Remembering Life in the Soviet Union, One Family Photo at a Time
MOSCOW — Xxx years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to be. The flag was lowered for the concluding time on Dec. 25, 1991. That moment still raises deep questions for the U.s.a.S.R.'southward heirs: "Who were nosotros as Soviets, and where are we going equally Russians?"
Many of the answers tin can exist found on Moscow'south main thoroughfare — named Gorky Street, afterwards writer Proverb Gorky, from 1932 to 1990, and renamed Tverskaya Street, a nod to the ancient city of Tver, as the Soviet Marriage was awash in last-gasp reforms.
Information technology was the Soviet Marriage'south display window on the bright future that Kremlin-run communism was supposed to bring. It was where the KGB dined, the rich spent their rubles, Vladimir Lenin gave speeches from a balcony, and government wielded their power against one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In the 1990s, Tverskaya embodied the fast-money excesses of the postal service-Soviet complimentary-for-all. In later years, it was packed with hopeful pro-commonwealth marchers. And now, nether President Vladimir Putin, information technology is a symbol of his dreams of reviving Russian federation equally a great power, reliving past glories and crushing whatever opposition to his dominion.
Join a bout of Moscow's famed Tverskaya Street.
Hotel National: Where the Soviet government began
The window in Room 107 at the Hotel National faces Red Square and the Kremlin. It offers a perfect view of Lenin'south tomb — fitting, since he was Room 107's most famous guest.
The Kremlin was damaged during the Russian Revolution in 1917. So Lenin and his wife moved into Room 107 for seven days in March 1918, making the hotel the first dwelling of the Soviet authorities.
The National, built in 1902 during the era of Purple Russia, also accommodated other Soviet leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, chief of the secret police. The building continued to be used by the Soviet government as a hostel for official party delegates and was renamed First House of Soviets in 1919.
Guests can now stay in the same room Lenin did for about $ane,300 a dark. In more recent years, the hotel has hosted notable guests including Barack Obama (when he was a senator) and histrion Jack Nicholson.
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"This hotel feels a piffling like a museum," said Elena Pozolotina, who has worked at the National since 1995.
"We accept rooms that expect onto Tverskaya Street, and we always explain to guests that this is the master street of our urban center," Pozolotina said. "This corner of Tverskaya that we occupy, it's priceless."
Stalin's programme: 'The building is moving'
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded a massive redevelopment of Moscow in 1935, an social club came to transform pocket-size Gorky Street into a broad, awe-inspiring boulevard.
Engineer Emmanuel Gendel had the chore of moving massive buildings to make way for others. Churches and monasteries were blown upward, replaced past newspaper offices and a huge movie house.
The Moscow Primal Eye Infirmary was sheared from its foundation, rotated 97 degrees, jacked up, hitched on rails and pushed back 20 yards — with surgeons operating all the while, or so official media reported at the time.
Gendel's girl, and so about eight, proudly stood at a microphone, announcing: "Attending, attention, the building is moving." Tatiana Yastrzhembskaya, Gendel's granddaughter and president of the Winter Ball charity foundation in Moscow, recalls that Gendel extolled communism but also enjoyed the rewards of the aristocracy. He drove a fine car and always brought the family the all-time cakes and candies, she said.
The largest Gorky Street building Gendel moved was the Savvinskoye Courtyard. The well-nigh hard was the Mossoviet, or Moscow metropolis hall, with a balustrade where Lenin had given speeches. The edifice, the former residence of the Moscow governor general, had to exist moved with its basement. The basis floor had been a ballroom without central structural supports.
Gendel'southward skills were used all over the U.S.S.R. — straightening towers on ancient mosques in Uzbekistan, inventing a means to drag tanks from rivers during World War Ii and consulting on the Moscow Metro.
Like many of the Soviet Spousal relationship's brightest talents, Gendel found that his liberty was tenuous. His ex-married woman was chosen by the KGB internal spy agency in 1937 and asked to denounce him. She refused, and he avoided arrest.
