Millennial Kazan

This year, the Russian city of Kazan turns 1000.

In honor of the anniversary, we asked

Paulina Hurwitz, a journalist with

strong links to this ancient city

on the Volga, to show us
Kazan from the inside.

Kazan lives by its own peculiar dynamic. Over the course of the 20th century, despite having endured several horrendous disasters, it grew by a factor of 12. As a result, Kazan has escaped from centuries of small-town obscurity and is now recognized as one of Russia’s leading cultural, scientific, industrial and trading centers.

And yet, I still meet “cosmopolitans” who have never heard my city’s name, who of course could never find it on a map. It was even once suggested that I had made a typographical error – that I must have meant to write that I was from Kazakhstan.

Inevitably, one is tempted to present Kazan through the prism of Russia: “Oh, it’s the third largest city in Russia,” I say, offering a vaguely dismissive wave. “It’s some 500 miles southeast of Moscow. It’s still in Europe, though.” Such an approach can feel like a compromise – providing one’s audience with an easily accessible point of reference, making everyone’s life easier. And it may in fact be the healthiest of all available options. But it is one that anyone with a scrap of cultural pride would do well to avoid.

Acquired Tastes

This is what fame is like for Kazan. Landlocked on the continent, it is tucked securely out of the way. The largely unimpressive Tatar geography offers no breathtaking tourist attractions, yet a discerning eye will appreciate the muted beauty of beech and aspen copses on the horizon, of endless, gently rolling fields and meadows, of tall grasses swaying in the breeze, shimmering in shades of pale gold and green, of the vastness of the Volga, spotted with countless wooded islands, and of the hills on its opposite bank, shrouded in a blue mist. It is not quite the Alps or the Himalayas, but more of an Earl Grey of landscapes: an acquired taste for the delicate palate. A land of associations and memories.

The technical details, as is usually the case with such things, are quite boring and tell you everything except the stuff you really want to know (unless you happen to be one of those extremely clever statisticians who has visions of translating pie charts into blockbuster movies). For example: Kazan is situated at the junction of the Volga river and its tributary, the Kazanka. The land surrounding the city is sandy forest-steppe with isolated patches of marsh, which leads to a relatively low humidity, a high pollen count during summer months, and moderate – but still quite annoying – dust storms in April (after the snow has melted and the ground is dry, but before new grass has sprouted, to keep the dirt from becoming airborne).

Technically speaking, Kazan’s climate is “continental.” Translated, this means you are in for a fairly long (12-18 weeks), comparatively severe and snowy winter, with an average temperature of -14o Celsius (7o Fahrenheit). This will be followed by a shortish (about 11 weeks), cool summer, averaging 19o C (57 o F). In reality, of course, these figures tell you nothing. For a number of factors loom to ensure confusion. The elements, after all, are out to get you and, no matter how hard you try, you will not be prepared for everything that a predictable, sedate continental climate may decide to throw at you.

Let’s begin with winter. It officially begins on December 1, but is only considered to have begun once snow has fallen and stayed on the ground for more than 48 hours. But of course it will never show up when you expect. It may snow as early as the second week in October, or, as in recent years, not at all. Well, at least not until after the New Year.

Then follows a short, tumultuous spring, with temperatures steeply rising. This is over in a blink and in charges summer, carrying with it drought and periods of stifling heat that are so long it would not be fair to call them heat waves. It has happened that the temperature has hovered around 40o C (104o F) for two months at a stretch, while all nature’s attempts to produce rain fail miserably: the water evaporates before reaching the ground, leaving a turgid suspension of stickiness in the superheated air. All hail the famous Russian permafrost.

Autumns are much like springs: blink and you will miss them. Intensely beautiful, fall comes with a crisp, watercolor fragility. Bright yellow leaves are set against a deep blue sky; musky, earthy scents waft up from the decaying foliage; endless drizzle offers a profoundly emotional combination with the ubiquitous, liquid suburban mud.

Kazan’s current population is estimated at approximately 1.2 million, not counting the suburbs. The city is composed primarily of ethnic Russians and Tatars, as well as peoples who have traditionally lived in the Volga valley, with a handful of miscellaneous ethnicities (Germans, Poles, Jews, Tajiks, Chinese, Armenians, etc.) thrown in. In Soviet times, there was a surge in interethnic marriages, encouraged by a State Ideology which strove to mold a unified Soviet race, one result being that the recessive trait for blue eyes has been all but bred out of us – most Kazanites have brown eyes. If you visit neighboring regions up or downstream, you cannot but notice that, in Russian-populated areas, people tend to have lighter coloration, like the rest of Northern Europe. A new sub-race is forming here. Not that Russians are particularly purebred, however. Russians are actually a highly composite ethnic group, absorbing many of the physical characteristics, cultural habits and technological discoveries of those they have rubbed shoulders with (Vikings, Swedes, Polovtsians, Tatars, Finns, Lithuanians, etc.) over the course of history.

