east 23_To Yekaterinburg, Pasternakin Hand pdf

Known as Sverdlosk in its Soviet past, Yekaterinburg is now a thriving
metropolis in the Russian Urals. But a trip into its past includes revisiting
Off to Yekaterinburg,
Pasternak in Hand
TRAVEL
Text and photos by Massimiliano Di Pasquale
Lenin’s lieutenant, the death of the Romanovs, Stalinist industry, and
bloody gangland warfare
AZANSKY VOKSAL, MOSCOW. A
long trail of stationary reddish-purple
railway cars on track No. 3 await the
trainmaster’s 3:57 p.m. whistle. Uniformed
K
assistant conductors (provodnitse) in
checkered sweaters, white shirts and blue
skirts study passenger tickets and indicate the
seating arrangement of the compartments. In
TRAVEL
the distance is the outline of Leningradskaya.
The Gothic-constructivist tower (now the
Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya) was the
smallest of Stalin’s so-called “Seven Sisters,”
skyscrapers ordered up by the Soviet
Georgian leader in the early 1950s to help
spruce the capital’s skyline. The Kazan
Railway Station was designed by “architect of
the people” Aleksey Shchusev along
geometric, Empire Style lines. It has its own
tower, similar to the Tartar Söyembikä Tower
in the central Russian city of Kazan.
Completed in 1926, the Kazan Railway
Station is near two others, Leningradsky and
Yaroslavsky, all three set on vast
Komsomolskaya Square, also known to
Muscovites as Ploshchad Trekh Voksalov
(“Three Station Square”). Trains headed
toward the Urals and Siberia leave from one
of the stations.
The “Ural,” the “Rossiya” (which connects
Moscow to Vladivostok) and the “Baikal”
(Moscow-Irkutsk) are all “firmenny poyezd,”
or “trains with names,” which usually means
comfortable, cleaner carriages, trained
personnel and above average restaurants. Or
so I was told by a pleasant railway employee
as I bought my ticket. Too bad she didn’t point
out an important Russian quirk: On the
departure board, the city of Yekaterinburg still
goes by its Soviet name, Sverdlovsk.
Headed for the Urals
Moscow’s outskirts still reflect the Soviet
Union at its most leaden: Giant grey housing
complexes and look-alike cement boulevards.
It doesn’t take a keen observer to know that
Moscow’s bright colors are a mirage for those
stuck in the squalid acres of communal
housing erected in the Brezhnev era.
When the train finally leaves the city
behind, it plunges into the extensive Russian
green. That at least is the landscape behind
the salmon-colored curtains in a
compartment I share with two young men
headed for Agriz and a girl with
Dolce&Gabbana jeans who unabashedly
wields her new Nokia mobile. Otherwise, the
compartment fits into the quaint Russian
literary tradition. Receding in the distance I
see colored cottages, forests of birch, steppes
and shimmering golden domes.
Kidnapped by this somehow-familiar
vision, my eyes glued to the scenery, my
mind replaced Moscow’s lugubriousness with
the poetic images from Pasternak:
“Field followed field and was in turn
swallowed by forests. The succession of huge
OFF TO YEKATERINBURG, PASTERNAK IN HAND
views aroused in the travelers a feeling of
spaciousness and made them think and dream
of the future.”
I thought also of Joseph Roth’s memorable
descriptions in “The Flight Without End,” his
chronicle of rail travel along the Volga
between Nizhniy Novgorod and Kazan in
October 1926. “The steppes breathed
immensely on the hills, the river. You could
feel the bitter taste of the infinite… Facing
such vastness man is lost but consoles
himself… he’s lost but also protected by the
borderless silence.”
IN VEKOVKA. The “Ural” makes its
first stop after about three hours. Armies of
babushkas, their faces at times lined with
wrinkles, their heads draped in white
scarves, sweep over the tracks bearing
baskets full of smoked fish, honey and
Siberian-style ravioli. Their presence only
reinforces a sense of having plunged into
some Great Russian novel.