"I believe he was not arrested and sent to the camps because he was a unique expert," said Yastrzhembskaya. World War 2, known in Russian federation as the Peachy Patriotic War, interrupted the Master Plan for Gorky Street.
Aragvi eating house: A haunt of the KGB
In the 1930s, the caput of the elite NKVD secret law, Lavrenty Beria, one of the architects of the Stalin-era purges, ordered the construction of a land-endemic restaurant, Aragvi, to showcase food from his dwelling house democracy of Georgia.
One night, NKVD agents descended in several black cars on a apprehensive Georgian bottle in Moscow that Beria had once visited. The agents ordered the chef, Longinoz Stazhadze, to come with them. The feared NKVD was a precursor to the KGB.
Stazhadze thought he was beingness arrested, his son Levan told Russian media. He was taken to Beria, who said that he had agreed with "the Boss" (Stalin) that Stazhadze would run Aragvi. Stazhadze had grown up a peasant, sent to piece of work in a prince'south kitchens as a boy.
Aragvi opened in 1938. It was only for the gilded prepare, a reminder that the "Soviet paradise" was annihilation simply equitable. The prices were astronomical. It was impossible to go a table unless the doorman knew yous or y'all could pay a hefty bribe.
Aragvi, at No. 6 Tverskaya, was a favorite of the surreptitious police; government officials; cosmonauts and pilots; stars of theater, movies and ballet; directors; poets; chess masters. Beria reputedly dined in a private room. Poet Sergei Mikhalkov said he composed the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem while sitting in the restaurant in 1943.
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It was privatized in the 1990s and struggled, earlier endmost in 2002. Information technology reopened in 2016 subsequently a $20 1000000 renovation. Merely the new Aragvi closed abruptly in 2019 among reports of a conflict betwixt its owner and the building managers.
"You put your unabridged soul into cooking," said the former head chef, Nugzar Nebieridze, 59, celebrated for his khinkali, a meaty dumpling virtually the size of a tennis brawl. He was devastated to discover himself unemployed. But other doors opened. He now prefers to travel, giving chief classes around Russian federation.
Stalin's funeral: A deadly street crush that never officially happened
On March six, 1953, the day afterwards Stalin died of a stroke, an estimated 2 million Muscovites poured onto the streets. They hoped to catch a glimpse of his body, covered with flowers and laid out in the marbled Hall of Columns virtually Red Foursquare.
Yulia Revazova, then 13, sneaked from her house with her cousin Valery without telling their parents. As they walked toward Pushkin Square, at one end of Gorky Street, the procession turned into a scene of horror. They saw people falling and existence trampled. Some were crushed against metal fences. Valery, who was a few years older, grabbed Yulia by the paw and dragged her out of the crowd.
"He held my hand actually tight and never let information technology become, considering information technology was pure madness," she recalled recently. "It took us four or five hours to become out of there. People kept coming and coming. I couldn't even phone call it a column; information technology was just an uncontrollable mass of people."
"I still take this feeling, the fright of massive crowds," added Revazova, 82. "To this day, if I come across a huge grouping of people or a actually long line, I only cross the street."
Neither Revazova nor her cousin knew virtually Stalin's repressions.
"People were crying. I saw many women holding piddling handkerchiefs, wiping away tears and wailing," she recalled. "That'south the psychology of a Soviet person. If there is no overarching effigy above, be it God or Lenin, life will come crashing down. The era was over, and at that place was fear. What will we do without Stalin?"
Officials never revealed how many people died that day. The Soviet-canonical archival footage of the four days of national mourning showed but orderly marches and memorials.
No. 9: The ruthless culture minister
The Soviet culture minister, the steely Yekaterina Furtseva, was nicknamed Catherine the 3rd, later on the forceful Russian Empress Catherine the Neat. Furtseva destroyed writers, artists or anyone else who challenged Soviet ideas. She lived at an elite 1949 apartment building for government officials at No. 9 — an ultra-prestigious address with a view of the Kremlin.
