Yekaterinburg: Passage to Asia

If Perm stands watch over the European part of the Urals, Yekaterinburg serves as the main passage to Asia. Indeed, near the main railroad between the two cities, there is a marker designating the line dividing the two great continents. Perhaps for this reason, Perm and Yekaterinburg, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, seem perpetually engaged in a contest of opposites. Perm is Europe, Yekaterinburg is Asia; the Perm region is associated with the Stroganovs, while Yekaterinburg was linked to the Demidovs. Each at some point during the past two and a half centuries has served as capital of the mighty industrial resources of the central Urals. (Now each is the capital of its own oblast, or province.) Although each witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the civil war between the Reds and the Whites, Yekaterinburg will forever be remembered as the site of the fateful murder of Nicholas II and this family in July 1918. Perm, from its perch above the Kama River, has the more dramatic landscape, while Yekaterinburg must settle for the decidedly less imposing Iset River.

Nonetheless, it is Yekaterinburg that can now claim the edge: its population of 1,400,000 is considerably larger, and many of the main affiliates of such national institutions as the Academy of Sciences are located here. Yekaterinburg is also the site of an important United States consulate, which represents American interests in much of the vast territory between Moscow and Vladivostok. Even the modest Iset has been turned into an asset, as its waters form a series of ponds that bisect the city from north to south. What were originally prosaic factory ponds now create a series of refreshing parklands in the center of the city.

Like Perm, Yekaterinburg is sustained by its heavy industry, once closely linked to the defense establishment. The town was founded in 1721 by Vasily Tatishchev, who also played a pivotal role in the development of Perm (see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2000). The expansion of Russian metalworking capabilities was a major part of Peter the Great’s industrial strategy, and the mineral resources of the Urals led to the creation of a number of factory settlements and towns. Yekaterinburg was established to be their center. Production at the first State Metals Factory on the Iset River began in 1723. The settlement was named in honor of Empress Catherine I, Peter the Great’s second wife, who reigned between 1725 and 1730.

In addition to the production and working of iron, other industrial enterprises led to the rapid growth of Yekaterinburg. In 1735 a branch of the State Mint began production. Subsequently, the city gained renown as a center for the fashioning of ornamental objects from semi-precious stones excavated in the Urals (for example, jasper, porphyry, malachite). Some of the most impressive of these objects can be seen in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage State Museum.

Yekaterinburg also flourished as a transportation center, despite its distance from a large river. In 1763 the Siberian highway was extended through Yekaterinburg. A century later the city became a major rail junction with the opening of lines west to Perm (1878), east to Tyumen (1885), and south to Chelyabinsk (1896).

These historical developments pale, however, in the memory of the city’s older residents, for whom the defining moment is the Soviet industrialization campaign that began with the five-year plans of the 1930s. As one said, “For us, this city will always be Sverdlovsk.” (In 1924 the name of the city was changed to honor the bolshevik admistrator Yakov Sverdlov, who had died in 1919. The name reverted to Yekaterinburg in 1991, but the province, or oblast, is still designated as Sverdlovsk.)

Not only did this spurt of industrialization lead to the massive expansion of heavy machinery production, represented by such giants as the appropriately-named Uralmash (short for Urals Machine) factory, but the period also resulted in the almost total rebuilding of central Yekaterinburg. From the post office to the main department store, from apartment blocks to office buildings, the city was literally rebuilt from the ground up during the late 1920s and 1930s. And while the severe, modernist aesthetic known as Constructivism is not to everyone’s taste, the buildings have been relatively well-maintained and they give a real sense of the dynamism that gripped this city—and much of the Soviet Union—as new factories arose out of seemingly nothing.

Indeed, for those interested in the history of Soviet Constructivism, the architecture of Yekaterinburg is the best preserved ensemble of the style anywhere in Russia. Not even Moscow, whose architects such as Moisei Ginzburg helped build the city, can boast such a dense concentration of landmarks to the monumental enthusiasm of the period.

To be sure, that enthusiasm had its dark side: the totalitarian regime dictated its new order with unprecedented brutality. The extent of this coercion is evident in the city’s Chekists’ Village (gorodok chekistov). This six-block-long complex includes a collection of apartment buildings, a large club with performance halls, and a 10-story semi-cylindrical tower for offices and a dormitory-style hotel. This huge complex was built for the exclusive use of the secret police, or “chekists” (from the first name of the Soviet security police, the Cheka). According to Valentin Lukyanin and Maya Nikulina, authors of a walking guide to the city, the first architect for the Village, Ivan Antonov, emigrated to Finland in the 1930s. The ostensible reason was to rejoin family, but rumors have it that he left after refusing to design an execution room within the complex. A questionable story, but at that time anything was possible. Another story has it that, from the air, parts of the design resemble a hammer and sickle, or the letters “SSSR” (for USSR).

