Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The Kremlin could be turned into a beautiful historic park, where all the gates are open twenty-four hours a day, like in the Old City in Jerusalem. People should be able to have romantic encounters there at nighttime; to touch the ancient walls and sit on the Red Steps, the parade entrance to the Kremlin Palace; to stroll with a friend on the raised bank above the Moskva River.

Where can state power be relocated? There are plenty of ideas, including the latest plan for expanding Moscow, according to which the state could have its own little city somewhere in the far reaches of the Moscow Region. The state could be configured in a Eurasian manner, setting up its new capital somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe, from where it would be easy for the government cortèges to switch on their flashing lights and call on brotherly Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. But the idea I like the best is that dreamt up by the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute, which I saw recently in a competition of student work in the Architecture Museum. It was called, ‘The Mobile Government’, and it was based on a sound Russian principle: wherever the leadership goes, life improves dramatically. The students suggested constructing a mobile model of the government, based on a special train. Travelling all over the country, the train would travel under its own cloud of abundance, and everywhere it went life would automatically improve.

And then there would be absolutely no need for it to return to Moscow.

Yet another routine bloody harvest occurred on Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt: on the night of 2–3 October 2015, at the widest part of the road, where it crosses the third ring road, two accidents happened almost simultaneously. First, a BMW-X5 was flying down the middle of the road when the driver lost control, crossed the central lane and drove into a Range Rover and a Porsche Cayenne coming in the other direction. Then a four-by-four travelling at high speed rammed into the traffic jam that had formed after the first accident. As a result, two drivers died, three people were taken to hospital with serious injuries and three more suffered minor injuries. Witnesses reported that a lot of drivers got out of their cars and ran to look at the burning vehicles, thus preventing the ambulances from reaching the scene of the crash.

Two years earlier, in December 2013, the influential Deputy Prime Minister of Dagestan (a Russian region in the Caucasus), Gaji Makhachov, died at exactly the same spot on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Rushing along in the central lane in his Mercedes GL four-by-four with his wife and three children he caught the edge of a plastic block around some roadworks, spun into the oncoming traffic and hit a minibus. In that accident, three people died and six others were injured. And on the night of 8 November 2014, just half a kilometre from that spot, a BMW-M5, travelling at more than two hundred kilometres per hour, also crossed the central lane into the oncoming traffic and hit a taxi, killing the driver and his female passenger. On this occasion, five people died and a further six were injured.

One can go on forever about fatal accidents on Kutuzovsky. According to both official and unofficial statistics, it is the most accident-prone stretch of road in the capital. In 2011 alone, there were eighty-six accidents there, resulting in fourteen deaths and ninety-six injuries. Various urban legends try to explain this: from its being a geopathogenic zone, to the existence of a magnetic anomaly; all the way through to the ‘graveyard theory’, which says that when they were laying down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the 1950s, a number of cemeteries that lay outside the city’s boundary were destroyed, and now the restless dead are taking their revenge on the living.

I grew up close to these spots, and I remember how, when my friends and I were playing in the dip that now houses the third ring road, we used to find broken slabs with indecipherable writing on them. It was only later, when I was studying old maps of Moscow, that I understood that these were tombstones from the ruined Jewish cemetery which was once situated there. But going to school in the mornings I noticed something else: how black government Chaika and Volga cars with little curtains over the rear windows would emerge from the courtyards of smart apartment blocks built in the style of Stalinist architecture. These carried the Communist Party nomenklatura who lived on Kutuzovsky and were on their way to work. In block number twenty-six on Kutuzovsky Prospekt lived two General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev and his successor, Yury Andropov. At the time we guessed this because of the rumours that were circulating and also because of the guys in identical coats who would be stamping their feet while waiting around in the courtyards; nowadays, there are memorial plaques bearing their names.

As a result of this, I have my own theory about the deaths on Kutuzovsky: the theory of the Elite Road. This is the official name for the highways that go from the Kremlin to the West of Moscow, including Rublyov Highway, Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Novy Arbat Street. The traffic police divisions which serve there are also described thus: the Elite Division of the Elite Battalion on the Elite Highway. I don’t know whether the personnel also have special titles – ‘Elite Major’ or ‘Elite Colonel’ – but they certainly have an air about them of fulfilling a special role for the state. In reality, this is the most important road in the country, and it is there not for the convenience of the public, but so that the country’s leaders can have a safe passage from the pine trees of Barvikha (just outside Moscow and chosen by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s), to the centres of power: the White House (seat of the Russian government); Okhotny Ryad (the State Duma); Old Square (the Presidential Administration); and the Kremlin. This is why you won’t find any lorries on this road; there are no traffic lights, nor are there police ambushes with speed traps. And that’s also why there’s a central lane down the middle of the road reserved for the leaders’ cars, but no central reservation – the main reason behind the head-on collisions and deaths.

The central lane on Kutuzovsky Prospekt is one of the main symbols and institutions of Russian power in the Moscow ‘vanity fair’. This is where you measure your worth; it all depends on your elite number plate and your elite pass. Specially chosen traffic police are there not so much to keep an eye on road safety as to ensure that the hierarchy of the state can travel along their central lane. Ford Focus cars with number plates in the series eKX and xKX (the FSO and the Federal Security Service (FSB)) travel along this lane quietly and without fuss; important limousines glide past with the numbers aMP and aMM (senior policemen) and aMO (the Moscow Mayor’s Office); numbers from the ‘commercial’ series oOO and kKK zip by, carrying bankers with their guards in their Mercedes G-class four-by-fours; occasionally, a Mercedes with blacked-out windows will fly past, with the regional code 95 (for Chechnya). The inspector filters all traffic using the central lane with an eagle eye: he salutes the leadership, waves through those whose rank permits its use and stops any others daring to use the lane to check on their status and see whether they have had the audacity to break the traffic regulations.

The privileged lane illustrates the vertical of power, which has become a horizontal servility. It is the old Russian class society with its table of ranks spelled out in the letters of the elite number plates; it is Russian feudalism in all its glory. [7] In 1722, Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, which carefully delineated the standing of everyone in the military, government and court. ‘Feudalism’ in Russia effectively lasted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. It is just like in seventeenth-century Paris, when cavalcades of horsemen with torches charged around the streets accompanying noble carriages, knocking over traders’ barrows and pushing those on foot back against the walls – ‘Make way for the King!’. Since that time, France has experienced the Enlightenment, revolution, the execution of the monarch, the Napoleonic Code and five republics. The class system has been dismantled and the principle has been established of equality for all before the law; including when it comes to traffic. In Russia, however, the seventeenth century continues, as if there had never been the new times, or the right to life, property and justice; and the way in which you travel around is determined exclusively by your class standing and how close you are to the body of the sovereign.