It was not my first time in St. Petersburg’s Ploschad Vosstanya metro station. I had stood under its garnished ceiling and stood on its huge escalators at least 50 times before. Russian metro stations are to D.C. metro stations as a Picasso masterpiece is to a child’s drawing. Paintings hang on the walls, the ceiling is filled with golden ornaments, and stunning mosaics portray an idealized image of the Soviet Union. (Don’t believe me? Just see this!) Russian metro stations are so unbelievably pretty I actually spent half a day in Moscow on a “metro tour.” Very different from the constant burning smell on D.C.’s metro that makes me think I should be ready to run from a fire at any second… So yes, it was not the first time I stepped foot into a Russian metro station, but nevertheless I was still impressed, even after seeing it so many times before. However, this trip marked the first time I was in the Ploschad Vosstanya metro station after discovering that the station used to be an old Orthodox church.
My favorite thing about Russia, and particularly Saint Petersburg, is its architecture. St. Petersburg does not exhibit homogenous and classic architecture like so many other European cities. I was told before I came here that I would be shocked by how beautiful St. Petersburg is. It is certainly beautiful, but there must be better adjectives to describe it. St. Petersburg is an architectural chaos. It is a beautiful and unique chaos, but nevertheless, chaos. Monstrous Communist buildings stand next to Renaissance Russian palaces. Neo-Byzantine cathedrals sit next to classic European constructions that stand right in front of modern buildings from the early 2000s. Saint Petersburg tried to change its architecture as frequently as it changed its name. Every new phase in the history of this city would require a new name, a new image, a new identity. The city was first named Saint Petersburg, later became Petrograd, and only six years later, was Leningrad. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Saint Petersburg would finally have its first name again.
Unapparent to the everyday onlooker, behind the beautiful, stylistic chaos depicted in St. Petersburg’s architecture there is an attempt to hide part of Russian history. Yesterday, I was visiting Saint Petersburg’s City Hall when my tour guide showed me a fascinating painting of the Russian Revolution. Next to the figures of Stalin and Lenin, it seemed like the painter had tried to paint over something. My tour guide looked at us with a hidden smile and said, “That used to be Trotsky, but after he was considered a traitor and exiled to Mexico, they just decided to paint over his face.” In the blink of an eye, Trotsky, one of the most important leaders of the Russian Revolution, became just a shadow on a painting in St. Petersburg’s City Hall.
I have recently realized that this same paintbrush, which sought to paint over Trotsky’s image in the corridors of the City Hall, seemed to leave its mark in a lot of places around Russia. I walked around the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station a thousand times without ever knowing that it used to be an Orthodox cathedral. Part of the Soviet plan to become the first universally atheist state involved converting some of the old Orthodox cathedrals into something more practical and mundane: metro stations. Something similar happened with government buildings. In 2014, Putin ordered the dismantling of a Stalinist government building inside the Moscow Kremlin, and among the things that remained were remnants of the Ascension convent and the Chudov monastery, where the Romanov children had been baptized: an example of yet another religious building destroyed to fit a reality that was no longer religious.
However, the efforts of the Bolsheviks, particularly Stalin, to destroy part of Russia’s past backfired. Soon after his own death, when it became clear to Russia that his actions had led to the suffering of thousands, Stalin himself was also taken out of the hundreds of paintings around Russia. When my friend told me to stare into a marble wall on Narvskaya station in Saint Petersburg, I knew enough about Russian architecture to know that there would be a rational explanation. “There is a gigantic mosaic of Stalin right behind this wall,” he said, “They decided to hide it a few years ago.”
I came to Russia because I was intrigued by mysteries such as this one. I was fascinated by Russia’s lack of labels; it seemed to me that Russia does not fit in anywhere. Russia is not Asian, but it is not European either. It is large enough to be its own continent, but it would not be Russia without Asia or Europe. I hoped to answer the questions “What is Russia?” and “Where does it fit?” However, when I got here I realized that the lack of labels is not the problem. The problem is an excessive amount of labels. Each chapter in Russia’s history book does not have its own unique name. The entire book changes every time a different chapter begins. Russia frequently changed throughout its history, and during each phase it attempted to become something different by denying bits of its past. Perhaps the best explanation comes from a Russian lady I met. After living in the USSR for almost 40 years, she told me it does not make sense to call the St. Petersburg of Soviet times by the same name we use today. “Soviet St. Petersburg was Leningrad, not St. Petersburg,” she said: a new label, a new identity, and a new book.
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