The row about the Yeltsin Centre is not a discussion about Yeltsin or even about the 1990s; it’s a row about Russian freedom and about the alternatives, the different paths of Russian history. The film shows how, century after century, Russia stood before the choice of freedom – but ended up choosing autocracy. In reality, the same thing happened with us in the nineties, and the main exposition in the museum illustrates this brilliantly. It was thought up by the film director Pavel Lungin, as a biblical seven days of creation – seven days that turned out to be turning points of the era, from the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in October 1987, when Yeltsin declared that he didn’t agree with the course being taken by Gorbachev, through the barricades of the coup of August 1991 and the ruins of Grozny, destroyed by the war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, to the presidential elections of 1996 and Yeltsin’s heart operation later the same year.
The concept of the museum was created by the American company, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, famous for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow. In the gallery devoted to 19 August 1991, visitors find themselves in an ordinary Moscow flat of those times: there’s a divan, a rug, and a sideboard containing books and photographs (genuine items that belonged to the three young men who died during the defence of the White House); on the small cabinet there stands an old-style telephone, which suddenly starts to ring – and when you pick it up you can hear actual conversations from that time, with worried Muscovites telling each other about seeing tanks on the streets. This room leads straight onto the barricades, with metal barriers and the Russian tricolour, and from there visitors enter the empty void of a food shop in the autumn of 1991. On the counter lie scattered useless food vouchers, and on the shelves there are tins of seaweed, the only thing you could buy in the shops in those days of food shortages…
‘…And on the seventh day He rested, after His work of creation.’ The journey through the nineties ends up in the President’s office, the artefacts for which were all taken from the Kremlin and set up in Yekaterinburg. Beyond the fake windows there is a frosty December day in 1999, an accurate pile of documents stands on the desk, along with a malachite writing set and a steaming cup of tea; a jacket hangs on the back of the chair as if the owner had just popped out for a minute. In one corner the lights flash on the Christmas Tree, and in front of the desk there stand a television camera from Russian Television Channel One and a TV monitor, on which Yeltsin, sitting in that very chair, repeats his farewell address to the nation.
Leaving the office, visitors are now in an empty room called ‘The Freedom Gallery’. On the wall there hangs a picture by the conceptual artist Erik Bulatov, where the word ‘freedom’ becomes lost in the clouds; on the window frames there are screens, on which famous people speak lovely yet unreliable words about freedom; in the windows there is the view of the dam on the Iset River, with the factories in the distance, a low sky, blackened by the smoke from the factory chimneys.
And a little to the right of the river, you can see the rich golden cupolas of The Church on the Blood, built on Yeltsin’s personal instructions: as a sign of repentance, they say, for taking the decision when he was First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region Committee of the Communist Party to knock down the Ipatiev House, the place where the Royal Family was murdered.[48]
This exit into emptiness says no less about the era than do the ‘seven days’ of its creation. The era ends on that winter’s day, when, under the gaze of the television camera, the heavy and puffy Boris Yeltsin handed over his office and the nuclear briefcase to the young Vladimir Putin, who was confused and couldn’t believe his luck, while Yeltsin, wiping away a tear, said to him, ‘Look after Russia’. At that moment, Russia once again – as in the stories of the Novgorod Veche, Catherine’s reformist projects and Speransky’s dreams of a constitution – chose authoritarianism. Yet another attempt to break through to freedom slowly died as the nineties wore on and, as a result, produced Putin. And as the visitor looks round this empty gallery, he or she simply cannot but think about the pattern of what happened and about Russia’s path through history, which each time tries to set out on the path to freedom, but inevitably slides down into slavery.
Nevertheless, the Yeltsin Centre is dangerous for the guardians of the state and the obscurantists, who see it as an alternative space, as an image of a different Russia – nonimperial and not run by Moscow. They see it as epitomizing the freemen of the Urals and regional autonomy, as a mechanism for remembering the gatherings of millions of people on the Manezh Square in Moscow and that period when the state, the eternal Russian Leviathan, stepped aside and shrunk back under the pressure of space, the people, history and freedom. It’s like the bulky stone version of Yeltsin at the entrance: this bear of a man, the representative of that same rebellious element of the people which so frightens Nikita Mikhalkov, behaving like the typical Russian barin, the landlord, in the times of serfdom. Instead of the Yeltsin Centre, they would rather build across the country a chain of Stalin Centres and military-patriotic parks with tanks. But they are quite incapable of seeing a very simple truth: genuine patriotism means freedom. And the museum on the River Iset preserves this idea as a memory, as nostalgia – and as hope.
CONSTITUTION DAY
On a cold morning in mid-December 2015, a grey-haired old man stepped onto the platform of the Yaroslavl Station in Moscow from a third-class carriage of the fast train No. 43 from Khabarovsk to Moscow, carrying a knapsack in his hands. He was of shortish height, broad-shouldered and stocky, wearing an old sheepskin coat, fur hat and mittens, and with felt valenki boots on his feet. He stopped, looking around in wonder, but was immediately shoved in the back by passengers exiting with their luggage, and was cursed by a porter with a trolley. ‘What’re you standing there for gawping, grandad! Get a move on! You’ve arrived!’
The old man picked up his bag and moved off along the platform with the crowd. The policemen with a dog by the exit were busy checking the documents of two Chinese people and paid him no attention. As he drew closer, the dog gave a quiet growl, but then whined and tucked in its tail. The old man went past the stalls selling icons and the kebab kiosks, squeezed past the crush to get into the metro and found himself on Three Stations Square, with its clusters of taxis, ringing of tram bells and smoke-blackened railway bridge, beyond which he could see tall towers. Large snowflakes began to fall from a leaden sky. The old man pulled his belt tighter around himself, threw his knapsack over his shoulder, and set off on foot into the throbbing winter city.
This old man was none other than the Decembrist, Alexander Nikolaevich Lutsky, a junker of the Moscow Life-Guards Regiment, who was charged with taking part in the uprising on Senate Square in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825 and who was known also as ‘the forgotten Decembrist’. He was born in 1804 in Borovichi, into the family of Senior Officer Nikolai Andreevich Lutsky, who belonged to the old noble family from the Lutsk District in Volhynia. Alexander did not actually take part in the Decembrist Uprising, but in defending the crowd he wounded a police horse, for which he was arrested and incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress on an island on the Neva.
48
The Church on the Blood was built in 2000–3 on the site where the Ipatiev House stood. Fearing that the House could become a focus for royalist sentiment, in 1977 the Soviet Communist Party ordered it to be knocked down. As First Secretary of the local Party Committee, Yeltsin saw to it that the order was carried out.