Is Arkhangelsk the Real Capital of Russia?

If you poll a thousand Russians and ask them about the cities of Russia, you will see certain patterns emerge. Moscow, so the thinking goes, is the financial center of Russia. It is a city built on commerce and energy, where people move quickly and do things. Petersburg is the cultural center, suffused with arts and high-thinking. People are somewhat kinder than in Moscow, but this is borne in the depressive sensibilities accompanying that of an artist. Vladivostok is way over there on the other side of the planet and has something to do with ships.

So what about Arkhangelsk? Is there any metric by which it could be said to embody the true spirit of the Russian soul? Frankly, I have no idea. I have only been here three months and still struggle to buy food. But having just spent a week in Arkhangelsk, I feel comfortable saying that it is a place that exists.

Set against the frozen curve of the Northern Dvina River, the architecture is such that it feels quite cozy by default. Old wooden Soviet barracks lean this way and that and give the street wanderer a feeling of rustic vertigo. These two-stories have murderous icicles which impart a sense of impending disaster at all times. Scattered throughout are majestic Stalinist classical facades. The city center has a rather impressive statue of Lenin, looking off into the distance as he is wont to do. Along the frozen promenade, gentrified merchant-monk stalls, forts, museums, and skiers lend the city a kind of walled-garden atmosphere.

Peoplewise, the sidewalks are covered in 2 cm of ice, but this does not stop joggers. In fact, it seems to embolden them. The general level of fashion is such that one seldom feels, as one might here in our dear Petrograd, like a misshapen schlub. There is a man who rides around on a bicycle with a pair of angel wings and an assortment of long fiberglass poles. I asked whether these poles were for fishing. I was told they were not. What purpose they served, then, is anyone’s guess. This kind of mystery is at the core of the Arkhangelsk experience.

What Arkhangelsk is missing entirely is shawarma shops. I spent one evening wandering around in expanding, radiating circles, assuming that a shawarma was e’er around the corner, but it never came, and I wound up buying half-price late-night potatoes from the supermarket deli. But can it be said that Arkhangelsk’s lack of shawarma shops is a critical flaw in the city’s makeup? Does it thereby suggest that the city fundamentally lacks?

No. A thousand times no. In my short stay there, I found the city to be altogether to my liking. Cities of ~300,000 people tend to exhibit the Goldilocks principle of being just right, and Arkhangelsk is the exemplar of the principle, making it a kind of recursive, fractal, just-right-ness that serves to magnify the city into a kind of Platonic ideal.