Furtseva, a former small-town weaver, made sure that No. 9 was only for the cream of political party officials and other notables, such every bit famous Soviet actress Natalia Seleznyova, scientists, conductors and architects.
Riding the coattails of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Furtseva was the just adult female in the Politburo and later became the Soviet Union's cultural gatekeeper despite her provincial sensibilities. She once infamously mixed up a symphony with an opera, and critics were quick to find.
"She had little in common with the artistic leaders of her state except a liking for vodka," Norwegian painter Victor Sparre wrote in his 1979 book on the repression of dissident Soviet writers, "The Flame in the Darkness."
Furtseva was famous for previewing performances and declaring anyone even subtly critical of Soviet policies as being anti-country. Manager Yuri Lyubimov described one such visit to Moscow's Taganka Theater in 1969, when she turned up wearing diamond rings and an astrakhan glaze. She banned the play "Alive," depicting a cunning peasant's struggle against the commonage subcontract system. She "was livid, she kept shouting," he told L'Alternative magazine in 1984. She stormed out, warning him she would use her influence, "up to the highest levels," confronting him.
He was expelled from the political party and in 1984 was stripped of his citizenship. She vehemently denounced Solzhenitsyn, and banned the Bolshoi Ballet's version of "Carmen" in 1967 over prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya'due south sensual performance and "un-Soviet" costumes that did not comprehend enough leg.
"The ballet is all erotica," she told the dancer. "Information technology's alien to united states of america." But Plisetskaya, whom Khrushchev once called the world'due south best dancer, fought back. The ballet went on with some excisions (the costumes stayed) and became a legend in the theater'due south repertoire.
Furtseva was virtually felled by scandal in 1974, ordered to repay $80,000 spent edifice a luxurious dacha, or country habitation, using country labor. She died months later.
Where Solzhenitsyn was arrested
The Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn exposed the Soviet arrangement's cruelty against some of its brightest minds, trapped in the gulag, or prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn was given 8 years of hard labor in 1945 for privately criticizing Stalin, then 3 years of exile in Republic of kazakhstan, a Soviet democracy at the time. His books were banned. Subsequently release from exile in 1956, he was allowed to brand only 72-hour visits to the home of his second married woman, Natalia, at 12 Gorky St., Apt. 169. Solzhenitsyn had to live outside the city.
"People knew that at that place were camps, only not many people, if whatever, knew what life was like in those camps. And he described it from the within. He had been there himself, and that was shocking to a lot of people," said Natalia Solzhenitsyna during a recent interview at the flat, which became a museum in 2018.
"Many people say that he did brand a contribution to the final fall of the Soviet Union."
Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, chosen Russian federation "the land of smothered opportunities." He wrote that it is always possible to live with integrity. Lies and evil might flourish — "but non through me."
The museum displays tiny handwritten copies of Solzhenitsyn's books, circulated secretly; film negatives of letters smuggled to the West; and chaplet fabricated of compacted bread that he used to memorize poems in prison.
"He spent a lot of time hither with his children. We were always very decorated. And we just enjoyed ourselves — being together," Solzhenitsyna said. They had iii sons.
Considering of KGB bugs, if the couple were discussing something sensitive, they wrote notes to each other, and so destroyed them. Two KGB agents normally roosted in the stairwell on the floor above, with two more on the floor below.
"The Soviet authorities were afraid of him because of his popularity among intellectuals, writers, people of civilisation and the intelligentsia."
Her favorite room is decked with blackness-and-white photos of dissidents sent to the gulag, the Soviet Union'south sprawling organization of forced labor camps. "Information technology's dedicated to the invisibles," she said, pointing out friends.
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Sweden planned to award Solzhenitsyn'southward 1970 literature prize in the Gorky Street apartment, but the author rejected a secret anniversary. A Swedish announcer in Moscow, Stig Fredrikson, was Solzhenitsyn's smuggler. He carried Solzhenitsyn'south Nobel lecture on tightly rolled moving-picture show disguised as a battery in a transistor radio, and he took other letters to the West and transported photos taped to his back.
