Russia's Double-Headed Eagle

Visiting Moscow today the tourist is amazed at the helter-skelter rush of the old city into the future. Fashion, electronics, international brands--Moscow is unrecognizable to a visitor of 15 years ago. But many signs of Moscow's past remain, as in the patient women who work in every public place, stoically serving their time, impassively solving the problems of a public always making demands on them. There are still apartment buildings whose shabby exteriors include the pipes that had been neglected when they were built. There are Stalin's enormous skyscrapers, converted to apartments still impressive though there may be a zoo-like smells inside. There are guards everywhere forbidding you to take pictures of those apartments, or even the exteriors of embassies. But there is also a brave new world, with open, helpful young Russians working at myriad jobs that never existed before.

The symbol of the Russian Federation is the double-headed eagle, grasping orb and sceptre, the symbol of Orthodoxy and also of absolute power. But the eagle could also mean the two heads of Russia--the ghosts of the past, alongside the trajectory of the future. I have been writing about the openness and curiosity of the Muscovites I meet, their diversity and helpfulness, their willingness to try and communicate even without a common language. I have also been writing of the fascinating history of this deep and powerful culture, a history that includes many tyrants safely separated from us by time. But there are also the tyrants who lived in my own lifetime, along with their descendants in Chechnya, for example, or in the centralization of power today, or in the cases of journalists jailed or otherwise removed from their duties. If you want to see this other head of Russia's eagle, you could start with Lenin's tomb.

The red granite mausoleum that houses the waxy ghoulish corpse of the godfather of the Russian revolution squats impressively on Red Square, and access to it is strictly controlled. It seems that Lenin's dead body is something the Russians can't live with, and can't live without. He remains a symbol of an unsavory past, but fascinating enough that it is never possible to actually remove him from Red Square. To see this embalmed "hero" one must check all one's cameras for 40 roubles and stand in line to be admitted, one by one, through a metal detector. Because my partner was held up due to some keys in his pocket I lingered on the granite path, and was pushed on by the military guards: "Go, madame, go!" I was not even allowed to try and decipher the Cyrillic characters on the numerous graves of celebrated dead, mostly bloodstained souls. Even as one finally enters the dark chamber and forces one's self to look at the waxy phenomenon that was once Lenin, the guards push you onward, forbidding a moment of reflection. Well they might. What a bloody history followed.

Lenin bequeathed Russia a heavy-handed police force and ultimately the Soviet Gulags, or penal colonies, that killed at least a million people between 1929 and 1953, according to the Soviet Union’s own data. But a policy of releasing people before death kept the figures down. At least 14 million people passed through these brutal camps, not only as political prisoners but also for petty crimes, unexcused absences from work or anti-government jokes. Death rates in these camps were almost six times higher than in the general population, due to the harsh conditions described by the famous dissident, Soltzenitzen.

In the small Gulag Museum there are paintings, photographs, clips and personal articles that bear witness to the Gulag, testimony to the sadistic and extreme nature of the Soviet penal colonies. The artists who painted them are, in some cases, survivors, and in some cases near relatives of the victims. The paintings tell a prolonged narrative: the knock on the door in the night, the family member being taken away, the humiliation, torture and death that followed, the interrogation of children, the degradation and culture of death, the sadism of the guards, the despair of the innocent.

In Iskousstv Park, located across the Moskovar River from the St. Savior Cathedral, one can continue this tour of the eagle's other head. The park itself is charming: whimsical arbors, swings and benches, its pathways filled with babies in strollers, its trees inviting and green. Here characters too notorious to remain on the streets of Moscow are found: Stalin, with half his granite head smashed in, and Felix Dzerjinski, the notorious founder of the secret police that preceded the KGB. I was not inspired to take pictures of either--their history is available elsewhere. Many who suffered and died are also memorialized in this park, in moving works of art that make strong and compelling statements. And, for some reason, Pinocchio has also been relocated here! Another strange occupant stands alongside, on the river. The artist Tsereteli had created a huge statue of Christopher Columbus for Miami, Florida--which Miami found too embarrassing to accept. So he changed it slightly, renamed it Peter the Great, and there it stands alongside this park, visible for miles.

There is another shrine to this past. Marina Tsvetaeva was a poetess who lived in exile in Paris for almost 20 years. When she finally returned to her beloved Russia in 1940, life had become dangerous and difficult. Few who returned escaped from Stalin, from the gulag or from execution. She did escape--by committing suicide. Today Muscovites are still leaving flowers on her statue, sitting by her home, in tragedy and despair.