History Lesson

In 1005, Kazan was founded by Volga Bulgars, a Turkic people who displaced Finno-Ugric tribes inhabiting the region. These latter moved north, into the barely penetrable forests along the Volga; their descendants are today’s inhabitants of Mari and Mordovia.

Volga Bulgaria’s geographic position gave it easy control of international trade passing through the region. Prosperity followed. A few centuries later, the Golden Horde came through and annexed the nation as one of its principalities. The people became known as the Tatars, regained their independence, and the Khanate of Kazan was established in 1430.

Another century later, in 1552, Ivan the Terrible, having grown tired of the Tatars’ constant raids on neighboring Russian lands, decided to subjugate the Khanate. And so he did. Kazan was conquered and enveloped into the lands of Russia, starting it down the path of being molded into what it is today.

The Tatars were made subjects of the tsar. Yet their resistance to assimilation, fed by religion (their predecessors, the Volga Bulgars, accepted Islam in 922 AD), meant that Russian administrators had to be posted to Kazan to oversee the unification process. The Tatar population, by and large technically and culturally backward even by the standards of Medieval Russia, sank into the relative obscurity of earning its living through menial labor or farming. With a few notable exceptions, high-ranking positions in local government, land ownership, education and trade were assigned to ethnic Russians, who, through their exposure to the dominant culture, were able to keep abreast of the changes society was constantly undergoing.

The collapse of the imperial model meant that everyone was given an equal chance to rise in the social hierarchy. Communist ideology gave lip service to the support of socially disadvantaged classes and ethnic minorities, which of course meant that the Tatars would have been prime candidates for social promotion. But true autonomy and cultural identity did not arrive until 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then with a vengeance. The early 1990s were extremely tough on the Slavic half of Kazan: Turkic assertiveness reached previously unseen levels and was set on making the Slavs’ life in the city unbearable.

A newly-formed political party held daily protests in the central square, urging expulsion of ethnic Russians, voiding of mixed marriages and extermination of all children resulting from such marriages. One could be ordered off a bus simply for speaking Russian. Salaries of Tatars shot 60% above what the undesirable non-Tatars (the statistical majority) were paid. The pretext was “encouraging the preservation of Tatar culture and language” – a tongue which, incidentally, very few Kazanites spoke.

Simultaneously, it was suddenly decided that higher education was for Tatars only. Someone came up with the marvelous idea of filtering out anyone not fully conversant in the language by simply changing the essay portion of the higher education entry exam: henceforth, it was to be written in Tatar. Luckily, saner heads prevailed at the Ministry of Education; they undoubtedly realized that the three months between April and July 1994 was too short a period for even high school graduates to master a language not being widely taught.

Mired in Education

Kazan actually has many institutions of higher learning. The best-known is Kazan State University (KSU), which is the third oldest university in the country, founded in 1804. Throughout the 19th century, KSU was the only center for higher education and research in what was then “Eastern Russia” (everything beyond the Urals was considered insignificant, a wasteland for unwanted human material; the first “Asian” university in Russia was not founded until 1880, in Tomsk). Today, KSU is a respected academic and research establishment which consistently ranks as one of the top 10 academic institutions in the country. The university turns out 2,000 graduates every year in some 32 specialties. Only a fraction of them, however, will carry on working in their chosen field, fewer still pursue an academic career.

The average KSU student is fairly dull, with their heart wholly elsewhere, going through the motions to earn a degree that is of little significance to them. The majority of girls are kitted out to look like middle-income office workers. The crew-cut boys sport fake designer wear of the “smart casual” variety. The mainstream youth are strangely offset by the relatively small, but colorful, group of informals, which themselves are divided into the hippies and the punks. It was once said that Kazan is unique in this respect: the two informal groups are completely at ease with each other and even enjoy some degree of inter-group flux; elsewhere, they would be in a state of ceaseless conflict.

The university hosts a “student orchestra,” which goes by the grandiose name, La Primavera. It boasts an impressive repertoire, tours extensively both within Russia and without, and is widely acclaimed for its outstandingly high  levels of musicianship. This is a point of infinite pride for the university, which is slightly suspect, if not outright odd, given that La Primavera is composed entirely of professional musicians, graduates of Kazan State Conservatory who have quite arbitrary links with the university.