"I felt that in that location was a sense of unfairness that he was so isolated then persecuted," Fredrikson said in a recent interview. "I got more and more scared and more and more than afraid every time I met him."
In 1971, the Soviet Spousal relationship allegedly tried to poison Solzhenitsyn using a hole-and-corner nervus agent, leaving him seriously ill. Early 1974 was tense. The prosecutor subpoenaed him. Land newspapers railed confronting him.
The morning of Feb. 12, 1974, the couple worked in their study. In the afternoon, he walked his 5-month-old son, Stepan, in the yard below.
"He came dorsum here, and literally a minute later, there was a ring at the door. In that location were eight men. They immediately bankrupt the chain and got in," his widow said. "There was a prosecutor in his prosecutor'due south compatible, ii men in plainclothes, and the rest were in war machine uniform. They told him to get dressed."
"We hugged and nosotros kept hugging for quite a while," she recalled. "The last thing he told me was to take care of the children."
He was deported to Westward Germany. The couple later settled in Vermont and fix upwards a fund to help dissident writers, using royalties from his book "The Gulag Archipelago." About ane,000 people still receive money from the fund, according to Solzhenitsyna.
When the writer and his married woman returned to Russia in 1994, they traveled across the country by train. Thousands of people crushed into halls to hear him speak.
Solzhenitsyn abhorred the shock therapy and unchecked capitalism of the 1990s and preferred Putin'south tough nationalism. He died of heart failure at 89 in Baronial 2008, 5 months after a presidential election in which Putin switched places with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in a move that critics saw equally a ploy to get around constitutional term limits.
No. 6: 'Feasts of thought'
Backside a grand Stalin-era apartment cake at six Gorky St. sits an ornate 1907 building famous for its facade, art nouveau glazed bluish tiles, elegant arches and baroque spires. Once a monastery dormitory, it was a staple of pre-Soviet postcards from Moscow. Merely in November 1939, the 26,000-ton building was put on rails and pushed back to widen the street.
Linguists Lev and Raisa Kopelev lived in Apt. 201 on the top floor. Their spacious dining room became a favored haven for Moscow'southward intelligentsia from the 1950s to the 1980s.
"People gathered all the time — to talk. In this apartment, like many other kitchens and dining rooms, at tables filled mostly with vodka, herring and vinaigrette salad, feasts of thought took place," said Svetlana Ivanova, Raisa'due south daughter from some other marriage, who lived in the apartment for about 4 decades.
Solzhenitsyn and beau dissident Joseph Brodsky were Kopelev family friends, as were many other artists, poets, writers and scientists who formed the backbone of the Soviet human rights movement of the 1960s.
As a writer and dissident, Kopelev had turned his dorsum on the Communist Party and a prestigious university position. The onetime gulag prisoner inspired the character Lev Rubin in Solzhenitsyn's novel "In the First Circle," depicting the fate of arrested scientists.
"The flat was a special identify for everyone. People there were non agape to speak their mind on topics that would be considered otherwise risky," Ivanova said. "A new, different spirit ruled in its walls."
Eliseevsky: Pineapples during a dearth
The Eliseevsky shop at No. 16 was a landmark for 120 years — born in czarist Russia, a witness to the ascent and fall of the Soviet Union, a survivor of wars, and a bastion during eras of shortages and plenty. It closed its doors in April.
Eliseevsky vicious on hard times during the coronavirus pandemic, as international tourists dwindled and Russians sought cheaper grocery-shopping alternatives.
In the palace-like interior, two chandeliers hang from an ornate ceiling. Gold columns line the walls. The front of the shop, looking out at Tverskaya Street, has a row of stained glass.
