Towards shallow memory and memory void in V3 Astrakhan
V1 & V2 versions of memory: REASON AND ORDER AT THE BORDER
Some of the efforts to design memory in the past (during V1 and V2) in Astrakhan were extreme.
Peter the Great was the first Tsar to visit Astrakhan. He came here to impose order, with an eye to good practice in Europe, as per usual. Having heard that there was a great deal of bribery and corruption in the town, he descended to the Astrakhan Kremlin and had the high-ranking culprits publicly thrashed in the 'лобное место' (place of public speeches and executions), with salted whips, obviously. A well-designed deterrent memory.
In the early days of the Kremlin, there was a tower called the 'torture tower', where brutal means were applied. People had their arms tied behind their backs and were hoisted up from the walls, their arms torn out of their sockets. They were left to hang there until they died, we were told with relish by the guide. These were not Russia methods in fact, but inherited from the peoples of the region. After all, the Astrakhan Kremlin began as a community of only five-hundred Russians when it was founded by Ivan IV, with the Tatars dispatched to a Posad on the far bank of the channel. With time the Kremlin community grew into 'white town' beyond, but the original communities were very present, and the Kremlin's ways of making people talk were Turkic and Tatar. The river came right up to the Kremlin at this time, just the other side of the torture tower. Perfect for rolling bodies into the river.
Peter the Great had the 'Torture Tower' renamed 'the artillery tower'. He wanted to extinguish the memory of the brutality that had occurred there. Time for Russia to get European and leave behind the dark ages.
Over the years, the bank of the Volga silted up, leaving the Kremlin away from the river, but the people of the town continued to use the tower's original name: the 'torture tower'.
A similar, earlier example involves the rebellion of Stenka Razin in Astrakhan in 1672. When Razin's Cossacks took the town, they accused Saint Joseph of relations with Moscow and rolled him and others from the gently sloping roof of what later became known as 'накатная башня' ('rolling tower'), to their deaths. Once the town was recaptured and in safe hands, the Russian authorities simply had the tower destroyed to cast away all memory of these executions.
On a larger Europeanising scale, Astrakhan got the same 18th Century make-over that the other Volga towns got. The architect Alexander Digby was commissioned to design the town along European lines, which he did between 1793 and 1795. During a round table we had at the Regionology Museum, the local architecture professors stressed how Digby had studied how various parts of the town were already used and incorporated this as much as possible in his plan, while still bringing Catherine's beloved classicism to Astrakhan. The Asiatic spirit, they argued, was respected and preserved more than in other Volga towns.
In communist times, iconoclasm and irreverent re-purposing of churches was the norm throughout Russia. However, in Astrakhan there are two particularly brutal examples. Firstly, St. Vladimir's cathedral was used as a bus station. Secondly, the icons from the main cathedral in the Kremlin were removed and used as targets in the shooting range. This image is an incidental reminder:
In a sense, we see a continuation of V1 memory design during V2: shining the central light of reason on this wild asiatic crossroads.
V3: TWEE IDENTITY AND SHALLOW MEMORY IN AN OIL AND GAS TOWN
While in V1 and V2 there was heavy-handed memory design, we argue that in V3 the designers of memory (the owners of resources and power) are designing a flat and trivial memory.
In 2008, for the 450th anniversary of the founding of (Russian) Astrakhan', Lukoil and Gasprom funded a revamp of the most popular public spaces in the town. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan also financially supported the works. Most notably, they renovated the most visited embankment (Gazprom), another embankment (Azerbaijan) and two spots - the Swan Lake and the new statue to Peter the Great on the embankment and surrounding monumental area.
I ask Nurlan, a local taxi-driver and friend, what it was like before. 'Hard to say. Chaotic, a bit. Fences here and there.' When did you prefer it? 'Then'.
I ask a mother playing with her children what she thinks. 'It's much better now. Much more pleasant to bring children, you couldn't before, there were all sorts down here. I come every day. You can even get bikes and go along the embankment. You could never do that before. To me, it's more important that it's a pleasant environment, we'll mention to the children what the statues are, but just in passing, you know.'
