George W. Bush once famously commented that he had looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. A new book, In Putin’s Footsteps, searches for the wider Russian soul across the vast, transcontinental country.
Perhaps now more than ever, a book about Russia forces a defensive posture in an American reader: Is this a pro-Putin story? That it’s told by Nina Khrushcheva, the great granddaughter of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who led Russia from 1958 to 1964, and Jeffrey Tayler, an American ex-pat living in Moscow, who has written in defense of Putin’s annexing of Crimea, signals it might be.
The book is a snapshot of Russian life across the country, and it should be beside the point what the authors think of America or Vladimir Putin. But, of course, it can’t be. Russia is not a country on which one can enjoy a travelogue without any mixed feelings.
The book title is based on a trip Putin devised after becoming president, wherein he planned to visit all 11 of Russia’s time zones in one night. This trip was never actually taken, but Khrushcheva and Tayler still praise Putin for visiting a quarter of Russia’s 89 regions shortly after taking over in 1999. Putin is described as connecting well with ordinary people, looking “both charming and in charge” as he “pledged to counter the negativity of the post-Soviet decade and set the country on a new, positive course.”
Whether the authors believe Putin has, in fact, “made Russia great again” is unclear. They do acknowledge some of his drawbacks, including that he reimposed “a degree of centralization” in order to install leadership loyal to him in the various regions. And they warn that if “Russia does become a monolithic imperial state,” it would be at the expense of Putin’s reputation.
Putin’s imperial vision does seem to have crept into the authors’ perspective, however. For example, they feature Kiev as part of their Russian tapestry, several times referring to Ukraine’s capital city as “the mother of all Russian cities.” That it’s not actually a Russian city seems neither here nor there.
In their visit to the place of my birth, now called Samara, they find people criticizing communism and capitalism in the same breath, proud of their city but embarrassed by the crumbling infrastructure. The people of Samara aren’t sure who they want to be. Khrushcheva and Tayler compare Samara to a Potemkin village, a place made to look appealing at a distance, for a certain audience — in this case, the people who came to Russia for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
They tell a similar joke at the start of the chapter about Novosibirsk, where my mother’s sister lives. The joke goes that the best way to fix a town in 24 hours would be to announce Putin will be visiting but to add that “he is going to visit the whole region and decide on a town later along the way.” It’s comical to put the joke in American terms and imagine a town sprucing up when the president visits. There’s much difference between Russia and America, and our conception of leadership is high on that list. If anything, we think presidents should spruce up for us.
When they visit Blagoveshchensk, which rests on Russia’s southeastern border, they worry about Chinese dominance in the area but also appreciate the way China is secure in its identity, in the way the sprawling Russian nation is not. There are similarities, however, as Khrushcheva observes after being stalled while trying to cross the border. Russia and China, she writes, are “two militaristic states with little respect for the individual.”
When they get to Magadan, a Stalin-era gulag town, Khrushcheva asks the grandson of a labor camp guard if he feels guilty. He doesn’t and turns the question back on her. She admits she does, adding, “In fact, I’m in the habit of apologizing for the Soviet injustices, especially for those during my grandfather’s rule.”
Admittedly, I am looking for these apologies, the admission that Russia has made a habit of crushing the individual, acknowledgment of the sad history of families such as mine. Khrushcheva and Tayler love Russia, it’s clear, but the book is at its best when they don’t excuse her, the moments where reality pushes against their idealized, theoretical Russia.
A Russia that is successful and has a future will be one that doesn’t see its purpose to be America’s antagonizer and learns from its past. But that Russia won’t be following in Putin’s footsteps, whether Khrushcheva and Tayler understand that or not.
Karol Markowicz is a writer in New York City.
