The crowds spill over the concrete footbridge, cascading down the worn staircases onto the plaza in front of the railway station. If the architect of Vitebsk railway station were to see what has become of his grand scheme, he would be appalled. Boris Mezentsev’s plan for Vitebsk train station was one of the last gasps in Stalinist design. It is one of those regal buildings full of polished marble and huge chandeliers. But nowadays passengers walk around Mezentsev’s very Soviet space rather than through it. Alexey Dushkin was another architect of the same era. His job title — Chief Railway Architect — was as grand as his design for the train station at Simferopol in the Crimea.
Then along came Khrushchev. A new broom. A man keen to mark a break with the design excesses of the late Stalinist period. The heavyweights of Stalinist design, men like Mezentsev and Dushkin, were banished to write their memoirs or design apartment blocks in Hanoi. And the crowds that spill off the blue and white trains arriving in Vitebsk opt for the modern elevated concrete walkways rather than the crystal chandelier route to the waiting trolleybuses.
Five hundred roubles for a ride on the trolley. Belarusian, not Russian roubles. Almost nothing. Be it just for a short hop over the river on a trolley or a long haul out to the far suburbs on the smart green bus. The long haul is very long. Vitebsk sprawls way out to the east, ranks of multicoloured apartment blocks gobbling up fields speckled with wooden cottages. In western Europe, planners would make a clean sweep, destroying trees and cottages in their quest for a greenfield paradise of all-too-perfect low rise suburbs: Cherry Lane, Meadow Drive and Orchard Close. Orchards, meadows and cherries there may be none.
Belarus does things differently. High rise marches boldly out towards the distant forests. A grand boulevard, once named after Bukharin but now styled after Pushkin, rolls off into eternity.
Belarusian suburban planners like irony. They leave the wooden cottages amid the modern ranks of housing blocks. Whiffs of nostalgia with their picket fences, a grazing goat here or there, a little orchard overlooked by heaven-seeking modernity. Marshrutkas run the rutted streets, potholes soon to be tamed into the smooth tarmacadam that is the Belarusian norm. This country has some fine highways.
Lydia is very proud of Vitebsk’s suburbs. “Bigger and better than many a Russian city,” she boasts on the bus that trundles to the outer edges of Vitebsk life. “They are already laying out new districts. Eventually Vitebsk will stretch right out east to the Pskov highway.”
The plan is clear. Conquer the Pskov highway and Vitebsk will have made the road its very own. Europe’s highway planners obviously value the Pskov road. The E95. The route from St Petersburg to Odesa. The Baltic to the Black Sea. From the Hermitage to the Potemkin Steps, taking in the forests savaged by Chernobyl’s collapsing skies along the way. All Soviet history condensed into a single strip of tarmac. Vitebsk urgently pushing out, pulsating with energy, pressing east towards the E95. Lydia cheering on the growing city, wanting her home town to make its mark in history.
But Vitebsk already has its place in history as the birthplace of Marc Chagall, the artist who was variously Jewish, Russian and French and is now being reinvented as pure Belarusian. The crowds on the railway station clamber onto the trolleybuses to cross the river, for most of Vitebsk is on the east bank of the Dvina. The station is stranded on the west bank, just a stone’s throw from the old Jewish quarter with its streets of red brick and wooden houses. For decades no-one remembered that Chagall once lived there. The area was neglected, a smudge on the map that made no connection with bold, Soviet Vitebsk pushing out east towards the Pskov highway. The Jewish colony and the railway station were ‘af der kleyner zayt’ (on the small side) of the Dvina. The Russians stuck to the much larger settlement on the east bank: ‘af der greyser zayt’ (on the big side), as the local Jewish folk called the far bank of the river.
Lydia has never heard a word of Yiddish, but back in the days of Chagall’s childhood, Vitebsk was an important Jewish cultural centre. Vitebsk, a fragment of Judea within the vast Russian Empire, and a place where Jewish settlers slipped easily from Yiddish into Russian and back, often even within a single sentence and sometimes throwing in a Hebrew word or two for good measure. Vitebsk was still within the Pale — the area where Jews were permitted to settle — but close enough to Moscow and St Petersburg to keep in touch with the wider world. Traders and artists, wise men and fools, Hasidim and Misnagdim, colourful and crowded Vitebsk had space for them all.