Once a self-enclosed world for those who enforced the ruling ideological dogma, now Chekists’ Village is prime urban real estate, rented out by the city to help pay maintenance costs. The tower of Chekists’ Village, for example, is now the Hotel Iset. Despite its modern appearance, this tower was actually built of bricks, hand-carried to the top on wooden ramps. “Not even a crane was used in its construction,” one resident said. Despite all the visionary ideas of the Constructivists, their projects were almost always built with the primitive means available in an economy scarce in technology and rich in labor flooding in from the countryside, especially in the devastating aftermath of collectivization.

Adjacent to the tower is the former club building. Boxy from the outside, its vestibule has one of the most dramatic of modernist stairwells leading to the upper floors. But reverie and photography were interrupted when a well-dressed woman—clearly the product of the Soviet era—turned while ascending the stairway and said, with a skeptical smile, “This is what our generation created. Let’s see what the new generation will produce.”

In fact, contemporary architecture is alive and well in Yekaterinburg, even if lacking the idealistic drive of the 1930s. Industry continues to thrive, and that, combined with the city’s importance as an administrative center, translates into money for the construction of apartments and offices. For example, there are a number of new, private apartment buildings, built to modern standards and with the amenities one would expect in the West.

At the same time, there are obvious traces of economic and planning disarray in the post-Soviet period. Like the brash city it is, Yekaterinburg sought to imitate Moscow and build a concrete television tower modeled on the world’s tallest, Moscow’s Ostankino. Alas, the money ran out and the tower stands unfinished at almost 200 meters. It now looks like the world’s tallest factory chimney. And then there is the 20-story building that, after completion, proved to have design flaws. It stands empty, but not unused: supporting a six-story banner advertising Nescafé coffee.

Everywhere in Yekaterinburg there is the sense of a cosmopolitan urban center in touch with the larger world. Lufthansa, for example, has scheduled service to Yekaterinburg, while downtown streets are festooned with banners announcing Russian flights to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. While the nearest McDonald’s is in Nizhny Novgorod (“The local mafia won’t let them [McDonald’s] in,” a student offered.), there is a shameless imitation called MacPeak’s on Lenin Street, the main thoroughfare. The quality is about what you would expect. Still, according to the new local paper, Gourmand (their slogan: “Proletariat of the world, dig in!”), the future looks promising for the proliferation of small restaurants and fast-food outlets in Yekaterinburg.

The re-election of Eduard Rossel (see page 54) to another term as governor of Sverdlovsk Province has been good for business and for continued investment. Industrial prosperity manifests itself in some unexpected ways. For example, the city’s largest industrial employer, Uralmash, played a large role in raising the funds to build the beautiful Church of the Nativity of Christ (1996-1999; architect: Alexander Dolgov), which is now one of the city’s best attended. Designed in a traditional Russian style, the church creates a new oasis of beauty, culminating in golden domes within the urban environment.

As was typical of so many Soviet cities, most of the churches in Yekaterinburg were destroyed during the 1920s and 1930s, and the few remaining ones were usually shorn of their cupolas and converted to uses such as an automobile garage. Some of these (for example the Church of the Ascension and the Old Believer Church of the Trinity) are now being returned to use and restored at considerable cost.

But the main focus of attention is the construction of a memorial on the site of the former Ipatiev house. Here, on the night of July 17, 1918, Nicholas II and his family were murdered by order of the Urals Regional Soviet and with the obvious complicity of Lenin’s government in Moscow. On July 27, 1977, the house was razed on Kremlin orders—apparently KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov worried that it was becoming a place of pilgrimage for monarchists. The first secretary of the region at the time, Boris Yeltsin, carried out the orders, twenty years later writing that “I can well imagine that sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism.”

There is now a temporary metal canopy, with a cross, over the site of the house. Nearby is a functioning Orthodox chapel, designed by Alexander Dolgov and built of logs. The chapel is actually dedicated to Grand Princess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna, who died an even more gruesome death at the Bolsheviks’ hands than did the tsar and his family.

Although the remains of the royal family have been reinterred in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg (not without controversy over their identity), the issue of a more permanent religious memorial at the site is moving toward a favorable resolution. The design for a church, dedicated to All Russian Saints, has already been selected and published. It envisions a grandiose temple-monument to all the victims of 20th-century totalitarianism. The elaborate, bell-shaped structure, most of which would be underground, is intended for the area near the Ipatiev house. “As part of this project,” said Alexander Barabanov, associate rector of the Academy of Architecture and the Arts, “Yekaterinburg will become a center of atonement not only for the murder of the Romanovs, but for all the crimes of totalitarian regimes in this century.”