Nice new places for children to play:
Then the lady told me her childhood memories of the place…’There were huge piles of sand here, we used to play on them as children. Where the hotel is now [a face-less concrete shell]’
Overhearing the conversation, a mad old woman approaches and urgently communicates that there used to be a river under this new statue to Peter Great. She manically waves her hand to show where the stream used to flow.
By Swan Lake, a stone's throw away, we see a 2008 monument to the family with soviet echoes.
Other people are less positive about the renovation, especially on the embankment. 'There used to be a lot of greenery here, but they got rid of it. It gets bloody hot here in summer and now there's no shelter. They cut down some really lovely old trees. I've no idea why they had to do that.'
A big site alongside the embankment is fenced off. Big placards on the fence announce that Gazprom are building a multi-purpose sports complex. There are simulations of its plastic looking white bulk. One of the stadiums is boat-shaped in recognition of local history.
I ask some people what they think about the plan and get a variety of answers:
‘Why do we need another sports complex? We already have Zvezdny and Olympiad. Maybe it will be nice, but Gazprom will probably only let their own (своих) use it.’
Another man was more positive: ‘It could be good, but I think they should build a river station instead. Keep the momentum up with livening up the embankment.’
I asked a coffee seller who has been coming to the embankment every weekend for the last three years what he thinks. ‘Don’t really know about it to be honest.’ The huge empty plot is less than two hundred yards away.
The town symbols and logos were also renewed in time for the 450th anniversary. Naturally, the sturgeon, the ship (also introduced everywhere, especially in playgrounds) and the lotus. The Volga delta lotus, which is very rare and rumoured to have been introduced by Buddhist monks, was only added to the town identity in 2008, for touristic purposes.
All of this town identity creation is very nice and well…But how deep does it really go? There is a making pleasant. Nurlan tells us what people think of Gazprom: ‘People are scraping around trying to survive here. It’s chronic, in the countryside the only thing is small-scale subsistence fishing. People are asleep to what Gazprom are doing. They don’t think about it.’
The new spaces are more pleasant urban environments than before. They involve some history. But they don’t honour the memory of the place deeply. They are sterile, and they are a more humane cousin of other well-kept, yet sterile, dead spaces that can be found near the Lukoil and Gazprom buildings with their shiny, impenetrable facades. In the space outside the Lukoil building, we find a memorial to the victims of political repression. The space leads nowhere and feels almost memoryless. I learn more about the history of Astrakhan as an exile town (Ссылный город) talking to a flower-seller at the cemetery than I can here.
Memorial to victims of political repression in a sterile oil-sponsored place:
Another sterile Lukoil spot:
There is ritual in the Swan Lake. Children feed pigeons at the water’s edge. But again, the environs are built sterile and somehow memoryless, the shiny Gazprom office towers beyond.
The renovations are OIL GIFTS. The president of Azerbaijan has a statue on the section of Astrakhan he funded. None of the locals can tell me anything about him, they can’t see a big connection. A statue for the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko is being designed, but a man in the park tells me the Shevchenko described Astrakhan as a god-forsaken hole. 'Shouldn't we have the founders of the town in the statues? There's the new statue to Peter the Great...what about Ivan the terrible!'
President of Azerbaijan...an oil gift with dubious relevance to Astrakhan
We ask at the round table in the Regionology museum whether there was any consultation before the Gazprom embankment work. Of course not. We ask how people perceive these companies. There is a sense we are on a touchy subject. People want to talk about it, but also to get off the topic as quickly as possible. Gazprom support sport, we are told.
We managed to speak to an employee of Gazprom at a mosque. ‘I go to Irkutsk. I wouldn’t work here. The oil here contains a really high concentration of wax and it’s bad for you. Some people have heart-attacks aged 29-30. It’s fucked up.’
So there is a ‘bad-guy’ side to the narrative; but more pertinent for us is the sterilisation, the perhaps deliberate, perhaps careless design of shallow and often irrelevant history at the expense of memory.