The Eliseevsky store, which opened in 1901, is seen in April, with a few customers and some archival photos, as it prepared to close every bit an economical victim of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Denis Romodin, a historian at the Museum of Moscow, said Eliseevsky is 1 of only two retail spaces in Moscow with such pre-revolutionary interiors. But Eliseevsky's level of preservation made it "one of a kind," he said.
The edifice was once endemic by Zinaida Volkonskaya, a princess and Russian cultural effigy in the 19th century. She remodeled the house into a literary salon whose luminaries included Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.
St. Petersburg merchant Grigory Eliseev opened the marketplace in 1901. It quickly became a hit among Russian nobility for its selection of European wines and cheeses.
Romodin said information technology was Russia's showtime shop with price tags. Before Eliseevsky, haggling was the norm. And it was also unique in having innovative applied science for the time: electric-powered refrigerators and display cases that allowed appurtenances to exist stored longer.
Even in the Soviet Union'south hungriest years, the 1930s famine, Eliseevsky stocked pineapples.
"One could find outlandish delicacies here, which at that fourth dimension seemed very exotic," Romodin said. "It was already impossible to surprise Muscovites with wine shops. Merely a grocery store with luxurious interiors, and large for that time, amazed and delighted Muscovites."
The Outset Gallery: A glimpse of openness
In 1989, in a dusty government office by a corner of Pushkin Square, three immature artists threw off decades of suffocating country control and opened the Soviet Union's starting time independent fine art gallery.
That Apr, Yevgeny Mitta and two fellow students, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut, opened First Gallery. At the time, the Soviet Union was opening up under policies including glasnost, which gave more room for public debate and criticism.
Artists were ordered to adopt the Socialist Realist way in 1934, depicting scenes such every bit happy collective farmworkers. Expressionist, abstract and avant-garde art was banned. From the 1970s, cloak-and-dagger fine art exhibitions were the only outlets to break the Soviet-imposed rules.
"I simply felt we had to brand something new," recalled Mitta, 58, who kept his involvement in contemporary expressionism a hush-hush at a superlative Moscow art school in the 1980s.
"It was like nothing really happened in art history in the 20th century, like it stopped," he said. "The Socialist Realism doctrine was invented and spread to the artists as the only one, possible style of developing paintings, films and literature."
Later the plummet of the Soviet Spousal relationship, artists had to "acquire how to survive, what to do, how to piece of work and make a living," he said.
McDonald's: 'We were not used to smiling'
In the Soviet Union'southward final years, a mania raged for all things Western. Estée Lauder opened the first Western-make shop on Gorky Street in 1989, after meeting Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in December 1988.
The Soviet Matrimony's showtime McDonald'southward, located across Pushkin Foursquare on Gorky Street, opened on January. 31, 1990 — a yellow-arched symbol of Gorbachev'southward perestroika economic reforms. Pizza Hut opened later on that twelvemonth. (In 1998, Gorbachev starred in a commercial for the pizza concatenation.)
Karina Pogosova and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at the McDonald'southward on opening day. The line stretched several blocks. Police officers stood sentry to keep it organized.
The Soviet Union'due south first McDonald'due south opened in 1990 and eager customers lined up to enter; Karina Pogosova, left, and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at the fast-food eating place on Gorky Street then, and they are senior executives with the company today. (Photos by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Mail service)
"The atmosphere was wonderful. The first day I had to smile the entire mean solar day and my face muscles hurt," Patrunina said. "This is not a joke. Russians practise not smile in general, so we were non used to smiling at all, non to mention for more than viii hours straight."
Pogosova and Patrunina were students at the Moscow Aviation Institute when they learned McDonald's was hiring through an ad in a Moscow paper. Interview questions included: "How fast can y'all run 100 meters?" It was to approximate if someone was energetic plenty for the job.
Pogosova and Patrunina are nevertheless with the company today, as senior vice president of evolution and franchising and vice president of operations, respectively.
"I thought that this is the world of opportunities and this new world is coming to our state, so I must be in this new world," Patrunina said.
