The Ruble Stops Here

After three weeks in Russia, I have to admit I still don’t understand the Russians — but then, why should I start with them?
Still, that brief visit, during which I hardly left one little neighborhood of Kaliningrad, permits me to pass judgment. For you see, Kaliningrad is the westernmost piece of Russia, separated from the rest of the nation by the Baltic States. Since Alaska, where I live, is also a non-contiguous, westernmost territory, and I told people in Russia that I am a completely typical American, I feel obliged to assume that anything I concluded about Kaliningrad is valid for the rest of the world’s largest country and its hundreds of ethnicities and regions.
Not that I reached any profound conclusions. The Russians are as contradictory a compilation of virtues and vices as any other people.
Chief among the former I judge their enthusiasm for gardening and their tolerance for cats. Among the more conspicuous of the latter are rampant alcoholism and the utter lack of a free press. At least Putin doesn’t support the alcoholism.
But now a little history, starring the Dom Sovyetov, a Kaliningrad landmark widely known as “the ugliest building on Russian soil.”
The city of Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic Sea, less than 50 miles east of Gdansk, Poland. Like Gdansk, it was once German territory, part of East Prussia. For seven centuries the busy port, famous for the region’s amber mines, was called Konigsberg. And for many of those centuries, a spectacular cathedral and castle complex dominated the central cityscape, a gem of medieval European architecture.
Near the end of World War II, the Royal Air Force bombed Konigsberg, wiping out the central city and destroying the castle. The strategic value of the attack is debatable, but the people who live there now still hold a grudge, even though Konigsberg was an enemy city at the time.
After the war, the Soviet Union annexed the territory, ejected most of the Germans, and renamed it after one of Stalin’s yes-men who never went near the place. While the Soviets turned the rest of the city into a workers’ paradise over the following decades, the castle remained a pile of rubble, with one dramatic wall fragment teetering over the remains like the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. That is, until 1967, when some party hack decided to make his bones by tearing down this last trace of bourgeois excess.
But what a great spot to demonstrate Soviet progress! After 20 years of design and development, construction began on the massive Dom Sovyetov, intended as a modern home for the national, regional and city administration of Kaliningrad. After another few years, construction stopped on the massive Dom Sovyetov as the even more massive Soviet Union went broke and dissolved into its pre-war constituents, except for Kaliningrad, which stayed Russian.
So for the next 15 years, a giant, unfinished, gray eyesore blighted what should have been prime commercial real estate in the center of a newly capitalist downtown. Then came 2005, and the visit of President Vladimir Putin to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city. What to do, what to do?
I can’t decide whether the next part harkens more to the Soviet tradition of the Potemkin Village, or further back, to the Gogolian “Inspector-General” tradition of tsarist oxymoron. Or maybe it’s just the latest manifestation of a timeless Russian approach to civic administration.
In any case, officialdom decided to feed more funds into the dingy Dom, but only to the extent of some thousands of gallons of light blue paint and a few acres of glass panes to cover all the window holes.
And so it stands today — massive, empty and unusable, casting its depressing shadow into the trench where a few archaeologists scratch for treasures of the medieval town and castle. Meanwhile, a German consultant concluded the cheapest and safest thing to do now is tear down the whole thing and let future archaeologists enjoy the rubble.
I grew up thinking of Central Europe as a zone full of backwards, impoverished victims of communist oppression, and found my recent visits to Poland and the Czech Republic a little jarring because they are now clearly more modern and prosperous than where I live. So I indulge a perverse schadenfreude from the story of the Dom Sovyetov and can still feel a little superior knowing that at least Russia has held true to dictatorship and public mismanagement. The only remaining question is when Putin will end the charade and declare himself tsar.
In America, nothing remotely like that comedy of goof-ups could ever happen. We would never, for example, disrupt traffic in Boston for eight years and go $20 billion over budget on a project with such shoddy materials that a piece of new tunnel collapses and kills a motorist. In America, a city like Denver would not build a new airport ($3.1 billion over budget) with a state-of-the-art automated luggage system that breaks down the first day and can’t be repaired because the access tunnels were taken out of the design as a cost-cutting move. Equally impossible would be getting most of the way through construction of an 8,000-foot highway bridge over the Saginaw River in Michigan and finding that the two halves miss each other by six feet ($48 million over budget).
So I’m back in the USA, and don’t I know how lucky I am, boy. I intend to enjoy it as long as possible — probably until 2012, when Obama and Romney split the rational human vote and throw the election to Palin on her Real American Party ticket. Then, While Vice President Limbaugh pats down the dirt on the grave of our own free press, I will humbly recall the words of another, somewhat more famous Konigsberg.
“In six months, we’ll be stealing Erno’s nose.”