The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (9 page)

From the moment we had arrived in Russia, people asked about our itinerary, and as soon as they heard we were going to Ufa, they all had the same reaction: “You have to see the horse with the giant balls.” “They have a statue of a horse there with the biggest balls you can imagine.” “I was drunk there once when I was in the army, and we saw the horse with the huge balls.”

As promised, so delivered. At the highest point in the city, on an anvil of concrete blocks overlooking the smog and the fork of the Ufa and Belaya Rivers, was a massive green statue of Bashkir national hero Salawat Yulayev atop a horse with, indeed, a scrotal sac of larger-than-average proportion relative to the horse. Until the town posted special security, local ne'er-do-wells had a tradition of sneaking up the hill and painting the balls every Easter.

Souvenir kiosk yurts framed the walkway leading to the overlook. You could buy a magnet of Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev dressed in Bashkir national costume, blue with gold trim and a kind of matching fez (Putin magnets were sold out). You could buy Batman T-shirts. You could buy cheap champagne and flowers for your skinny girlfriend in heels. Two men with mangled or missing legs had set up begging stations. The public bathroom cost eight rubles. A sign warned of a hundred-ruble fine for washing shoes in the bathroom sinks. There was a skateboard ramp in front of a brand-new statue of Lenin.

We passed a white Hummer limo with a bachelorette party hanging out of the windows. There was a lot of oil money in town, Dave said. The old two-story wooden houses were in better shape here than in Samara, though the locals told me that these were just facades and that they had been completely renovated inside. Once again, I had the feeling that between the sagging clapboard houses and the lugubrious humidity, I'd been transported to a dusty version of a French colonial outpost, a Dakar or a New Orleans.

If someone came to me the next morning and said, “For $100, you can have three more hours of sleep,” I would have said, “That sounds like a very fair price and I will take that deal.” Misha had driven down from Perm' the day before to open the show, and we would head back and play with his band the following night. It was an eight-hour drive, with the merch suitcase on my lap. “Like Gagarin said,” said Misha, “let's go!”

Misha's stoic and good-humored record-store coworker Alexei drove a Singaporean Hyundai. We asked Misha how his night had gone.

“We had an alcohol fight”—a drinking contest. He sighed. “I was the winner.”

Aside from the usual birch and pine, the distinguishing flora of this slow climb up the misting foothills of the southern Urals was a kind of ten-foot Queen Anne's lace that fills the meadows. Misha claimed that this strain was genetically engineered to feed cows but had gone rogue and invasive, leaving welts if you touched it—an example of the kind of conspiracy theory rampant in this part of the world. (A botanist friend identified the plant as giant hogweed. Its sap does cause something called phytophotodermatitis: if you get it on your skin, nothing happens until it's exposed to sunlight, at which point you break out in horrifying blisters.)

We passed a town called Kukushtan, elephantine hay bales that shadowed stooped babas harvesting
sunitsi
(a kind of snub-nosed blueberry), nodding brass-knuckle derricks, socialist realist roadside sculptures emerging from rough-hewn stone, and the best-dressed nuclear cooling towers in the east, painted blue-and-gray stripes with triangular white trim. I had
headphones on, listening to Future of the Left while watching the remnants of its past.

Driving in Russia was a challenge at best. The passing conventions were anarchic, the lawlessness of great stretches of the country bred a variety of scams and blackmail, and the cops tended to be on the take. If you were pulled over and didn't want to, as the local idiom has it, “feed the paw,” your only recourse was to play dumb and engage the cop in a stalemate. You won when your tolerance for sitting around ignoring his hints surpassed his frustrated realization that every minute he was wasting on you was keeping him from drivers who would simply slip twenty rubles under their license and be done with it.
^3
3
As the porter says in
Dr. Zhivago
, “Wheels don't run without oil.”

Many Russians had taken to mounting a video camera on their dashboard, for protection in case of accidents and/or to have their interactions with the police on record. (This practice has led to a profusion of websites where proud drivers post their most hair-raising maneuvers.) “Professional” drivers were no great improvement. Misha told us a story about hailing a taxi in Perm' and opening the door to find a fiftyish driver with a beer in his hand, his teenage girlfriend sprawled in the passenger seat, and a cat sleeping on the dash.

“Like Gogol said, Russia has two problems, roads and fools,” Misha said. We pulled off onto a muddy dirt track, a farm road with bluebells and conifers to the left, fields to the right, and clods of dirt scraping the undercarriage. “Russian autobahn. That's how we roll.”

It was meant to be a shortcut, but it was several miles before the paving recovered, and then the road dead-ended against a fenced-in Lukoil holding facility. Alexei pulled off the road and laughed guiltily. “We thought this road would be better than the one we knew,” said Misha. “I see now it was a mistake.”

At length we passed Kyeda, the next town, producing general cheering and self-satisfaction. Misha explained that the town has a “fancy” name—half each of the Russian words for “dick” and “cunt.” It was time for a lunch break at a roadside cafeteria, which confirmed my impression that Russian food tastes better than it looks.

Perm' looms large in the literary and political history of Siberia as the quintessential “provincial capital” where ambitious young officers from Moscow or Saint Petersburg could either make their name or wither with frustrated malaise. It features pseudonymously as Yuriatin, where Dr. Zhivago flees ahead of the Bolsheviks, a town that “clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle on the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos.” The premise of Chekhov's
Three Sisters
is the titular characters' terminal dissatisfaction with their life in the “provincial capital,” generally accepted to be based on Perm' (“which is of course,” as one character says, “backward and crude”), after their father is sent there. Dostoyevsky described the kind of family who wound up in Perm': “A post in Siberia is usually a snug berth in spite of the cold. . . . The officials, who may fairly be said to be the aristocracy of Siberia, are . . . men who have come from Russia, usually from Petersburg or Moscow, attracted by the extra pay, the double traveling expenses and alluring hopes for the future. . . . [Those] of more levity and no capacity for solving the problems of existence soon
weary of Siberia, and wonder regretfully why they came.” There is no lack of regret, and disdain for Perm', in Chekhov:

CHEBUTYKIN
: But what a wide, splendid river you have here! A wonderful river!