In addition to KSU, the most notable educational institutions are the Medical Academy, the Conservatory, the Chemistry and Technology Institute and the Aviation Institute. The latter does not train pilots, but future aircraft designers. There is also a swarm of relatively obscure schools, from the Institute of Agriculture to the Institute of Veterinary Medicine. The Institute of Finances and Management also emerged from such obscurity, riding into sunlit glory on the wave of post-socialist demand for qualified accountants and managers.

At present, higher education is wrapped up in a two-tiered system of degree funding. First, for “gifted” students, there is State Assistance, which pays a student’s tuition and doles out a miserly monthly living-expenses grant. Second, those who fail to score well enough on entry exams can “self-finance” their education, i.e. pay as they go. In the abstract, the system is fair, acting as both a deterrent to filter out those who would not benefit from (or who are not serious enough students for) an advanced degree, while aiding the financing of struggling institutions. In reality, however, bribery rules the roost. The parents of academically promising applicants must often offer substantial sums to admissions tutors to keep their children’s exam scores from being lowered to make room for less qualified students, whose parents do not want them to suffer the stigma of being a “paying” student. This is particularly prevalent in the faculties of prestigious specialties, like journalism, management or law.

Amazingly perhaps, introducing this two-tier system in the 1990s did not reduce the number of high school graduates who wanted to obtain higher education. Frequently, the families of students who are clearly not college material feel the need to make enormous sacrifices in order to send their children to school: you get a degree to prove yourself and also because everyone else is doing it. This attitude was inherited from Soviet times, when the main social accent was placed on education. The State fed this desire by making higher education available to applicants from all backgrounds, coping with the resulting deluge of over-qualified specialists by creating entire research centers to provide specialists with lifetime employment.

Times have changed. Employment is no longer guaranteed, and the job market, especially in provincial cities like Kazan, and especially in historically mercantile cities (again like Kazan), is over-saturated with graduates offering their specialist services. The devaluation of university education would have continued unabated had local businesses not come to the rescue. Employers recognized value in the refinement and malleability implied by possession of a degree. Advertising for graduates to work outside their “specialty” – as travel or estate agents, or in PR consultancy or media – is one thing. Getting them to walk the shop floor is another thing altogether. I will never forget reading an expensive shoe store’s ad for a “sales advisor”: “Must be female, 170 cm or taller, have a degree and fluent English.” Of course, sashaying across the hard marble floors, surrounded by the scent of leather (with just a slight undertone of smelly feet) would have been any good-looking, brainy girl’s dream as she sat, poring over her books in preparation for exams. But fluent English?! In a city where foreigners are so scarce they are spotted in an instant? I’m still trying to work that one out.

Parochialism

Kazan is a large city with a village mentality. As I see it, this has developed in response to Kazan’s long-established status as a staging post on the route from rural despair to the beckoning fame of Moscow, St. Petersburg or Europe. At the same time, Kazan has somehow not taken on the air of carefree transience such places usually have.

Despite the fact that the size of the city’s population has long since expanded beyond what might be termed “comfortably compact,” you can still strike up a conversation with another Kazanite who lives distant from you both geographically and socially, whom you have never seen before in your life and, starting cautiously from your respective corners, discover mutual acquaintances before it is time to make a third move. There is probably a special sociological term for this phenomenon – most things are called something pompous; its regularity is such that you can safely bet money on it. And, as usually happens with well-established regularities, it has made its way into our urban folklore: “Beware of people who know not who you know.” Civilian mechanisms of data verification have served humanity well since time immemorial and have proven themselves to be very efficient, if somewhat slow.

As usual, there are always people ready to turn the ways of the world to their private advantage. An ordinary Kazanite will not toy with well-mannered reserve, and will not hesitate to contact a total stranger when they need a favor. The conversation will begin like this: “Hi, this is so-and-so, I know so-and-so. He knows your brother. Can I crash at your place for a week?” Should you express incredulity at this request, you will be labeled “un-neighborly, unhelpful and stuck-up.”

Kazan is also a hard place to maintain one’s privacy. Everyone – from neighbors to colleagues at work or professors at college – pries. The harder one strives to shut them out, the more intense their prying becomes. Women are expected to share their troubles, providing aged gossips with bits of juicy news, in order to be instructed and judged, in turns. Refusing to do so will lead to animosity, mistrust and being held in disdain. And then there is that dreaded label again: “stuck-up.”

