Our new friends described how the river loops around the hills, creating a peninsula encompassing a reserve of tens of thousands of acres of national forest that, before the Revolution, used to be farmland. In the decade preceding the Great Patriotic War, factories began encroaching on it as the Soviet Union, fearing attack from the West, prepared for potential evacuation eastward of industries in European Russia.
In Soviet times Kuibyshev was, like Kaliningrad, a “closed city” owing to its defense-related industries. It also became, eventually, the “space capital” of the USSR, producing rockets and much else the country’s space program required. (The city was also famed as the producer of the Pobeda (Victory) timepieces—a Soviet Rolex of sorts.) Our young interlocutors complained that these days the Russian space industry relies on foreign-made equipment and is being neglected.
Yet the space museum remains one of the city’s prominent landmarks, featuring, as it does, exhibits of the war. It was Khrushchev who presided over the Soviet Union’s space program, long after Stalin’s death. The Sputnik satellite circled the globe for the first time in 1957, twelve years after the war ended. Yury Gagarin made mankind’s first journey into space, when Stalin was thoroughly expunged from the Soviet pantheon. And yet here he is again, the dictator rehabilitated. The museum presents the momentous achievements of the Space Age—some of the Soviet Union’s most momentous—as the direct consequence of Stalin’s era.
“What is Samara really good at?” we asked the new graduates.
“Industries, of course,” they replied.
“But you say factories are being neglected here.”
“Well, Samara is more a trade town these days. As a major river town, we’ve been always good at trade, too.”
After saying good-bye, we walked back up toward Kuibyshev Square, breathtaking in its size. “It’s the largest in Europe!” said a passerby, noticing our fascination.
“Are we in Europe?” we asked him.
“Well, not exactly,” he replied, chagrined.
The square’s ever-mutable name reflected the historical epochs through which it, and Russia, had passed. In czarist Orthodox Christian Russia, it was called Sobornaya (Cathedral) Square, for the huge house of worship that once graced its northern reaches. The Soviets dynamited the cathedral and designated the square Kommunalnaya (Communal) but eventually changed that to Kuibyshev, in honor of Valerian Kuibyshev, who ran the planned economy under Stalin. In 2010, a municipal commission recommended switching the square’s appellation back to Sobornaya, but the mayor nixed the move. The young people we had spoken to on the riverbank didn’t know who Kuibyshev was, but, in any case, they insisted that “At thirty-seven acres ours is the largest square in Europe.” Again, Europe. Where we were not. But to which Russia looks.
Trapped between the double-headed eagle and the hammer and the sickle, Samara straddles the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the communist and the capitalist.
Ramshackle, centuries-old wooden buildings decorated with intricately carved eighteenth-century latticework stand next to high-rises of glass and steel. Samara is a city of contrasts that even in Russia one rarely sees.
On our way back to the hotel, as we sped past the wooden houses, we asked a friendly cabdriver named Nikolai, “What are you going to do with the old huts, renovate them with contemporary amenities? Only a few, we saw, have been redone that way.”
“No,” he laughed. “The city got 26 million rubles [at the time $500,000] to drape painted tarps over walls facing the street. Just like the old Potemkin villages! Two hundred years later, Russia still has not changed!”
The Potemkin reference goes back to the summer of 1787, when Catherine the Great set out to inspect the recent additions to her vast empire, including the Crimean Peninsula, annexed from the Ottomans four years earlier. Catherine’s lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the governor-general of her new southern provinces, knew shabby land- and cityscapes would displease the Germanic empress, who set high standards for order. So he saw to it that roadside buildings along her route would be lined with cheerful, prosperous facades, to hide the reigning squalor of rural poverty. On her return to Saint Petersburg, Catherine announced she was pleased with her new territory’s bucolic riches.
Centuries later, the authorities still carry out renovations to impress visitors, be they czars or presidents. The current Potemkin program in Samara owed its origins to the 2018 World Cup, because along with ten other cities in Russia, it was picked to host a number of the tournament’s matches. This time, the local government has decided to hide Samara’s unseemly side not from the president, but from foreigners.
“At least in the USSR the authorities knew how to make life better. We made rockets and watches, we had boat rides on the Volga,” Nikolai said.
We were curious: Kuibyshev was the reserve capital during the war, and the Soviet space industry capital after that. Yet the authorities have not managed to change the look in many downtown spots.
Just a few feet away from the wooden shacks on Vilonovskaya Street stands a fancy yellow building showing elements of Classical Stalinist style. There dwelled the Khrushchevs, the Stalins (his children, that is), and other political families evacuated from Moscow. Nina grew up hearing stories about the privileged wartime abodes within.
Nikolai had no answer as to why even the city center seventy years later still falls short of the “second capital” designation, except to note that Putin was working on it. Which did not mean that he was necessarily a fan of Russia’s current ruler.
“With capitalism,” said Nikolai, “there is no money for anything good for the people. And our governor is almost a communist,” he announced, referring to the regional chief Nikolai Merkushkin. Officially a member of the dominant Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia) party, Merkushkin has racked up a notoriously long list of complaints among his electorate, all the while making strident statements about the West’s plot to destroy Russia. “Of course, things take a long time,” our cabdriver said. He was speaking before Putin’s elections in March 2018. “We’ll see who will replace the governor.”
“But didn’t you say communists did everything well before Merkushkin, who was also a communist?” we asked.
“Those were good Soviet communists, but now they are bad capitalist communists,” Nikolai replied.
Before the presidential elections, a sort of “musical chairs” was taking place across Russia, with mayors and governors being dismissed and others nominated in their stead to assure that Putin’s de facto party, United Russia, would fill all the most important positions with the most reliable—that is, loyal—people. Just a few months after our visit, in September 2017, Merkushkin resigned “voluntarily” and was replaced by Dmitry Azarov, a local politician with a better economic pedigree.
For comparison, the Kremlin powers that be spared Ulyanovsk’s governor Morozov such a fate in his Lenin-famous hometown. His good standing with the Kremlin has helped assure the longevity of his position. Even though Ulyanovsk could certainly use more sprucing up, Morozov has done well navigating local and national political, social, and cultural currents.
The farther east we would travel, the more we would see the well-being of a city, a whole region even, relying on the local government for its prosperity, while that prosperity was dependent on the regional authorities’ cordial relationship with the Kremlin.
5
PERM, YEKATERINBURG, AND TYUMEN