Cold Warriors

Cold Warriors

As we were editing this issue, Vermont, where our publishing office is located, was hit with a bitter cold spell. Overnight, temperatures dropped into the -20° to -30° F range for about a week.

It was a timely taste of what life is like in Norilsk (page 50), where temperatures do not get above this level for months. But of course, the air here is much cleaner and Vermont does not have a dark history of gulag slave labor camps.

Still, as an editor, I find such unexpected synchronicities fascinating. 

In a similar vein, it is exciting when a story we have been working on for several weeks or months – without any sense of timeliness – suddenly becomes top news just as we are putting an issue to bed. 

This is what happened with our story on Norilsk. In January, the head of Norilsk Nickel (NN), Mikhail Prokhorov, was arrested in France in connection with a crack-down on a prostitution ring (see our PostScript, page 64). Then, a week or so later, Prokhorov and oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who jointly control NN, announced they were parting ways. Prokhorov will be leaving Norilsk and Potanin opened the door to the State’s re-acquisition of NN. 

Potanin reaped millions when he engineered NN’s fire-sale privatization in the loans-for-shares deal in the 1990s. His reorganization of NN over the past decade helped the company and the town survive, with modest improvements in ecological conditions. But it has also made him one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in Russia. It will be interesting to see if the Kremlin will let him cash out without imposing onerous obligations on him (e.g. the way oligarch Roman Abramovich has been tasked with redeveloping Chukotka, see page 8).

Speaking of redevelopment, two stories in this issue (Khitrovka, page 38 and Vanishing Act, page 30) look at the changing face of Russia’s capital – the ways that Moscow’s rich history and intimate courtyards are being paved over to make way for garish apartment buildings and Potemkin-village-style architecture. It is a sad development, and it is encouraging to learn that some hardy activists are banding together (thanks to the Internet) to hold planners and chinovniki to account.

I love to wander the back alleyways of Kitay Gorod when I visit Moscow. It would be a shame if these and other historic places continue to be bulldozed or plastered over with Disneyfied imitations of history. The courageous Turkish novelist Elif Shafak observed in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air (as this issue was being edited, of course) that, when people stop using historic, rich words in their language (substituting them with foreign imports), a part of that people’s imagination dies. Could it be any less true when historical places are lost?

It may be easier to replace a crumbling, centuries-old brick building with a concrete copy than it is to lovingly restore it. But at what cost? 

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There is much speculation today about where Russia is headed, whether it is becoming an authoritarian state again, and how. In that light, our lead news item (page 7) introduces one of the primary movers behind the Kremlin’s “sovereign democracy” ideology. But this piece only scratches the surface. To delve deeper into this or any other story covered in the magazine, we encourage you to visit our website, where we post useful links for all the stories appearing in our magazine.

Enjoy the issue.