Communist Ruins

"There will rise, believe me, comrade
A star of captivating bliss, when
Russia wakes up from her sleep
And when our names will both be written
On the ruins of despotism."

(Pushkin to Chadeev, 1818, cited by Orlando Figes in in the introduction to Pushkin's History of Pugachev)

What does the term, ruin, connote? What makes something worthy of being called a ruin? A ruin is something more than a collapsed or demolished building. To be a ruin, something must hold our sentimental attention and call forth feelings of awe and wonderment. A ruin is a collapsed architectural structure--with pretensions to grandeur.



Visiting St. Petersburg, one would expects to find ruins everywhere. Since the city was only founded in 1703, we can't expect to find any building fragments with ties to antiquity. Even so, since we know that one of the world's grandest and most destructive experiments in living was launched here in the city, we expect to see the physical fragments of the greatest social phenomenon of twentieth century on almost every street corner. Surprisingly, these fragments aren't all that easy to find, at least in the historic heart of the city.

Of course, the physical manifestations of seventy years of Soviet rule do in fact exist; they are just less prominent than one might expect, at least in the city's tourist areas. The vast majority of Lenin statues have been removed, though a few still remain. Totalitarian governmental buildings and monstrous housing projects do the landscape, but are overshadowed in the historic heart of St. Pete by the works of Italian and French masters of the eighteenth century. Here and there we notice a socialist realism frieze or statue. Here and there a hammer and sickle or red star adorn a building wall or metro stop. But the era of the Soviet Union isn't all that easy to spot unless you know what you're looking for.

There are a few museums that bear witness to the triumphs and tragedies of the birthplace of Bolshevism. The Museum of Political History, for example, is housed in the famous palace of ballerina Mathilda Kshesinskaya, where the Bolsheviks once convened, and where Lenin once preached to his followers from one of the balconies. But the home of the Petrograd Soviet, the Tauride Palace, is no longer a monument to the Soviet idyll, but rather a working governmental building dedicated to the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States. The nearby Smolny Institute, Lenin's home for a brief period, site of the Kirov assassination, and home to the Bolshevik Party during 1917, still exists. And a Lenin statue there hasn't been removed. But the Smolny Institute, as opposed to the cathedral, doesn't seem to be on anybody's tourist agenda. The guides don't mention the Institute at all.

To be a ruin, something must be much more than merely a remnant of the past. A ruin is a Romantic concept, a monument to a great (though not necessarily good) but defeated cause. St. Petersburg is home to myriad physical reminders of an important era in the life of the nation. However, the Russian people haven't apparently had either the time or the inclination to romanticize their grim past by highlighting the ruins in their midst.

Bruce Lincoln's St. Petersburg

Readers of the blog will know that Soviet Roulette holds the late, great Russian historian, Bruce Lincoln, in high regard. Lincoln is the author of about a dozen excellent books on modern Russian history. Readable, informative, and exciting, his exciting yet scholarly trilogy on the Russian Revolution and Civil War is representative of Lincoln's huge talent. Lincoln's last book is a testament to his lifelong love affair with Russia's imperials city, St. Petersburg. In Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia Lincoln demonstrates a sensitivity and mastery of cultural history that has wasn't on display in the majority of his treatises on modern social and political history.

In Sunlight at Midnight, Lincoln argues that St. Petersburg's story is simultaneously unique and central to the story of Russia's evolving identity. Lincoln's book is less than four hundred pages long, and yet somehow seems far longer, notwithstanding its scintillating prose. This is because St. Petersburg's history is rich, dense, and complex. This invented city has always been Russia's "Window on the West," which of course means that it has always stood at the very apex of Russia's struggle to come to terms with its divided Eurasian cultural identity. On the one hand, as a result of the geography, St. Petersburg is closer to Western Europe than the vast majority of the Russian or Soviet Empires. On the other hand, St. Petersburg has traditionally been an epicenter of imperialism, and one that necessarily communicated with all of Russia's Eastern, Asiatic, Islamic, Caucasian, and Siberian constituencies. It's strange to note that visitors to St. Petersburg can still feel this divided cultural heritage today. As it turns out, the 19th century debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers is not a cliche. While St. Petersburg plays host to hundreds of thousands of Western tourists each year, its tourist industry seems to depend at least as much on Russian travelers. While anecdotal, the fact that many young Russian workers in the tourist economy--hotel desk personnel, restaurant hostesses, and museum employees--speak almost no English, French, or German, may suggest that the city remains uncertain about the role the West could or should play in its future. The city, like the country at large, remains uncommitted to the West even three centuries after Catherine the Great conducted her famous correspondence with the literary giants of the Western Enlightenment like Diderot.

