run to the piers to buy the world-famous black caviar from Volga sturgeon. “Now there are few boats and no black caviar.”
As the boat trip drew to a close, we tried to tip our chatty bar host, but she refused to take any money. “We were told not to take bribes,” she explained. In a country where so many state employees do take bribes, from the plumber to the president, Lyudmila was the best the country has to offer—kind, cordial, hardworking—and uncorrupted. The kind of Russian Goncharov described in Oblomov:
His heart has never struck a single false note; there is no stain on his character. No well-dressed-up lie has ever deceived him and nothing will lure him from the true path. A regular ocean of evil and baseless may be surging around him, the entire world may be poisoned and turned upside down—Oblomov will never bow down to the idol of falsehood, and his soul will always be pure, noble, honest … Such people are rare; there aren’t many of them; they are like pearls in a crowd![27]
Ever keen to tout Ulyanovsk’s status, our local historian Petrov had grudgingly admitted to us that their part of Povolzhye (as the territories adjacent to the Volga have been historically called) had been transferred to the Samara time zone down the river. As he reminded us, Simbirsk was once the capital of a guberniya that prestigiously shared the Moscow time, but now clocks in Ulyanovsk run in synch with those of downscale Samara further east.
The next day, after a hot, bruising five-hour car ride (to cover a mere 150 miles!) instead of the pleasant two-hour boat trip we would have enjoyed in previous decades, we pulled into Samara. With a population of 1.2 million and known in Soviet times as Kuibyshev, Samara, with its traffic jams, high-rises, and busy shopping malls resembles something like a Moscow-on-the-Volga. The old wooden huts, some almost fallen to the ground, still abound—something Moscow has not seen in decades—but the local offices of Gazprom banks affiliated with it, and the giant state-owned Sberbank look formidable and palatial. They are second only to buildings that belong to the municipal administrations and the security agencies. Such structures, despite what they symbolize—the Russian state’s dependence for its survival on its bounty of natural resources and the unceasing labors of its police force, both covert and overt—do rescue the city from anything resembling a provincial air.
Indeed this has always been so, and thus Soviet planners selected Samara for a unique honor, as we would see.
Upon arrival, we stopped by the city’s museum of ethnography. In contrast to the Ulyanovsk museums, the Samara display is not supposed to be political, but exhibits about the history and customs of local peoples quickly give way to yet another tribute to Russia’s imperial grandeur. The museum is mostly dedicated to Stalin and his victory in World War II, with due coverage awarded to Lenin and the czars—Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Nicholas I and II, Alexanders II and III, and so on. And then there was Czar Putin, promoter of the double-headed eagle and all it stood for.
In the far corner, next to an exhibit of the region’s prehistoric era and mock dinosaurs, we found a small section devoted to Stalin’s purges. Yet if you didn’t know the history of all the bloodshed and imprisonment in his day, you might come away with the impression that the bosses of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the precursor agency of the KGB), not the dictator himself, were to blame. One cannot understand Russia’s history without comprehending the atrocities of the Stalin era and how they inevitably grew out of unbridled one-man rule and the need to eliminate—physically—any possible contender to the throne.
In Samara stands a far more impressive relic of Stalin’s era and that of the war he prosecuted victoriously: the famed Stalin Bunker.
As Nazi troops rapidly advanced toward Moscow in 1941, most of the USSR’s ministries, foreign diplomatic missions, and political families (including those of Stalin and Khrushchev) departed for Samara (Kuibyshev in those days), which was to serve as a makeshift reserve national capital in the early war years. The city also hosted facilities critical for the Soviet military—aviation and engineering plants and higher education institutions, including a relocated Moscow University. A massive riverbank bunker was built for Stalin just in case he had to be evacuated, too.
Though open to groups, visiting it as individuals would be, it turned out, no easy task. First, we tried to book a tour from Moscow. The website urged us to reserve tickets by phone, but when we called, we were rudely informed that we could not get in unless we were part of a group.
“Leave your names and call the day of your arrival. Maybe you’ll get in,” we were told.
We did as advised. That morning, Nina made the calls.
When she finally got through, a man’s crackling voice answered.
“Deistvuyshyi obyekt gosudarstvennoi oborony. Dezhurnyi po obyektu” (Active facility of state defense. Facility officer on duty speaking.)