Lacking celebrities, local newspapers and TV broadcasts exploit fully the lascivious greed for pieces of others’ lives. Small-scale news orbits the grotesque (e.g. “While attempting to prize open a bottle of deodorant believed to be containing alcohol-based fluid, a local drunk blew his eyes out and shattered windows in his flat from the explosion of the gas still trapped in the bottle.”) and the ridiculous (“During the excavation of a tunnel leading to the northwest line of the Metro, the machinery came too close to the surface and hit on loose soil, which caused a significant collapse, sucking in someone’s shed, containing some garden tools and a goat. The animal has been rescued and is currently waiting for its owner to come forward.”).

Turkic Renaissance

As with any people threatened by assimilation (translated into Tatar as “extinction”), over the past decade the Tatars have asserted their ethnic identity by any means available. Along with the fringe political movements described above, they decided to remold the city to suit their ideology. Mosques shot up, muezzins were installed, and loudspeakers broadcast plaintive prayers at 4 am, just 50 yards from the windows of innocently sleeping citizens. Hundreds of historic buildings were declared beyond reasonable repair and were pulled down, leaving unsightly, ragged gaps and heaps of rubble in their place. Whole roads were dug up and resurfaced with fancy brick and flush-mounted footlights.

The Kazan Kremlin – the city’s most beautiful, ancient artifact, assigned protected status – was violated by the construction of an immense, four-minaret mosque on its grounds. Not only is the house of worship at odds stylistically with the rest of the ensemble, but it is so huge and colorful that it dwarfs the subtle white buildings which envelop it. The city administration is very proud of its achievement, boasting that Kul Sharif is the largest mosque in Europe. Meanwhile, the Orthodox church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, which is also within the Kremlin, had its crowning crosses removed and replaced with UNESCO signs. So much for cultural and religious diversity.

At the same time, additional building projects were undertaken. The historic city center was once the true spirit and essence of Kazan: sleepy, tree-lined streets with houses sporting façades of intricate woodwork; shady bicentennial gardens with unruly lilac bushes and vines hanging over their fences; fragrant orchards cultivated not for harvesting but for aesthetic enjoyment.

All of this has been razed. Throughout the city, hacksaw-wielding officials got carried away, destroying old parks and gardens, replacing them with desolate concrete fields punctuated by a few straggly, consumptive-looking birch trees. Make way for more amusement complexes, shopping centers and double-wide roads!

For a time, in fact, the city looked as if it was recovering from a carpet bombing. So the administration hurriedly contracted with builders to move in and assemble the leftover rubble into streamlined, glass-fronted, minimalist offices. But even these bland, uniform buildings are stamped with the print of the ethnic idea. In 1995, the Conservatory and Philharmonic Concert Hall was rebuilt from scratch, replacing a 1960’s monstrosity that resembled an aquarium but which had divine acoustics. In its place is now a 1990’s monstrosity finished in smoked glass, black marble, burnished brass and crystal chandeliers. It looks incredibly grand but has the acoustics of a Turkish bath. As a finishing touch, the pale cream interior walls were hand-painted with stylized floral motifs, the sort that usually cover ethnic footwear. It is an interesting visual effect when combined with the raspberry draylon of the chairs and the gilt edging of the stage and aisles.

But the greatest current building project – in fact one of truly apocalyptic, goat-consuming proportions – is the Kazan Metro. Construction was supposed to have begun back in 1978, but tight budgets forced more essential needs to be addressed first. But now the oil-fueled economy is blossoming and money is being spent lavishly to overhaul the city’s antiquated transport system. Local cynics are quick to say that this is President Mintimer Shaimiev’s way of leaving his indelible signature on the face of the city: placing his first initial – the metro “M” – throughout the Tatar capital.

Into the Future

For the past decade, all of Russia has been lurching through the long process of recovering from decades of Soviet bleakness. This is not easy. And there are no rules of thumb for how to give a city a complete makeover in 90 days.

As people undergo a search for their identity, gradually replacing old value sets with new ones and shaping a new mentality, they are bound to make rash decisions, pleasing fewer people than they offend. This is what constitutes the course of history. It is what shapes humanity. And while it may seem at times that, in specific places, civilization is sliding backwards, we must also bear in mind that history moves in cycles: some strides are longer than others, but nothing that is being done today has not, in some guise, been done already several hundreds of years earlier. That is particularly true when there is a millennium of history to contend with.   RL