In the end, the historic significance of St. Petersburg transcends the story of Russia, as important as that story is in its own right. This is of course because St. Petersburg experienced the vertiginous process of industrialization and modernization in unique ways. Although other European capitals had been transformed by factory life and the rise of the bourgeois and proletarian classes, St. Petersburg was practically overwhelmed by social and economic change in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, St. Petersburg was not only divided between its imperial and Westernizing destinies, but also by its proletarian outskirts and bourgeois or bureaucratic center.

Part of Russia's inability to gracefully adapt to modernization is related to Russia's historic economic backwardness; after all, the serfs were only legally liberated in the 1960s. But part of Russia's fragility is related to Russia's political immaturity. At first, the Russian autocratic model helped backward Russia to weather the challenge of Western power, but later relying on autocracy led to severe class tensions. With no legitimate avenue to effect political change through democratic processes, proletarians and even bourgeois often turned to radical or even violent forms of dissent. St. Petersburg's Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, which marks the spot in which the Tsar Liberator Alexander II was assassinated despite his efforts to reform and modernize the state, is one testament to the impasse Russia confronted as early as the 1880s.

Bruce Lincoln doesn't attempt to explain the October Revolution in this book. The First World War obviously deserves a great deal of the blame for this event. Had Russia not suffered so grievously against German armies, who can say that a liberal revolution might not have succeeded? Lincoln indirectly suggests that St. Petersburg's cultural experimentation at the turn of the century--the Silver Age--is in some way related to radical political experimentation. The causal relationship between the poetry of the Straw Dog and Isanov's Tower and the political decisions of Lenin and Trotsky doesn't exist. Even so, Lincoln, following Marshall Berman, know that cultural radicalism may at least be a reflection of the kind of pressures that eventually legitimate radical political innovation. Certainly Andrei Bely's modernist novel, St. Petersburg, foreshadowed confusion, disorientation, and even disaster even before the First World War.

Mawkish Literary Museums in St. Petersburg

To visit St. Petersburg is to confront its monumental and almost undifferentiated architecture of grandeur. Whether neo-classical, baroque, art deco, or Stalinist, St. Petersburg's vast catalog of historic buildings--most in the process of being architecturally refurbished in some way--seem to resemble one another in their heaviness, height, and scales. And why not? The city was created out of thin air, and unlike Paris or Moscow or almost all other European cities had no centuries-long process of natural and therefore haphazard architectural evolution. Notwithstanding decades of relative decline vis-a-vis Moscow, St. Petersburg remains the imposing capital of its energetic founder, Peter the Great, and his immediate successors, especially Catherine the Great.



St. Petersburg--or at least its "historic heart"--is a city of palaces, governmental buildings, and elegant but intimidatingly large apartment buildings. It's also a city of bridges, canals, monuments, and the great Neva river. Having ironically lost its vitality in the wake of its own historical moment October Revolution, St. Petersburg has somehow evolved into a city of museums. The Hermitage, most famous of all Russian museums, and one of best museums the world has to offer, is the centerpiece of St. Petersburg's obsession with the past. The fabulous State Russian Museum, repository of so much of Russia's unique artistic heritage, is another of the city's most important historical treasures. But it's the smaller cultural museums--not Yusupov's Palace (magnificent site of Rasputin's legendary murder), not the Stroganov Palace (now a wing of the State Russian Museum), not the Menshikov Palace, and not Peterhof or Tsarskoe Selo (just two of the tsar's multiple Versailles-like retreats)--that ought to attract our attention.

