Something named ‘Museum of Russian Culture’ should not require the archaeologising of a city. Like a hundred dollar bill on a dry sidewalk, it should be palpable, available – and much sought-after. The disappointment with the couched-ness of this museum’s soul lay in my flirtations with Russia. Some years ago: through War and Peace, Tchaikovsky, Crime and Punishment and histories of the nation. In particular, for all my philistine and rash indictments of the horrors of Stalinism and the iron claws upon the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the adolescent excitement for the colour red, the yellow stars, and socialist realism is alive. I stand hence infatuated by the Bolsheviks. To come around this stance of a sober disavowal of the Soviet Union and simultaneous infatuation with the Socialist worldsphere, I recently even manufactured the Drake-meme approving the Union’s memorabilia sprinkled in India but shunning the lead-dark weight of the USSR.

Indeed the Museum called me – from its quiet street around only a mile from the Presidio Park of San Francisco, and from its home, the Russian Cultural Centre. From days ahead I sat on the sorrows of the glum Berkeleyan skies with the fizzy excitement for this visit.

At the said silent street, an ornate façade that smells like enlightened despotism. A doorbell. Carpetted floors. Hallway filled with portraits of Russians – Californian and present-day that is, – celebrating their faraway home: with dances and cakes. Film posters. A large large elevator. Soon enough – I only wished sooner during my stay near San Francisco – the museum was here. On the third floor that marks itself apart with photographs of early 20th century Russian generals, scientists, and bureaucrats. Finally, Russians themselves on their seats. Listening to Russian! But also in Russian?

I looked around myself. Far from my imagination – better to say desire – , there was not a dash of red. Forget photographs of Lenin and translations of Marx, illustrations abounded around me of Napoleon, of trails of soldiers fighting France in 1812 (which is a particularly ruminated year and one cherished with smacking lips and gulping throats in Russia for the Battle of Borodino – a Battle that was no side’s tactical victory but proved fatal to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and War in Europe at large) and song books on the defeat delivered to France in the Napoleonic Wars. A photograph of the Cathedral of Vasili here. A lithograph print from Germany of a view of the Kremlin from the Moscow River there, the Annunciation Cathedral and all. A sketch of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Better still, paper labels marked a few of these artefacts – sometimes in English but always definitely in Russian. But I did not take long to learn that the museum spoke more than Russian, it spoke nostalgia. A nostalgia that skipped decades and gave a longing, crispy, sepia-tinted, and often-embroidered kiss to the monarchical (they might say classical?) past. A kiss to the vanquished Romanovs.

Unsettled by this untimely romance for kings (and some queens), I walked around the gallery plastered by endless spoken Russian. Owed maybe partially to Telugu poet Mahakavi Sri Sri’s “Garjincu Raṣiyā”, a good part to the frenzy with which Gowtham Ghose’s Maa Bhoomi speaks of the Revolution, and surely to the fanfare that Dev Anand, the album of Mughal-e-Azam, and Awara enjoyed in the Union, Russian-speakers appealed to me always with a familial tone. As if walking through ‘my’ people, I kept gazing. At a shelf that was expressly in memoriam to the last Tsar, I shuddered. Tapestries that remembered the 1896 ascension of Nicholas stood out – along with photographs (that pretend to be neutral and apolitical – one need not even read Sontag to realise the falsity of such a belief) that lament the brutal and bloody killing of the Romanov family in July 1918. A volume of a 1901 French imperial magazine issued on the occasion of a grand party celebrating a then-eight-year-old alliance between the two nations (indeed Napoleon had long long paused, and Bismarck was the new man in town to put check to!) was framed. From the same year, a coin featuring once again, Nicholas II commemorating Russia’s first cast-iron, smelted two hundred years before that – with Peter the Great at the helm (the grandfather faces the young monarch in this coin, not knowing of course that he shall be the last one).

The wound of having to witness the monarchy here is gently bandaged in this hall with reminders of the ‘enlightened’ design of Russian tyranny. A recent edition of Pushkin on a table. Behind a glass there was a thick hardbound book with a green cover and presumably rusty paper – perhaps to me, the most exciting find this gallery, the registry of the 1912 (the fourth) Duma, the ‘parliament’ of Russia (never mind that more than half the convention came this time from Nobility and Tsar Nicholas pushed that the Duma be reduced to be a mere consultative body). Elsewhere a large, beautifully embroidered commemorative volume for the 50th anniversary of the abolition of Serfdom in Russia under Tsar Alexander II (never mind that a few years before the abolition in 1861, more than one-third of Russian population slaved as landless serfs who were to labour under landlords, nearly 20% of whom “owned” more than 100 serfs!). Nothing tastes sweeter to oneself than self-congratulations one ‘conquering’ one’s own vices.

As I anthropologised around, a responsible club-member of this Society hastened to me and kindly requested me to enjoy food and champagne. Including blocks of walnut cake that she had baked and soviet (finally!) chocolates. I picked the cake and the chocolates and decided to be what she specifically asked me to be – not shy. From skirting around the edges to look at the artefacts, I began not diving but softly wading into the Russians.

