The row about the museum reflects the schizophrenia of the Russian leadership towards the figure of Yeltsin and to the 1990s in general. On the one hand, nearly all of them, politicians and oligarchs, grew up in Yeltsin’s shadow, as they say – from Vladimir Putin, who served as the faithful bag-carrier of Yeltsin’s comrade-in-arms, the charismatic Mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak; to Vladimir Medinsky, who was a pro-Yeltsin activist during the coup in Moscow in 1991; to Nikita Mikhalkov, who appeared during the presidential election campaign in 1996 as a trusted supporter of Boris Yeltsin. On the other hand, in the new political consensus of Putin’s 2000s, the 1990s have become a target for abuse, they are seen as the original sin, stigmatized; and the new identity of power is being built on denying anything positive about that decade. Observing how the current elite tries to extricate itself from its links with that period and with Yeltsin is a truly Freudian spectacle, reminding one of the Oedipus Complex and patricide.
However, this is not merely a case of the shadow of Yeltsin, which still makes the ruling class uncomfortable; it’s a lot bigger than that. It’s about Boris Yeltsin, and the Centre named after him, and his local region, the Urals, and in particular the film clip that is shown in the museum, which presents an alternative view of the generally accepted line of Russian history, which is authoritarian, imperial and Moscow-centred: it’s this that has particularly upset the guardians of power. By the very fact of its existence, the Yeltsin Centre demonstrates the possibility of there being a different Russia: nonimperial, free and federal, which could have happened in the 1990s but which was torn up on 31 December 1999, that very New Year’s night when Boris Yeltsin appeared on television and announced that he was stepping down, effectively naming Vladimir Putin as his successor.
The exterior of the museum is rather unusual. It was an unfinished and crudely constructed shopping centre, just like hundreds of others that sprang up in Russian cities in the 1990s. It was redesigned by the architect Boris Bernasconi, and turned into an open exhibition space with an enormous atrium, inside which there rises a spiral staircase, rather like in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Huge windows look out onto a wide city pond, fed by waters from a dam on the Iset River, an industrial river that flows between Yekaterinburg’s factory buildings and the pre-revolutionary merchants’ houses. But the most outstanding feature of the building is the façade made of perforated aluminium. Most of all, this reminds one of a rusty iron curtain; light shines through the holes in it. In no sense could the building be described as pompous or even looking like a ‘memorial’; rather, it looks like the rethinking of a cult object from the 1990s, a shopping centre, in technocratic and political terms, a redevelopment of commercial real estate for the public and human space.
This is what was turned into the Yeltsin Centre, which has become the focus of the cultural and social life of Yekaterinburg. As well as the museum and the library, there is an educational centre, a conference hall, a bookshop called ‘Piotrovsky’, which is probably the best one east of the Urals, and the ‘1991’ café, where they sell burgers, Soviet-era cuisine, locally brewed craft beer and a bird-cherry cake made to Naina Yeltsina’s special recipe. Dozens of conferences, concerts and exhibitions take place in the Centre, and the museum has become the most visited in the region, with up to a thousand people a day passing through its doors.
A real indication of the genuine popularity of the Centre is that it has become a stopping point for wedding parties; dozens of them can turn up on an autumn day.[46] Along with the statues of Lenin and the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov (after whom the city was re-named ‘Sverdlovsk’ in Soviet times, before reverting to its original name in 1991, although the region remains Sverdlovsk Oblast), the statue of Yeltsin – an imposing figure, carved out of a block of marble by the sculptor Georgy Frangulyan, and giving the impression that Yeltsin is stepping out of it – has also become a part of the traditional route for newlyweds as they tour the city’s ‘places of memory’. And on the bronze statue of Yeltsin, where he has apparently sat down on a bench to relax in the foyer of the Centre, the nose is shiny – it has become the norm to rub it for good luck. Here, Yeltsin is one of their own, a man from the Urals, an ambassador for the industrial population who conquered Moscow and changed Russia, and the people of the Urals stand shoulder to shoulder in his defence – as they did after Vladimir Medinsky and Nikita Mikhalkov denounced the Yeltsin Centre.
The Urals is a region with a very strong and deep sense of local identity. It represents an anti-imperialist alternative, and is an independent centre of power; it was no coincidence that in his speech against the Yeltsin Centre Mikhalkov mentioned the talk of Urals separatism which occurred in the 1990s. And independent politicians like the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Royzman, simply strengthen the feeling that this is a special place. The siting of the museum in Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s cultural and industrial centres, was a strong step on the road to the decentralization that our country so badly needs, and the hysteria that erupted in Moscow because of the Yeltsin Centre was partly caused by the instinctive fear of regionalism.
But the main apple of discord is the eight-minute-long film clip of Russian history, which is shown on a constant loop in the small cinema at the start of the museum’s exposition. It shows an unorthodox version of Russian history: as a series of attempts to break out to freedom. It doesn’t show the Battle on the Ice of 1242, when the Prince of Novgorod, Alexander Nevsky, defeated the knights of the Livonian Order on Lake Chudskoe; but it does talk about the Novgorod Veche, the free city assembly, which elected its own princes and twice forced out Alexander Nevsky because he infringed the city’s liberties, in contravention of their agreement. There is no mention of the capture of Kazan, the capital of the Kazan Khanate, by Ivan the Terrible in 1552; but there is ‘the elected council’, the informal government called by the young Tsar Ivan when he planned to reform the monarchy. The film talks about the enlightened dreams of Empress Catherine II at the end of the eighteenth century, which changed the word ‘slave’ to ‘subject’ in official documents; and about the draft constitution drawn up by Mikhail Speransky under Emperor Alexander I at the start of the nineteenth century; about the Decembrist uprising in 1825; and about the great reforms of Emperor Alexander II in the 1860s and the emancipation of the serfs. It tells how, in the twentieth century, the people were not broken by fear or Stalin’s machine of repression, and were able to carry out industrialization and build ‘the Magnetic Mountain’, the largest metallurgical plant in the world in Magnitogorsk; achieve victory in the Second World War; conquer the Arctic and Space; it tells of Khrushchev’s thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika. The film ends with the election of Boris Yeltsin, who completes the series of reforming leaders and becomes President, relying not on his personal power but on the independent choice of the people.
The film clip shows not the standard ‘History of the Russian State’, as written by all Russian historians, starting with Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Klyuchevsky in the nineteenth century, but the history of Russian freedom. The video is full of respect for the people, their choice and their sovereignty. As the philosopher, Kirill Martynov, put it, it is ‘a republican history, seen through the eyes of the downtrodden, who are excluded from the corrupt state food chain’;[47] and this is what has upset the critics most of all, who demand from historians a dutiful list of rulers and victories, an encyclopaedia of the state’s greatness.
46
There is a tradition in Russia for wedding parties on the way from the registry office to the wedding breakfast to stop off at various sites of historical or local interest. If it is a war memorial, the bride may even lay her bouquet there. A separate superstition is to rub or touch a part of a bronze statue for luck.
47
https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2016/12/12/70870-utomlennye-eltsinym.