At the risk of appearing too sentimental about an unsentimental town, St. Petersburg's greatest museums are perhaps its smallest ones, although one wonders whether cynical tourist authorities have invented a few of these museums to pray on the heightened emotional sensitivity that Russophiles must always feel when visiting the city of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. The Pushkin museum, for example, features five small pieces of wood that Pushkin allegedly collected from the gallows used to execute five friends who died as a result of their participation in the Decembrist Revolt against tsarist tyranny in 1825. Did someone make this up? It seems almost too moving to be true. And should one experience a sense of awe and wonder, or merely check for one's wallet, when one notices a box of cigarettes on Dostoyevsky's desk (at the writer's own museum) on which one of his children has written: "Papa died today..."?

St. Petersburg's many wonderful apartment museums are filled with similar touching if mawkish artifacts. Alexander Blok's museum, which takes up space on the second and fourth floor of a still-in-use apartment building, contains copies of some his earliest publications. Anna Akhmatova, patron saint of suffering in a town that has known more than its share of trauma, has her own museum, which prominently displays the coat of her second husband, who was taken away to die in the gulag, and calls attention to the hallway in which her son was forced to shelter due to the brutal facts of communal living. The museum reminds us that Akhmatova suffered through the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad, saw her son taken away to the gulag more than once, suffered from the Bolshevik execution of the man who had been her first husband, Gumilyov, in 1921. Most affectingly, Akhmatova's museum presents us with her famous letter to Stalin, in which she implores him to release her son from imprisonment, as well as the newspaper articles that viciously and officially denounced her writing following World War II. Of course, the heart of St. Petersburg's literary nostalgia industry is Pushkin House. Here one can see a hundred artifacts and photos of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Belinsky, and all of the other great figures of Russian cultural achievement.

Petersburg phobia conquered?

Readers of Fur Coat's most recent post may wonder whether its author ever actually made it to St. Petersburg. That detail appears ambiguous. It all calls to mind Freud's famous Roman phobia, as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams. For years, Rome was the city that most fascinated Freud, the basis of the classical education his psychology borrowed so much from, and the destination of several abortive journeys. Freud claimed that what repeatedly turned him back, once just 50 miles from the city, was an identification with Hannibal and an antipathy for the Catholic Church due to its persecution of Jews.

Will the same fate befall Fur Coat? After years and years of intense identification with Russian culture and the Soviet experiment will physical proximity overwhelm him? Will he turn back at the Finland Station or press on across the border? We can only wait and see.

St. Petersburg Rules

Is there any better tourist destination than St. Petersburg? To read Bruce Lincoln's last book, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, one would expect "Piter" to outshine all other European cities, including Moscow. After all, St. Petersburg is a city of lovely canals and embankments and splendid baroque and neoclassical architecture. More than this, St. Petersburg is a city of tsars, revolutionaries, and, above all, poets. This is the city of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, and Alexander the Tsar Liberator. It's the city of Lenin, Trotsky, Kirov, and the Russian citizens who held out for 900 days against Nazi encirclement. And ultimately it's the city of Pushkin, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Blok, Bely, Gumilyev, and so many others.

But on a practical level, where should one go to find out what actually awaits the visitor who would like to see the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, the Bronze Horseman, Peterhof, the Nevsky Prospect, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Neva River, the Admiralty Spire, The Mariinsky Theater, Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, Kazan Cathedral, Yusupov's Palace, Smolny, the Mikhailovsky Castle, Tsarskoe Selo (Pushkin's Village), the Tauride Palace, the Finland Station, the Stray Dog Cafe, and other physical reminders and architectual moments of St. Petersburg's brilliant but tortured past? For clues, why not see what Mara Vorhees, the author of the Lonely Planet's Petersburg City Guide has to say?

As far as this blog post will go, let's just say that Vorhees recommends some Internet resources related to the city's past and present. These include the following:

www. encspb.ru
www.eng.gov.spb.ru
www.hermitagemuseum.org
www.nevsky-prospekt.com
www.petersburgcity.com
www.st-petersburg.com
www.sptimes.ru
www.mariinksky.ru

Politics, War, and Faberge Eggs

Solomon Volkov's Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under The Tsars delineates the complicated and evolving relationship between Russian autocracy and Russian cultural genius between 1613 and 1917.
This is a self-described prequel to another work, the Magical Chorus, which treats the same topic during the Twentieth Century. See my earlier blog post on this wonderful book.