Beginning in 1857, the year the Russian
railway system expanded to include
destinations far from Moscow, train travel
assumed in increasingly important role in the
nation’s collective conscience. Images of
smoking samovars at the rear of trains appear
in the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who
set key events in “Anna Karenina” and “The
Idiot” in railway carriages.
When the train departs after 20 minutes,
the two young men break out their frugal
dinner, cold chicken and tomatoes. They invite
me to join in, once again evoking images of
“Dr. Zhivago.”
“The toilet emitted a light stench that
people tried to cover over with cologne. You
could smell the slightly sour odor of roast
chicken wrapped in greasy paper.”
20 HOURS LATER. The train stops in
Druzhinino, the last station before
Yekaterinburg. The young woman with the
Nokia pulls out makeup and dizzying high
TRAVEL
heels from her purse. Her track shoes are
quickly replaced by something far more
provocative. She then works on her lashes and
applies fuchsia-colored gloss to her lips. She’s
oblivious to my presence. At 6:32, with Swiss
precision, the train pulls into Yekaterinburg
station after 26 hours of travel.
neighborhood near the station. Pavel will
host me during my brief stay in the Urals. I
get to his apartment, shower briefly, and
soon find myself at “Gordon,” among the
city’s more popular pubs.
It’s Friday night and I nurse Newcastle
Brown Ale. Around me slightly tipsy kids
gyrate to the sound of Abba’s “Dancing
Back in the USSR
Queen.”
Marina is originally from Tver, north of
Meantime, Dimitri shows up. He’s a friend
Moscow, but has lived in Yekaterinburg since of Pasha and Marina who was a DJ for a wellthe early 1990s. She graduated in art and
known local radio station in the 1980s. Dimitri
culture from the local university and is now
breaks the ice, taking his cue from my Smiths
among the best photographers in the city. Her “The Queen is Dead” T-shirt.
portfolio includes female nudes for glossy
“I was one of the first DJs in the Soviet
glamour magazines, landscape shots in
Union to play their music,” he says proudly.
National Geographic style and portraits of
“Even though we lived in the hinterlands we
actors and show business personalities, such as always found a way of getting a hold of
singer Toto Cutugno, immensely popular
Western pop and rock.”
here.
Beginning in the late 1960s, thanks to
When I meet her she’s with Pavel, a
global popularity of The Beatles and a general
lanky IT technician who lives with his
decrease in tension between Russia the West,
Siberian cat in a suburban residential
rock groups cropped up. “They weren’t really
OFF TO YEKATERINBURG, PASTERNAK IN HAND
that good, and a lot of them played
underground, but they paved the way for the
1980s scene,” says Dimitri
During Perestroika, the country’s most
famous band, along with DDT out of
Leningrad, was Aquarium, headed by singersongwriter Boris Grebenshchikov. “Their
concerts, which were usually held outside the
city [then called Sverdlosk], were major
underground events … Boris wrote great
songs… He was the spokesperson for an
entire generation.”
Dimitri, who still swears by AngloAmerican rock, now works in a bank. His
radio station closed in 1998, probably the
worst year in recent Russian history. That
summer, after Communist lawmakers in the
Duma rejected Boris Yeltsin economic rescue
plan, international investors that had
supported the post-Soviet recovery backed
away. The ruble was devalued and banks
failed. The country was poised on the brink of
collapse. The Depression-style crisis
devastated Siberia, where whole cities were
evacuated for lack of food and heat.
Dimitri recalls those times clearly. He
smiles to exorcise the worst of it, and then
tells me how he and his future wife Natasha
survived on bread and potatoes.
Birch forests and lost mines
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, always
singing the praises of the Soviet heartland,
wrote: “The Urals region plays an essential
role in providing communism with
industry and goods.”
In the 1920s, Sverdlosk — renamed in
1924 to honor Bolshevik leader Yakov
Sverdlov, Lenin’s right-hand man and heir
apparent who died during the 1919 Spanish
flu epidemic — was among the most powerful
TRAVEL
industrial cities in the new Soviet Union.
Years of forced industrialization saw the
1933 creation of Uralmash, which grew into
one of Europe’s most famous heavy
machinery producers. “For many years that
name was the symbol of the country’s new
and powerful technological progress,” wrote a
Soviet publication in 1991.