I began conversing with a box-faced man with a Central Asian rich-blue tubeteika reminiscent of the domes of Khiva. Denis introduced himself as a Khazak, a laser physicist, and an engineer living to the south of San Francisco. He was today here on one of his yearly drives up to the Russian Centre. He corrects himself – he is Russian, but from Kazakhstan. I ask: are there many of you here? Does he have many Kazakh friends in America? He keeps to himself, he says. I trust you, I thought. Without much pretense I ask – the absence of Soviet artefacts is interesting, right? He goes for a save, pointing to a model of a helicopter behind me. There are a few photographs of Sikorsky, the inventor of the helicopter (whatever ‘invention’ even means). And he was right. Igor, along with his wife, stayed perched upon a grey table, and stared sternly with his tight moustache firmly holding his stiff lips. Following his invention of a military aircraft, the VS-300 in 1939, America set out on the first mass manufacture of helicopters in 1942 apparently.

Some others whose company I kept that afternoon placed themselves in the curatorial universe of this museum. The baker of the cake rushed me to a display of photographs from a college that her father went to and warned – he is not in this collection, but this is my connection to this museum. Another red shirted old gentleman, only too alike to Colonel Sanders, points to a frilled frock and tells me – my wife used to own a frock like this. As I look deeply into the “womanly” artefacts, he asks me: Do you read Russian? “No” I say. “You?” “My wife is Russian.” “And you?” “Peter.” “The Great?” I joke. He giggles and says: I once sat on his chair and proceeds to recollect that a touch of royalty stuck to him on Tsar Peter’s chair in Moscow, from the hall that he abandoned to found his new capital St Petersburg in the West. Granted that artefacts of immigrants here all dated to before the revolution, I asked if his wife was from a noble family. She arrived in the US in 1917 but he tells me that she was a “common person”.

These Russians (almost) were delightful! – I thought. I then met Mercedes – of course she proposed the car company as a mnemonic device. When I inquired about her family’s arrival, she reveals that they had had many stops: after the war, in 1945 first in China (my mind’s eye swiftly turned around to behind my head to wink at the pendant featuring Xu Jincheng, a Qing noble who had been an envoy to Russia), then in Philippines, finally to Los Angeles. She smiles at the name of LA. “There were a lot of Russians there” – dropping a few more “lots” for emphasis afterwards. “Many Russians were in Hollywood too! My father was a Cossack” (Ah yes, a sociological facet for a sociology junkie inside me – the Cossacks were a semi-nomadic largely militarised loosely and widely distributed mostly-Slavic ethnicity that the Russian empire relied on for its defence and maintenance) “And cossacks played Indians in Westerns.” (The overlaps between the Cossack economy and the life of the American Indian who had to be tamed shone prominently to me) Just in case I had not caught the picture, she clarifies “the enemies of Americans were to be played by Russians.” I slide in: “I am the other kind of Indian” and ask “do you speak Russian?” Regretfully she shares that she speaks five languages but not Russian and proudly proclaims that her father used to speak nine. When I remark that the world was monolingual, she beamed: “It still is! It’s just America that thinks it isn’t. And look now they are even deporting people.” We grimace together.

It turned out that my Khiva-reminding Kazakh-Russian friend had very sweetly ushered a proud volunteer of this Centre to speak to me about the selective curation of this museum. Viktor introduces himself. Thick Russian accent – first generation immigrant – electronics engineer. Somewhat dismissively initially, he said: “It is obvious, isn’t it? This museum was made with the artefacts brought by immigrants. And so many escaped around 1917. The collections mostly belong to before that. Remember, we were with great hopes for the Revolution. We cheered for it – but the first thing they did was make Russia internationalist. They clamped down on Russian culture. We could not be Russian at all. A quest began to find a place to preserve Russian culture. First, a House was located in Prague. The museum there invited the USSR to handle it – but they ruined it there as well, so we wanted to take Russia as far away as we can from Russia so here we are in San Francisco.” He joyously speaks merry of the collection around him. He turns to the gowns and says with a “shamelessness” that is, but an ornament to all mankind, I ridiculed when the women wanted to bring in their attires and curate them, but today they are the most beloved artefacts in this museum! Through his disparagements of the Soviet Union, there was also nostalgia. Rather, a severe dislike for the current republic. With rancidity, he shared that following Yeltsin’s shock therapy, Russian industry – upon which he had sat during the Communist years – has been virally attacked, and eaten up. Unequivocally, he said, there was dignity in the past era. In 1997 – he had his own personal tragedy in this new world of kleptomania. When he had gone away, his house been broken into, his most valuable objects destroyed or stolen, particularly his computer. And only minutes later, his friend from America – as if a pronouncement from another world – called him over. And he sought his new home here, he said.

This new home that was not even like his old home, but one that was even older. One where eagles flew on flags, generals wore not caps but helmets and even crowns, and kings marked the badges of honour given off to soldiers. For all the apparent oblivion that emigres seek with the “revolutionary” past, I still wish a photo of Khruschev would have done good, and a poster of Lenin. Why when there could be a French map of Russian troops in Morocco from World War II and memorial paintings of churches from the 50s could there also not be, as I started this essay, a dash of red?