Romanov Riches is a short book, and Volkov cannot claim to have analyzed any of the tsar's aesthetic predilections or cultural policies in any detail. Even so, Volkov manages to say something interesting and original about Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, and even Lenin. In just slightly more than 200 pages, we tract the collapse of imperial authority in the arts. Where the emperors once dominated almost every aspect of the art market, Nicholas II's patronage was often spurned by liberal or radical artists for ideological reasons. Moreover, by the turn of the century, wealthy bourgeois patrons competed with the tsar for role of taste-maker and patron of the arts. Volkov is well established as once of the most balanced and knowledgeable experts on Russian culture, and feels equally at home analyzing trends in ballet, music, theater, fine art, poetry, and prose.

This book, like his treatise on the influence of Stalin on Shastokovich, is filled with insights into the influence of high culture on state policy. How did Pushkin and Nicholas I use one another and who got the better end of the bargain? Why was Pushkin's death, as well as that of Lermontov, a political problem for the tsars? How did the government use Dostoevsky and Gogol, and were the risks of relying on these Slavophiles to make their case to the literate classes? And who couldn't be fascinated by the way autocrats read and understood Tolstoy? Tolstoy, of course, interpreted the Franco-Russian War of 1812 for the Russian public, but he also shaped public perception of the Crimean War with his Sevastopol Sketches, and of course had a lot to say about how Alexander III dealt with his father's murderers.

All in all, the Romanovs come off rather well in Volkov's history. Although military and political matters necessarily dominated their worldviews, most of these conservative autocrats were sensitive, well-read, polyglots with serious personal interest in participating in the arts. Some were even educated by Russia's greatest authors, including the historian Karamzin. Volkov's point is that political leadership of the Russian nation necessarily entailed cultural fluency if not cultural mastery.

Oblomovshchina

"God grant tomorrow be just the same!"

"Work is life's form, content, element, and purpose--at least mine. You've driven work clean out of your life, and what has come of it?"

This blog was partly inspired by the movie, Julie and Julia, in which blogger Julie Powell describes cooking 524 recipes from Julia Child's famous cookbook in 365 days. Although I loved the concept of Powell's obsessive blog as soon as I heard about it, I only saw the movie a couple of days ago. Loving Meryl Streep as I do, I enjoyed the movie a great deal. It also uncovered hidden memories of watching Julia Child's bizarre show with my mother when I was a child. It was hard to know what to make of Julia Child, with her powerful but unidentifiable accept. Without the benefit of a VCR, who could follow her complex recipes? I still wonder whether her show taught women how to cook or merely helped people to touch base with a deep sense of loss about the fact that they no longer knew how to do what she did, or even had time to make the attempt to cook real food.

Watching the film, it's time to reflect on the nature of this blog. Why did I decide to follow Powell's example and write about my evolving obsession with Soviet intellectual history? To my mind, blogging was an attempt to escape the fate of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. See Elaine Blair's article in a 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books, entitled "The Short Happy Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov for an abbreviated description of that life: the novel is well over 500 pages long Ivan Goncharov's iconic character, Oblomov, retired from the civil service while still in his thirties. At this point, he devoted himself to leisure--not leisure in the ordinary sense of drinking, gambling, duals, and other equally pointless aristocratic pursuits, but leisure in the extraordinary sense of purposeful repose. Avoiding both work and entertainment, duty as well as pleasure, Oblomov does almost nothing from one day to the next and dreams of one day attaining an even purer state of indolence by perhaps living in the countryside. Eventually, although he drifts gently into family life, Oblomov dies, having "quietly and gradually fit himself into the simple and wide coffin of the remained of his existence." In some ways, the story of Oblomov is a metaphor for anyone who loves to read, since reading is one of life's most seductive forms of escapism. While Oblomov actually rejects literature in favor of an even more passive attitude toward life, reading is probably as close as most of us will ever come to the Oblomov's idyl. Blogging, of course, is a close relative of reading, and certainly blogging isn't any substitute for a plot in one's life, but it's at least an attempt to lift oneself off of Oblomov's comfortable bed from time to time.