THE URALS’ HOLY TRINITY
TIME ZONE: MSK+2; UCT+5
When you are Putin, the Russia you see around you is flourishing.
Three towns in the time zone that is second past Moscow—Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen—are major stopovers on the Siberian Throughway (in Russian, Sibirsky Trakt, also known as the Moskovskiy Trakt, or the Moscow Throughway). The throughway was the longest road in the world and for centuries connected Moscow and the Far East, passing through China. The three towns are also main junctions on the Trans-Siberian Railway, forming the trinity of the Urals—the mountain range dividing Europe and Asia.
Perm is the Urals’ culture capital—the “first city in Europe,” we would be told, and the setting for Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Named in honor of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine the Great, Yekaterinburg—known as Sverdlovsk in the Soviet days—is the regional political center and the capital of the vast Ural region. Boris Yeltsin was born in a village nearby. Tyumen is the hub for the region’s oil industry, the industry supporting the Russian state and enmeshed in its politics.
Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, offers us a charming précis of how diet affects character. “Pepper … makes people hot-tempered … vinegar … makes them sour … chamomile … makes them bitter … and barley-sugar and such things … make children sweet-tempered.”
Hard candy confected from barley sugar was for the prim Victorian Brits, of course. For the doughy Russians, Carroll’s Russian translator Nina Demurova’s pronouncement is apt: “ot sdoby dobreyut” (they grow kinder from eating buns). In Russian sdoba (yeast dough buns) and dobryi (kind) share a root.
Perm impresses with its buns and its decorative gingerbreads—Russia’s most famous—and kindness. The city’s bakeries brim with a variety of pastries sweet and savory, with fillings of cheese, fish, meat, cream, and potatoes and coming in various shapes and sizes. The vendors, smiling, make suggestions and offer samples of flavors you have never imagined. Say, an intricately decorated multilayered calf-liver cake with fresh herbs—amazing. Or a salmon turnover with cheese—even better.
After the lean, dour Soviet decades with their empty shelves and shortages, baking has been making a comeback all over Russia. One can buy fine baked goods even in subway stations—but in Perm they are even finer. The Russian soul, they say, dwells in its pastries and pies. Long before Lewis Carroll came on the scene, Russians had their own saying: “A home is not nice because of its decor, but because of its pies.”
Maybe that is why Chekhov and Pasternak chose to memorialize Perm in their work. Chekhov’s Three Sisters tried to salvage their intellectual lives in a “regional garrison town” where they eagerly dreamed of moving to the more refined Moscow. Doctor Zhivago—Pasternak’s novel about a Russian poet-physician in love with another man’s wife—is set in the fictional town of Yuryatin, based on Perm, amid the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution. There love blossoms between Yury Zhivago and Lara. Their meeting place—the nineteenth-century caryatid-decorated house in gorgeous Prussian blue, now on Lenin Street, that once belonged to the wealthy local trader Gribushin—is as important a character as the lovers themselves. They call it the “house with figures” here. In a double literary twist, Yuryatin’s doctor learns that Chekhov’s Three Sisters was, too, set in Perm.
The last city before the Urals, Perm, according to its residents, is “where Europe begins.” Others view it as the last European city—the end of the world, even. The Perm Paradox.
The intoxicating smell of lindens, so rare elsewhere in Russia, wafts over the house from where these trees stand on the nearby Komsomolsky Prospect, adding to the house’s fin-de-siècle charm. Next to it stands a more recent, commercialized sign of the times: a posh Doctor Zhivago restaurant, named in the post-Soviet tradition of pilfering literary texts for marketing memes. Have its customers read Pasternak’s novel? Doubtful—the story is popular in Russia, the book itself much less so. Popular, because the novel’s history is a political ordeal that many Soviet artists had gone through. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech Pasternak wrote a Zhivago romance set at the time of the Revolution, like Bulgakov exploring political themes of Stalinism and religion. The manuscript, forbidden in the Soviet Union—de-Stalinization notwithstanding—was secretly published in Italy in 1957. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Soviets forbade him to travel abroad to receive the honor. Later in life, Khrushchev was embarrassed by this decision he called “despotic.”
Having passed by the house with figures, we continued on Lenin Street, which we assumed would lead to the city’s Lenin statue. We asked two young women for directions, but they didn’t know the Soviet leader’s location. Luckily, we came upon an older man who kindly explained that in Perm, a city of culture, the local Lenin monument was associated not with his eponymous street but with a park, where he stands in front of the stately pale blue Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater.
Music and ballet have always been cultivated here. Sergei Diaghilev, a native of Perm, founded in Paris in 1905 the Ballets Russes—the most famous twentieth-century Russian contribution to European high culture.
A hundred years later, in the summer of 2017, the city continued those cultural traditions. The Tchaikovsky Theater’s orchestra, MusicAeterna, conducted by the Greek (and current Perm resident) Teodor Currentzis, opened the Salzburg Festival with its performance of Mozart’s Requiem, the first time such an honor was bestowed on a non-Austrian company. Many do wonder how this town so off-center can attract world-class artists such as Currentzis. His explanation was that he chose to move to Perm because there he found “the spiritual depth he had been craving.”[28]
Currentzis is not the only one who believes that Perm offers an atmosphere conducive to the creative life. The prominent art entrepreneur Marat Gelman, another native of Perm but known throughout Russia, launched many projects in town, including the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, PERMM.
In the mid-2000s, the young governor of the Perm region, Oleg Chirkunov, had an idea to follow in the footsteps of Diaghilev, Chekhov, and Pasternak, and to turn Perm into the new capital of Russian culture. He was encouraged by Putin’s then pro-European statements, including his BBC interview that “Russia is part of the European culture.” “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. It is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy,”[29] Putin said.
Chirkunov indeed made Perm’s culture prosper, but by 2012 the political atmosphere changed and the governor resigned, effectively ending the period of the Perm “cultural revolution.”
After Putin’s third term as president began in 2012, the Russian government showed itself increasingly intolerant of diverse viewpoints—including in art—and the Kremlin decided Gelman’s creation enjoyed too much popularity among the political opposition. In 2013, the government, or so Gelman contends, deprived him of control of the gallery, though it remains open and still plays an important role in the city’s cultural life, albeit operating under the tighter supervision of the authorities.
2
“Breakfast with Frost Interview: Vladimir Putin,” BBC, March 5, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/breakfast_with_frost/transcripts/putin5.mar.txt.