But it was Peter the Great, two centuries
earlier, who first foresaw Yekaterinburg’s
potential. The city was founded in 1723 as a
citadel and factory center with the intention
of tapping into the vast mineral wealth of the
Urals. It was named in honor of two
Catherine, Peter’s wife and a second
Catherine, the patron saint of miners. Within
decades, the territory between Yekaterinburg,
Perm and Orenburg counted some 55
factories that processed iron and coal.
Today, the mineral-rich town of Dektiarsk,
a few kilometers from the border between
Europe and Asia, is now a popular movie-set
location. The mountains, rugged terrain and
now-closed mines make it ideal for noirs or
road movies in David Lynch or Dave
Cronenberg style. Or even for crime movies,
which might be based in fact on the Mafia
murders that tore apart the town in the mid1990s. Its obelisk provides a popular
destination for newlyweds, who liked being
filmed there.
From the top of a nearby hill, the
horizon unfolds with lakes, birch forests and
a sky that seems decorated with white, fairy
tale-like clouds. What’s most striking may
be the absence of dominant peaks. The Urals,
which stretch 2,000 kilometers from the
Kara Sea in the north to Kazakhstan in the
south, divide eastern Russia from Siberia.
Yet they’re hardly the daunting barriers
some imagine.
Ganina Yama
Closed to foreigners until 1990 for
military security reasons, the city also bore
Boris Yeltsin, who at different time was
Mikhail Gorbachev’s ally and most bitter
rival. Yeltsin, who ran Russian Federation
after Gorbachev, was born to a humble family
in the nearby village of Butka. Yekaterinburg
was also famous for its role in the mysterious
death of the Tsar Nicholas II and the entire
Romanov royal family. The Romanovs were
assassinated near the city on July 17, 1918 at
Sverdlov’s request. He allegedly ordered the
local Soviet commissioner for the Urals, Yakov
Yurovsky, to have them shot them and bury
the bodies.
After their murders, the Romanovs were
subjected to macabre speculation. Their
remains were finally found in 1979 in an
abandoned mine shaft known as Ganina
Yama. The discovery was kept secret by Soviet
authorities until 1991, when the bodied were
finally completed exhumed. Ganina Yama,
which the Russian Orthodox Church
recognized as the sole rest of the Romanov
family, now has a wooden monastery
dedicated to their maartyrdom. The deep quiet
of the surrounding birch forest projects a
surreal and quiet spirituality typical of holy
places.
Entering the monastery, Marina
respectfully covers her head in a sign of
devotion while Pasha and I continue our
animated discussion of the Gorbachev years in
a whisper. Later, before returning to the city,
we sit at an outdoor kiosk run by monks who
revive us with “piroshki” pastries and glasses
of “kvas,” a bread drink made from rye.
Yekaterinburg today
“It’s peculiarity of our country: If the
dream of every soldier is to become a general,
then the dream of every Russian criminal is to
make money legally,” wrote journalist Anna
Politkovskaya in the book “Putin’s Russia”
(Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006.)
She meant the words for Pavel Fedulev, the
Urals oligarch and one time Yekaterinburg
“King of Vodka” who during the 1990s was
among Russia’s most powerful oligarchs.
As Marina explains that in recent years
Yekaterinburg has finally evolved into a
modern, clean and efficient city, dramatically
different from a decade ago when gangland
violence kept many residents barricaded at
home. Those were the days to which
Politkovskaya referred.
Marina readily admits that the city’s new
bounty of elegant restaurants, chic bars and
modern malls is inextricable linked to a
decision by former gangsters to invest in legal
businesses.
Imaging Yekaterinburg as a Chicago-ofthe-1930s, Al Capone-style gangland capital
instead of a city that was once at the center of
Soviet heavy industry and state funerals is
freighted with kitsch. So is human-size statue
of a young gangster dangling the keys to a
luxury Mercedes and planted squarely in the
ground at the entrance to Shirokorechinskaya
cemetery just outside the city.