Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

Standing at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, some 500 miles from Moscow, Kazan is a fascinating blend of East and West—a riot of churches and mosques, markets and parks, Tatar restaurants and Russian cafés. With just over a million people, it’s Russia’s eighth-largest city, and it has a cosmopolitan, eclectic vibe that belies a bloody history of fighting among Mongols, Tatars, Bulgars, and Russians.

Kazan’s most striking architectural feature is its massive white kremlin, a sixteenth-century walled fortress perched atop a steep, grassy hill. With its stately towers, gates, and cathedrals, the kremlin is spectacular from any angle, and the main gate boasts a stirring statue of Tatar poet Musa Dzhalil struggling to break free from barbed wire. Gary and I had walked around the kremlin in 1995, but when David and I arrived in 2005, I was surprised to discover a new structure there.

Towering above the kremlin walls were the turquoise domes and minarets of the Kul Sharif Mosque, one of the largest in all of Europe. The scale is eye-popping, with minarets rising 180 feet into the sky and a gleaming 128-foot-tall cupola. The vast prayer hall can accommodate 1,500 people for prayers, while another 9,000 can fit into the adjacent square. Tourists flocked to the mosque, where they gazed in wonder at its ornate tile work, massive chandeliers, marble floors, and stained-glass windows.

It was odd to see a mosque inside a classic Russian kremlin, but the location was historic: Kul Sharif was built on the same spot as an earlier mosque that was destroyed in 1552, when Ivan the Terrible’s armies stormed across the region slaughtering Muslims in an attempt to spread Russian Orthodoxy. Four and a half centuries after the massacre, the Russian and Tatar governments combined forces—with financial help from oil companies and private donors—to re-create the largest and most beautiful of the mosques that had been destroyed.

I couldn’t help but wonder how it was that Muslim Tatars now had such good relations with Russians, while Chechens and Russians were still at each other’s throats. Both groups were predominantly Sunni, and both had historically suffered slaughter and pillage at Russian hands. But here in Kazan—which, ironically enough, means “cauldron” in Tatar—Russians and Tatars mingled easily. Curious, David and I decided to conduct a thoroughly unscientific survey, asking a few random people in the city’s quaint downtown district what they thought.

We spent a couple of hours stopping people, and one answer we heard repeatedly was that relations were good because there were many more mixed marriages here. About half the Tatars we stopped told us they were married to Russians, and vice versa. “How can you hate Tatars when your own children are half Tatar?” one Russian woman asked with a shrug.

This didn’t really solve the mystery, though. After all, there have always been Russians in Chechnya too, but mixed marriages there are more rare. Yet in Kazan, the question seemed like such a non-issue that people didn’t even know how to answer. One 18-year-old Russian named Mark, out walking with his Tatar buddy Artur, said, “It’s just always been this way. We don’t even think about it.” I couldn’t help but recall 19-year-old Zhenya and marvel at the fact that if these two teenagers had been born further south, they might have ended up aiming guns at each other rather than strolling around town together.

We happened to stop a historian named Delyara, who gave us a brief discourse on Tatar history. “There have been many governments here over the centuries,” she said. “The Bulgars, the Golden Horde, the Kazan Khanate. Under the Kazan Khanate, no churches were ever destroyed. So we have a history of tolerance here.” But then she told us there was a simpler reason why Chechnya was more volatile.

“People from the Caucasus are different,” she said. “Our blood doesn’t run as hot as theirs.”

This was a sentiment we heard repeatedly. One middle-aged Russian woman told us that Chechens were “very emotional people, very fiery.” And a 20-year-old Tatar woman echoed this, saying, “They’re hot-blooded, they want to be free. Tatars are not like them. We’re calm people.”

In Russia in 2005, generalizations about Chechens abounded, many far more disparaging than “hot-blooded.” Dark-haired, olive-skinned men were routinely stopped and harassed by police, and many Russians openly expressed prejudice against Chechens, often in crude and insulting terms, in a cycle of hatred and mistrust that seemed unlikely to break anytime soon.

One of the last people we interviewed, a taxi driver named Mikhail, seemed dismissive of such stereotyping. A self-described “pure-blooded Tatar,” he told us, “I went to kindergarten and school with Chechens, Tatars, Russians, everyone. We all got along. Listen, there are no bad nations, only bad people. You can’t generalize.” Compared to what we’d been hearing, this felt like a refreshingly progressive sentiment. Then he added, “Although, I really don’t like Azerbaijanis. They’re rude, disgusting, and don’t keep their word.”

Kazan was full of surprises. In 2005, the city was celebrating the 1,000-year anniversary of its founding; the buildings downtown had been beautifully restored, a new subway system had just opened its doors, and busloads of tourists chugged past billboards proudly proclaiming the millennial jubilee. Yet as we later learned from Vladimir Muzychenko, the 1,000-year number was, to put it kindly, a guesstimate. In fact, in 1977, city officials had spent months preparing for an 800-year anniversary. The celebration never materialized, though souvenir pins were made.

So, how did Kazan manage to age two centuries in just 28 years? Some people believed the 1,000-year anniversary was a political gift from Russia to Tatarstan. The evidence for this was twofold: not only had Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaimiev managed to wangle enough money from the Russian government to completely spruce up the city, he’d also persuaded Putin to allow Kazan to declare itself 150 years older than Moscow—a political concession unthinkable in Soviet times.

But Niyaz Khalitov, an archaeologist at the Kazan kremlin, revealed that there was actually some scientific reasoning behind the new millennial date. In the mid-1990s, he told us, archaeologists here unearthed two coins that dated from the tenth century, indicating that the city was at least 1,000 years old. “Kazan is probably even older,” he said, “but a decision was made to mark it as a thousand years.” The city had hoped to hold its celebration in 2000, but “it took time to clean up the city and make souvenirs. Then, we thought we might do it in 2003, but St. Petersburg was celebrating its three-hundred-year anniversary that year. So we decided on 2005”—science by committee.

The following day, David and I set out to find Zhenya’s mother, Natalya. The family didn’t have a phone in 1995, so all I had was their address; we’d have to just show up, as the first time. We caught a taxi to their neighborhood in the north of the city, yet somehow I couldn’t even find their street, much less their apartment.

The taxi driver drove around and around as we tried in vain to figure out where their building was. Nobody seemed to have heard of their street, which was bizarre. It was like a bad dream, and both David and I were boiling with frustration by the time we learned the problem: the street name had been changed in the late 1990s. We were in the right place, but had no way of recognizing the building, as all the apartment blocks were identical gray boxes.