A City on the Edge
Who'll symbolize the "new Russia," Paul McCartney or Felix Dzerzhinsky?
Friday, May 30, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110003557
The allusion was not subtle. And just in case anyone missed it, Paul McCartney delivered an encore of "Back in the U.S.S.R." at a concert in Moscow's Red Square last Saturday evening attended by none other than Vladimir Putin. On Sunday, only a week after fêting Mr. McCartney, Mr. Putin will play host to George W. Bush, who will be in Mr. Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg with about 40 other heads of state as part of the city's 300th anniversary festivities.
Naturally the St. Petersburg celebrations come heavily freighted with Higher Meaning, mostly having to do with the city's heritage as a window on the West. We had a foretaste of this when, in a televised interview, the Russian president told Sir Paul that the Beatles were a "breath of fresh air" to Russian teens such as himself back in the 1960s. Of course, the liberating influence of the Beatles was apparently insufficient to spur Mr. Putin to take up music or become a dissident. To the contrary, as WABC's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander dryly noted on their radio show, Mr. Putin enlisted with the KGB.
Though within Russia St. Petersburg has historically been criticized as almost un-Russian for its artistic and architectural aping of Europe, plainly the baroque grandeur of its buildings speaks to a past that looks all the better for what came after. The good news is that the 300th anniversary did provide the impetus for recovering some of this past.
Most sensationally this recovery includes the painstaking re-creation of the Amber Room in Catherine the Great's summer palace--a Russian treasure that disappeared after it was dismantled by the Nazis and taken as booty in World War II. Similarly, the newly restored Konstantin Palace will be the venue for a summit of European leaders. And the Hermitage, one of the world's most magnificent museums, this week welcomed home the St. George standard, a military flag taken abroad by His Majesty's Imperial Lancers in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.No doubt Mr. Putin would like this week's celebrations to be taken as a metaphor for a new Russia. As with most things Russian today, however, the reality is more complicated. To name but one irony: At the same time that an aging Beatle is brought in to illustrate Russia's opening, the mayor of Moscow is angling to have a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky--founding father of the Soviet secret police--restored to the Moscow square from which it was toppled in 1991.
In short, as we watch the president of Russia attaching himself to the legacy of one of its more famous czars, it strikes us that the Russian establishment's enthusiasm to rediscover its heritage does not yet include any effort to come to terms with the record of the 20th century. Far from bringing about the end of history, it appears that the collapse of communism has only set off a mad scramble for who's going to appropriate it. |
