EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - Play President of the (Defunct)Communist Party of the USSR for a Day! Part II

EURASIA INSIGHT

PLAY PRESIDENT OF THE (DEFUNCT)COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR FOR A DAY!
PART II

Thomas Goltz 8/17/01

This is part II of a two-part series. Click here for part I.

After a thorough exploration of Sukhumi, it was time for our group to stake out our objective. Getting there wasn’t all that complicated. We were able to find local authorities willing to oblige our desire in exchange for a small contribution to the local exchequer. Abkhazia is cash-strapped, and forty bucks is money.

After having made your arrangements with the non-recognized government, drive North from Sukhumi across the Gumista River, avoiding all pot-holes filled with water lest you inadvertently end your vacation by hitting a mine. After crossing the Gumista, you will discover that the main traffic hazard consists of cows. International sanctions on Abkhazia mean that there is a real lack of gasoline, which translates into very low levels of vehicular traffic. The roads have not been chewed up and left un-repaired as elsewhere in the region, but do not run out of gas because you will never find anyone willing to give you a spare liter.

At the sign designating ’Mysera,’ turn left along the tarmac road that is collapsing on itself. Take it easy, because although one need not really worry about on-coming traffic, if the road is not negotiated slowly there are a number of sudden drops that could take off the oil pan of your vehicle.

After a half hour or so of exquisitely beautiful rain forest, you will enter the security gate, and then turn left and drive another kilometer to the dacha; a right turn will take you to a monstrosity that presumably served as a sanitarium for Gorby’s guards, but is now owned by some Russian ’biznezman’ of dubious connections. Avoid taking pictures, lest you get shot. At the end of the drive-way, you will see a large, apparently three story (it is actually five, from the beach up) structure made of yellow lime block with massive marble balconies on the upper floors. The Gorby Dacha, at last!

But you will more likely say to yourself: ’This is it?’

Patience, because the Gorby Dacha is much larger than it appears from outside, mainly because there are two more floors beneath the surface, including the pool and sauna and secret garage.

When we got out of our vehicle, a man emerged from behind the huge oak doors, and announced that his name was Valeri. He conducted our tour of the last vacation spot constructed for the last head of the Soviet Union -- Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev.

According to Valeri, a chunk of ceiling fell and shattered on the parquet floor the moment Raisa Gorbacheva was buried, but he adds that it would be incorrect to talk about hauntings because neither Raisa Maximova nor Mikhail Sergeivich ever stayed here.

"It was just a curiosity of timing, that made us wonder," says Valeri, "Raisa came here often in 1990 to finish the design according to her tastes, but the Soviet Union collapsed before they even stayed a night."

The tour continues--and it is a journey through the gaudy tastes of the late Soviet elite. A 90-foot, full-kitsch brass chandelier descends from the fifth floor ceiling through the stairwell connecting the floors, but there are no closets, save for one in-wall safe designed to hold Gorby’s nuclear briefcase. The kitchens on each floor are tiny and so basic as to annoy anyone interested in the finer aspects of culinary arts. Neither Gorby nor the late Raisa, nor any of their guests, presumably, took much thought to preparing their own morning coffee. The kitchen cabinets are of the cheapest Formica, the refrigerators small and the dishwashers miniscule. No, the inquiring mind concludes, the Gorbachevs did not intend to spend much time in the kitchen while on vacation, and did not care about the inconveniences suffered by their Soviet servants.

The exact opposite is true of the marble bathrooms. They dwarf the kitchens, and are fitted with the most modern nozzles and sprayers and dryers and sink/shower/monster tubs that I have ever seen. But it was the toilets that caught my attention. The late, great Soviet Union was notorious for the very lack of decent WCs throughout the land. But in the Gorby dacha, each of the six master bedrooms has a marble-floored bathroom so ’full’ as to seem larger than the bedrooms themselves. The sense of superfluous space is so overwhelming that it is one of the few times in a writer’s life that he is tempted to use the word ’agoraphobia,’ not so much in the sense of ’fear of crowds’ as ’fear of the empty space where the crowd should be.’

Ditto with the recreational space in basement, replete with an Olympic-sized pool connected by pipes leading three kilometers out to sea to bring in cleaner water to fill it than available just off the beach. Valeri said the thing has never been filled; nor has the gargantuan sauna ever been used.

There is a cement jetty that I jumped off, but no stairs going back up, and swimming off the rock and pebble beach does not seem like a lot of fun. A narrow gauge train-track guides the visitor from the back of the dacha through a tunnel under a small mountain to a cliff over-looking a ’private’ beach, but what appear to be gun emplacements on either side and a lack of any means of getting down the cliff suggest rather a defensive design, although the tunnel itself would appear to be too shallow for use in surviving a nuclear attack.

"It was Russian workers who built the entire complex," says Valeri. "They would not let Abkhaz artisans work on it, so we can only speculate about certain things."

So, just what did Mikhail intend to do here? The library area on the top floor has enough shelf-space for an encyclopedia collection, maybe, but no easy chair. A grand piano (out of tune, of course) takes up most the floor space there, whereas one would want to put the thing on the ground floor, in a party room, perhaps.

I think I will book myself into Lenin’s Zurich apartment for next year’s nostalgia tour. At least you get to walk around the neighborhood, and the water runs hot.

Editor�s Note: Thomas Goltz is the author of Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventurers in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic (M.E. Sharpe, 1998; paperback 1999).

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