The smiling staff wasn't the just civilisation daze for customers. Some had never tried the fountain sodas that were available. They were unaccustomed to food that wasn't eaten with utensils. The colorful paper boxes that Large Macs came in were occasionally saved equally souvenirs.
McDonald's quickly became a landmark on the street.
"I remember very well that the street and the entire city was very dark and McDonald's was like an island of light with bright signage," Pogosova said. "The street started to modify later on McDonald's opened its first restaurant at that place."
Wild '90s and a missing ballerina
The finish of the Soviet Matrimony uncorked Moscow's wild 1990s. Some people made instant fortunes by acquiring state-endemic enterprises at throwaway prices. Rules were beingness written on the fly. The urban center was pulsing with possibilities for those with money or those desperate to become some.
"It was easy to get drunk on this," said Alex Shifrin, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive from Canada who lived in Moscow from the mid-1990s until the late 2000s.
It all was on full display at Night Flight, Moscow's offset nightclub, opened by Swedish managers in 1991, in the terminal months of the Soviet Union, at Tverskaya 17. The club introduced Moscow's nouveau elite to "face command" — who merits getting by the rope line — and music-throbbing decadence.
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The phrase "standing on Tverskaya" made its way into Russian vernacular as the street became a hot spot for prostitutes. Toward the finish of the 2000s, Night Flight had lost its luster. The order scene in Moscow had moved on to bigger and bolder venues.
Decades earlier, No. 17 had been famous equally the building with the dancer: a statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, placed atop the cupola during Stalin'south building blitz.
Muscovites nicknamed the edifice the House Nether the Skirt.
"The thought was to have Gorky Street as a museum of Soviet fine art. The statues represented a trip the light fantastic of socialism," fine art historian Pavel Gnilorybov said. "The ballerina was a symbol of the freedom of women and the idea that, before the revolution, women were slaves. It is as if she is singing an ode to the authorities."
The aging statues were removed by 1958. People forgot them. Now a group of Muscovites, including Gnilorybov, are campaigning for the return of the ballerina.
"Information technology's an idea that nosotros want to give the urban center as a souvenir. It's non political," he said. "It'southward beautiful."
Pushkin Square: For lovers and protesters
Pushkin Square has been Moscow'due south favorite coming together place for friends, lovers and political demonstrations.
In Nov 1927, Trotskyist opponents of Stalin marched to the 27th House of Soviets at one end of Tverskaya Street, opposite the Hotel National, in ane of the terminal public protests confronting the Soviet ruler.
In December 1965, several dozen dissidents gathered in Pushkin Foursquare to protest the trials of two writers. It became an annual event. People would gather just before half-dozen p.chiliad. and, on the hour, remove their hats for a minute.
In 1987, dissidents collected signatures at Pushkin Foursquare and other locations calling for a memorial to those imprisoned or killed by the Soviet state. The movement evolved into Memorial, a leading human rights group. Memorial was declared a "foreign agent" in 2016 nether Putin's sweeping political crackdowns.
In January 2018, left, and January 2021, correct, protesters gathered at Pushkin Square. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Mail)
Protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny were held at Pushkin Foursquare earlier this year. And it is where communists and liberals rallied on a rainy September night to protest 2021 parliamentary election results that gave a landslide win to Putin's United Russia party despite widespread claims of fraud.
Nearly xxx years after the fall of the U.s.a.S.R., Putin's Russia carries some echoes of the stories lived out in Soviet times — censorship and repressions are returning. Navalny was poisoned by a nervus agent in 2020 and later jailed. Many opposition figures and independent journalists accept fled the country. The hope, sleaze and exhilaration of the 1990s take faded. Tverskaya Street has settled into calm stagnation, waiting for the next chapter.
Arthur Bondar contributed to this study.
Correction: A map accompanying this article incorrectly spelled the start proper name of a quondam Soviet leader. He is Vladimir Lenin, not Vladmir Lenin. The map has been corrected.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/russia-soviet-30-anniversary-tverskaya/
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