Russia’s Twin Nostalgias

Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?

Long before Stalin’s rule, the Russian elite would relax here, valuing the distance from Moscow both geographically (it is about 1,000 miles away) and culturally (it lies a short distance from what is now Georgia, and across the water from Turkey). Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s widow, Anna, moved to Sochi to escape violence in St. Petersburg surrounding the Bolshevik revolution, buying a piece of land on the outskirts of the city where she built a house and planted a garden, calling her little retreat “Joy.” (Dostoyevskaya lost that home soon after she moved in, when a soldier attacked her as part of the Bolshevik campaign against property owners, saying the house now belonged to the working classes, and forcing her to flee once again. Along with the personal cost to her, she also lost a part of her husband’s archive—handwritten copies of The Brothers Karamazov are still missing as a result.)

After coming to power, Stalin in 1926 ordered his commissars to plant botanical gardens here. Hoping to curry favor with the leader, each one—among them Kliment Voroshilov, Genrikh Yagoda, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze—also built and ornately decorated hotels in their name. These structures included enormous neoclassical columns, pompous arches, grandiose fountains, and statues of naked Greek gods next to busts of Soviet heroes. In less than a decade, a dozen such palaces emerged, each one next to the other, along Sochi’s hills, offering healing mineral water, spas, and baths.

Upon Stalin’s death (and Nikita Khrushchev’s denouncement of the dictator’s cult and political repression), Sochi’s main avenue—Stalin Prospect, a 6-mile highway stretching along the Black Sea shore—was renamed Kurortny Prospekt, or “Resort Prospect.”

After that, the city cultivated a reputation as a vacation destination for workers across the U.S.S.R.—thanks to state-provided packages that included stays at health resorts and various healing programs. Miners, engineers, or factory workers as far away as the northern reaches of Siberia knew that after a year of hard work, they would be able to take a month-long break here. Millions living in grim industrial cities dreamed of warm Sochi nights, where the tropical air added to the sense of excitement. Here, residents of closed and secretive towns could even see foreign tourists visiting from Eastern Europe, or African countries allied with Moscow, all together on open dance floors. For locals, Sochi was a beloved place, its quiet and romantic embankment populated by old people playing chess, the city’s pace relaxing and peaceful.

My own family has a strong link to Sochi. During World War II, Stalin turned the city’s sanatoriums into hospitals, its dozens of hotels treating more than 350,000 wounded soldiers in all. One of those resorts was Iskra, built in the 1930s and named after a newspaper co-founded by Vladimir Lenin, which was reserved for officers of the NKVD, a predecessor to the KGB. Among those evacuated there was my grandfather Anatoly, who was rushed to the facility from the front in Crimea. Surgeons amputated his leg, first above the knee and then all of it, as the gangrene kept creeping up. His future wife, Yelena, my grandmother, worked as a nurse at the hospital where he was treated. As he recovered, they spent long periods reading in a gazebo by a little fountain, in what had been Iskra’s gardens, breathing in the sea air, enriched with the thick aroma of thousands of species of plants around them. After the war, Iskra was open for others to visit as well. My mother brought the love of her life, my father, to Sochi, where the same shady gazebo in Iskra’s quiet botanical garden inspired his poetry. I, too, remember frequent visits as a child.