OLGA
: Yes, only it's cold. It's cold here and there are mosquitoes.

. . .

ANDREY
: Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants—and not one of them who isn't exactly like the others, not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist, not one who stands out in the slightest bit, who might inspire envy or a passionate desire to emulate him.

It's not literary history, though, that has shaped most people's first associations with Perm', but its status as one of the premier centers and way stations of the gulag. One of only two camp complexes for political prisoners still open in the 1970s, it was where the dissidents of post-Stalinist thaw built furniture and sewed gloves and uniforms. In her book
Gulag
, Anne Applebaum reports that by the 1970s there were as few as ten thousand political prisoners in the camps, “low by the standards of Stalin's Soviet Union.” The Perm' camps became a center of rebellion and hunger strikes from then on, claiming one of the last Sovietera dissident martyrs, the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, in 1985. In part this was because information had begun to flow more freely from the camps to the newspapers, radio, and samizdat of the outside world, so camp uprisings and abuses in the
remaining political prisons were much more widely publicized in human rights circles and the Western press. The Perm' camps closed only in February 1992—outliving the Soviet Union itself, as Applebaum notes. The Russian historical society Memorial has reconstructed the Perm-36 camp in its entirety as a museum and monument to the gulag experience. Its neighbor, these days, is the local asylum.

Misha's grandfather was, in fact, an exile from Saint Petersburg who had been sent to the gulag for being too lenient with disgraced old Bolsheviks in the Stalinist purges. Yet Misha and his girlfriend lived in an unusually spacious and sunlit apartment (by the standards of DIY show promoters), decorated with sketches of beavers with captions like “Ginger Master.”

“Here we have Perm'. On one side”—Misha gestured out the car window at a ramshackle structure—“God-forget-it house. On the other side”—pointing to a nouveau-riche mansion—“lions and Jacuzzi.” A monumental abandoned military academy on the waterfront was adorned with building-size neoclassical graffiti: Ionic columns, mopey toga wearers, a massive QR code in a wreath, and a small crowd of business-suited silhouettes.

We arrived at a labyrinthine and metallic club that looked like a fashionable meat cooler. Misha's band opened for us, and afterward he had a DJ gig until four a.m., so he dropped us off at his apartment. His girlfriend had left dinner for us (pasta and bread with black cumin seeds), and we slept on a pullout couch.

Perm', a place where cathedrals were used as prisons, became in the literary imagination a place to leave or dream about leaving. At the end of
Three Sisters
, the army battalion that has been stationed there is shipped east:

CHEBUTYKIN
[
getting up
]: I, my friend, am going away tomorrow, maybe we shall never meet again, so this is my advice to you. Just put on your hat, take your stick in your hand, and leave . . . leave and start walking, walk and don't look round. And the further you walk, the better.

We had a half-coupe—two bunks—on the same-day train to Yekaterinburg, a short trip. On the way out of town we spotted a fifty-foot, four-sided squared arch made of logs, meant to depict the Cyrillic П for Perm' (Пермь) from every angle. Nearby was a hundred-foot concrete spire—a sundial shadowing a garden of flowery hours—topped with the inevitable Lenin. Blots of dark ash spilled from the cottage gardens toward the tracks, where households burned their trash. Babas on the platforms sold strings of long, dried, half-skinned fish, the flesh cubed for easy removal.

Compared with the other Siberian cities, Yekaterinburg was a boomtown. There was a wide waterfront with Sunday rowers and a tall, unfinished TV tower (“one of the tallest incomplete architectural structures in the world,” per Wikipedia) popular with rock climbers and the suicidal. Best known as the execution site of the Romanovs, Yekaterinburg is also the hometown and early stomping ground of Boris Yeltsin. As party secretary in the 1970s and early 1980s, Robert Service has written, Yeltsin “ranted and threatened . . . used charm and guile . . . [and] turned public ceremonies into carnivals.” Once, Service continues, after crashing his car in a ditch outside the city on the way to the October Revolution anniversary parade in the square, Yeltsin “bounded over the fields to the nearest village and
commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get to the morning parade on time.” Yekaterinburg briefly declared itself capital of an independent “Urals Republic” in the post-Soviet 1990s, but reintegrated quickly and with prosperous results.

We were playing in a hipster café four floors up, with couches and bearded baristas. I was offered a sandwich of stale white bread, a slice of cheese, and a pickle drowning in a swamp of mayonnaise. We retreated to the sushi restaurant on a lower floor. They didn't have most of the items on the menu, but I managed to fill the despairing hunger hole left by the sad sandwich with some soup.

One of the logistical traps I'd laid for myself in planning this tour was that I had a new record,
Do the Struggle
, coming out on a London-based label, and I was thousands of miles away, without a laptop and functionally unavailable by phone. I had a friend and a small gang of puppeteers working on a music video back in New York, and the director asked if I could shoot an intro for it. Down in the dusty parking lot, where a local taxi company had, by way of guerrilla advertising, spray-painted silhouettes of Lenin's head above its phone number, I punched out the bottom of a tin coffee can with a screwdriver. Maria held one phone, filming up through the can to literalize the song's “tin can” vocal effect, while I sang along to the track playing on a second phone. Showbiz! Also, modernity.