There were devout and scholarly men like Itzhak Menashe — who for a spell taught the young Marc Chagall at the local heder. The courtyards behind the little houses echoed to old Jewish tales. Shivhei ha-Besht (In Praise of Ba’al Shem Tov) was standard fare with its magicians wandering through a mythical landscape populated by the children of Israel. And there were new stories too, with Sholem Aleichem a growing favourite, his cast of mysteriously mobile characters as fanciful as a Chagall painting. Jewish Vitebsk was no degenerate small town shtetl, but a vibrant, exuberant and eclectic community that had one eye on a mythologised Eretz Yisrael and another eye firmly trained on a Russia that was changing very rapidly and offering ever more opportunities to Jewish traders.
In good years, the river ice on the Dvina had melted by soon after Passover, and the Jewish businesses were getting ready for the river trade. Steamers to Riga and beyond. The small side of the town bustled. There was Kolbanovsky’s tobacco factory, not far from where Chagall’s family lived. The artist’s father worked in the herring business.
Lydia has her own gloss on Chagall. “He was the most famous of all Belarusian artists,” she explains on another of those long tram rides across town. Five hundred roubles can cover a great sweep of art history. And the long ride out into the suburbs is a chance to try and unravel the knotty issue of Belarusian identity. “I could speak Belarusian if I wanted,” claims Lydia. “But there’s no need. Everyone in Vitebsk speaks Russian.” The reality is that Belarusian identity is forged on the anvil of history and not distilled through language. Try as you may, it would be well nigh impossible to pick up a copy of the Belarusian language newspaper Naša Niva (Наша Ніва) anywhere in Vitebsk. Bilingualism is evidently tolerated rather than encouraged, and although Belarusian has the status of an official language, it very much plays second fiddle to Russian.
Tumbling off the train and riding the trolleybus over to the other side of the Western Dvina is a Chagallesque introduction to Vitebsk. Ignore the fiercely patriotic monuments, silent soldiers surveying empty squares, and look through history to churches that float on distant hills with a foreground dominated by the mishmash currents of everyday life. Torah-true it is not, but it boasts short skirts and bling-bling of a young Vitebsk generation that knows how to party. Not quite Harlow or Croydon chic, somehow more muted. Like everything in modern Belarus, hard to get your mind round. Lydia gives an upbeat account of the Vitebsk buzz of course. “People come from all over for the Vitebsk summer festival,” says Lydia, referring to the Slavianski Bazaar. “The festival is a symbol of the openness and hospitality of the Belarusian people,” she adds, echoing almost to the word the speech by President Lukashenko when he opened the 2009 festival.
Vitebsk, Vitebsk. Grey and blue cottages, apartment blocks sternly prodding the Belarusian skies, new highways pushing out between fields that are not fields, a community carving out a new history. Yes, a rebuilt synagogue or two would be no bad thing — at least that is what the architects say as they ponder their plans for a redeveloped Jewish quarter. But not a hint of Yiddish in the air, neither ‘af der kleyner zayt’ nor ‘af der greyser zayt’ of the Dvina river. Not now and surely not for years to come. In the days when Marc Chagall lived in the red brick house on Pokrovskaya, the majority of Vitebsk’s population was Jewish. Today the city is a Slavic stronghold, an assertive product of the Russian century, populated by people with little time for fancy chandeliers and marble staircases. Proletarian, egalitarian, trolleybuses and trams that run to time, and not a speck of litter in sight. Precise and orderly. Swiss efficiency colliding with Soviet style in a city that cannot quite find space for Chagall’s remarkable fantasies. Some day, sometime, someone in Vitebsk might climb on a gabled roof and play a little klezmer music to the crowds on the Pushkin bridge below. Chagallesque. Daring. But not today. Today is too soon for Vitebsk — a city where some things are still beyond the Pale.
The location of Vitebsk within Belarus.