Meanwhile, the city struggles to preserve the historic architecture that remains. Some streets still have imposing 19th-century mansions, and there are isolated examples of wooden houses, some of them with fanciful decorative carving. Yury Litvinenko, the energetic director of the Center for the Protection and Reuse of Monuments in Sverdlovsk Province, has a capable staff, but limited resources for the amount of work to be done in preserving what is left of the area’s architectural legacy. There are no laws that would empower preservation agencies. “We suffer from the toothlessness of the present system,” Litvinenko said.

The Road to Verkhoturye

Ninety-nine kilometers to the north of Yekaterinburg is the industrial town of Nevyansk (population 29,000). The town was established in 1700 to produce cannon for Peter the Great’s armies. In 1701 Peter transferred ownership of the cannon works to Nikita Demidov (1656-1725), the founder of a great dynasty of Russian industrialists. Shortly before his death, Demidov commissioned an enormous bell tower (1724-25) with a chiming clock. Because of unforeseen problems with the ground rock, the tower began to lean; but prompt measures were taken to stabilize the structure in the eighteenth century, and it has since stood solidly, sixty meters in height. “Our equivalent to the leaning tower of Pisa,” Alexander Sakantsev said proudly of the massive white column.

Sakantsev is director of the local office of the Sverdlovsk Regional Restoration Center and is responsible for the remarkable restoration of the carillon in the Nevyansk tower. The tower is actually located on the grounds of a factory that worked primarily for the Ministry of Defense. “At one time,” Sakantsev said, “thousands of people worked at this enterprise. But with the decline of the Soviet Union, the place emptied.” Indeed, the vast complex had the look of a ghost town, with largely empty, overgrown buildings, and few people to be seen—apart from tourist and student groups visiting the tower. The town itself, which consists primarily of wooden factory houses, is relatively well maintained, in view of the economic depression of the area.

Another 200 kilometers to the north of Nevyansk is the marvelous town of Verkhoturye. On an early evening in August, from atop the large cliff known as Trinity Rock, the golden domes and white walls of Verkhoturye’s Trinity Church gleam in rich sunlight. Below is the Tura River. And all around are other churches in various stages of restoration.

Verkhoturye was founded in 1598 as a major transit point on a route to Siberia blazed by a free peasant named Babinov. The so-called Babinov Road, which led from Solikamsk (see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2000) to Verkhoturye, greatly shortened the time and distance to Siberia for early Russian colonists, who could continue down the Tura River and eventually reach Tobolsk. This original Siberian trail lies considerably to the north of the current main line, the “Moscow Road.” This latter was established only in the late 18th century, after the pacification of steppe tribes. Verkhoturye thus played a major part in the colonization of Siberia, along a path that extended back to Solikamsk, Cherdyn, and Solvychegodsk.

The symbol of Verkhoturye’s pivotal role in extending Russian authority is its kremlin and church on Trinity Rock. What makes the Trinity Church so unique is not only its spectacular location, but also the rich combination of elements from the Italian renaissance, medieval Muscovy, Ukrainian baroque, and a local flair for ornament that is so evident in the green ceramic work on the facade. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that the church, which takes so much from 17th-century Russian design, was in fact begun in 1703, the year Peter founded St. Petersburg and introduced a totally different architectural language to Russia.

With the development of the Moscow Road through Yekaterinburg in the 1760s, Verkhoturye waned. At the end of the 19th century, however, the town reinvented itself as a religious destination for pilgrims who venerated the remains of Simeon the Righteous, the Verkhoturye Miracle-Worker, which were kept in the St. Nicholas Monastery. To accommodate the stream of pilgrims, among whom were members of the imperial family, the monastery commissioned at the beginning of the 20th century the enormous Cathedral of the Elevation of the Cross (1905-1913). Among its treasures was a luminous ceramic icon screen, made by the famous Kuznetsov Ceramics Company in Moscow, that filled the eastern part of the cavernous structure.

During the Soviet period, the St. Nicholas monastery was closed, some of its churches destroyed, and the cathedral ransacked. In a savage but all-too-typical act of vandalism, the unique ceramic iconostasis was smashed to bits. But local artisan Viktor Siminenko’s firm, “Terem,” is performing a miracle of the restorer’s art in the cathedral’s vast interior. The icon screen, with its splendid Art Nouveau glazing, stands once again. “All we had were a few fragments of the original ceramic iconostasis,” Siminenko said, “but we were able to recreate the Kuznetsov formula for the clay and the glazing. Now look what we have!” Work on the interior is not yet complete, yet later this year, the cathedral, whose acoustics are among the best in Russia, will finally be open for services.

Verkhoturye is inventing itself yet again. During the Stalinist period, the town prospered from the timber cut by slave labor in GULag forest logging camps. With the demise of that brutal system, Verkhoturye drifted into poverty and obscurity, only to be brought back through a combination of local pride and support by the Sverdlovsk administration. There is now a small but attractive hotel; pilgrims and some tourists are returning. And there is recognition, as local preservationist Andrei Borisov explained, that “these great relics of the past are not just there for art historians. They are the very basis of our economic survival.”