“I am Nina Khrushcheva, and I’ve called a few times before. We want to make sure we are let in to the bunker.”
“I remember your name. That Khrushchev, I’m no fan of his.”
“Why?”
“I’m sick of him. He wrecked too many things (mnogo ponatvoril). Just take Crimea. Your name, Nina, is even the same as his wife’s, blyad,” he cursed, using the Russian word for “whore.” “But fine, come on over.”
The man never even asked if Nina was related to the former Soviet premier. It took nothing more than hearing the name to set him off.
We took a cab to the bunker, located at 167 Frunze Street and concealed beneath a nondescript apartment building. At a nondescript plain back door, a crowd of some forty eager visitors stood waiting for admission, some, no doubt, worried as we were that they would be refused entry if they were not part of a group. But ultimately the guards let everyone in. They still operated according to the tried-and-true Soviet precept of managing public places: even if they have to let you pass, you will have to suffer for it.
An almost cubist stained-glass portrait of Stalin puffing on his pipe welcomed us in. We climbed twelve stories down a steep staircase to the Generalissimo’s quarters: a conference room with a large map of Russia, and a wooden oval table surrounded by twelve chairs; and a living room office with a white sofa, a desk covered with a musty piece of green felt, and a red emergency phone line, all watched over by an austere portrait of Alexander Suvorov, one of czarist Russia’s greatest military heroes. The last Generalissimo of the Russian Empire, Suvorov inspired the first Soviet one.
The cheerful guide, a blond woman in her forties, couldn’t hide her excitement about how roughly Stalin treated all those who were tasked with defending the Motherland. “One of the local factories,” she said, “which was producing munitions during the war, at first made less than required.” Stalin reprimanded them. “You can’t make just one bomb a day,” he bellowed. “You have to make hundreds, thousands a day!” Fearing for their lives, they did just that.
She finally delivered the punch line—“Stalin actually never stepped foot in the bunker, remaining in Moscow all through the war”—but mentioned nothing about Stalin’s key role in starting the war. Fearful of being undermined by capitalist France and Great Britain, and even more afraid of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin was eager to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, in 1939. This, in effect, permitted the Third Reich to take over Europe without worrying about a Russian response. After the Nazi invasion of the western areas of the Soviet Union, Stalin, in the early stages of the war, blamed massive Russian defeats on his countrymen’s unpatriotic behavior. But the military failures owed much to inexperienced officers who assumed their duties after the NKVD had wiped out the gifted old officer corps, accusing them of being “enemies of the people.”
The bunker, our guide told us, was built in nine months and cost 19 million rubles ($324,000 in 1942)—more than $5 million today. We overheard two men, perhaps father and son, walking in front of us down the clean, cold spiral staircase.
“Imagine that, they built it so quickly, but nobody stole anything!” said the young one.
“Of course not,” the older man replied. “You would not steal under Stalin.”
“But with Khrushchev, you could!”
“Oh, that Khrushchev!”
After much climbing up and down claustrophobic stairs and passing through innumerable steel doors resembling those aboard a submarine, the tour ended and we reemerged at street level. We went over to introduce ourselves to the two duty officers. Both looked to be in their eighties—still too young to have fought in the war but, judging by their bearing and mannerisms, quite likely former police or KGB officers. They were also clearly devoted Stalinists and were exited to meet Jeff, the American.
“Trump has sent you to see what power Russians have!” said one. “Tell him that we are peaceful people, but we won’t be pushed around!”
We asked which of them had been so rude to Nina on the phone earlier that morning. Both denied having spoken to her, alleging, oddly and irrelevantly, that their German was better than their English, so there must have been some misunderstanding. This statement made no sense, as she had spoken to him in Russian. Whatever. Since Jeff had introduced himself as an American journalist, we could only conclude that they feared he would report on how angry Stalinists had mistreated his “minder,” and they wanted to avoid any scandals.
We walked back out into the glorious spring day. After listening to our guide expound on the heroic nature of the Soviet Union’s most infamous mass murderer, we needed some air and a drink. The bunker lies just a couple of blocks from the Volga’s shore. Samara sits on the river’s left bank. The rocky Zhigulevsky Mountains on the right bank dominated the view from the bench on which we sat.
Pleased with such stunning scenery, we nevertheless recoiled at the bunker guide’s de facto glorification of totalitarianism and repression, which, in the twenty-first century, run counter to everything Europe stands for. Russia is not Europe, many would say. Yet Europe is and always has been Russia’s main point of reference, the standard against which, willingly or not, it both judges itself and finds itself judged. This held true even deep inside the Stalin Bunker. There, our guide had proudly informed us that it was Europe’s deepest (121 feet); which is more than twice as deep as Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and, of course, far deeper than Winston Churchill’s piddling dugout in London.
We spoke English as we sat drinking the cans of Zhigulev beer we had just acquired from the centuries-old famous local brewery of the same name. The brewery’s on-site store offers numerous varieties of beer on tap and salted-fish treats to go with them, all traditionally much beloved in Russia, but long gone from Moscow’s posh environs.
Soon we found ourselves the object of curiosity of high school students sitting on a nearby bench. This was, it turned out, their graduation day; their cohorts strolled past us, dressed in stylized Soviet-era school uniforms—plain brown dresses and laced white aprons for girls, dark blue woolen suits for boys. Those were the uniforms that Lenin’s unfashionable wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had adopted for schoolchildren in the 1920s. Hated for their dullness in Soviet days, they have made a comeback as a festive school outfit for special occasions such as graduation and evoke nostalgia in those pining after the now-defunct communist superpower.
Hearing us speaking English, the young Russians on the next bench were curious about the foreigners visiting their town: “Do you need help?” they asked in good enough English. “Would you like to have something translated or explained?”
Switching to Russian, we expressed our pleasure at seeing how well kept the Volga’s embankment was here—families strolling, one of which appeared to be same-sex, children running, teenagers skateboarding. Crowded even on a weekday, the embankment stood in contrast to the neglected wasteland along the river in Ulyanovsk, and we told the students this. They proudly explained, “Ours is the longest river embankment in Europe!”
“Is Russia Europe?” we asked.
“Well, no,” one of the boys answered. “But Samara, as the country’s reserve capital during the war, is now the capital of the oblast and needs to look the part. Even though Nizhny Novgorod [another Volga town] has taken over as the unofficial capital of the Povolzhye, we are going to catch up.” The others voiced their agreement.
Samara had languished in disarray for decades, but in recent years it has been trying to revive its riverine transportation business. From here speedboats—the meteors that we saw rotting away in Ulyanovsk—run to the larger industrial cities on the Volga, including Kazan, Tolyatti, and Syzran.