First, you get into the cable cars and ride up to the side of a mountain. The cables in the picture are actually from another set of cable cars that are in place for the convenience of the manganese miners and offer an infinitely more harrowing experience-- though Heidi assures us they've never fallen. I will take that at face value because any evidence to the contrary would induce me to foreswear the most quirky public transportation system in Georgia. That, and the miners' cable cars are free.
At the top of a hill, from which you can see the former majesty of all the proletariat attractions I described in the last Chiatura entry, there stands mud. The mud has kept me from gaining entry to the Pioneer's Palace the previous two times I'd tried, but not yesterday. Yesterday we discovered that a kind soul had placed crude stepping stones so that one could tiptoe onto former Soviet grounds with a minimum of mud engulfing one's shoes.
Oh, time out-- do we all know what the Pioneers are? For those of you in America who haven't had the notion to look it up, the Pioneers were like Soviet boy scouts, except for both genders participated, of course-- equality for the workers! There's a former Pioneer meeting house in many towns, including the one where I live, and they offered the usual stuff... cultural education, clubs, excursions, patriotism, indoctrination, etc (just like Boy Scouts, right?).
Now we come to the purpose of the Pioneer Palace, which was like a giant meeting place for good little pioneers on good little pioneer excursions. You can sort of picture it in its days of glory, a vast marble structure with columns and arches and stairs, overlooking the socialist perfection of Chiatura. You can almost hear the little Russian voices ("Yes, Russian, stop clinging to your former Georgian identity; you're Soviet now!") lifting the tune of L'Internationale and heaving it over the cliffside where it would warm the cockles of party members everywhere, even reaching as far as the all-marble KBG building. A portrait of Lenin crowns the landscape, framed by trees against a background of Chiaturan socialist harmony.
Let's take it forward about twenty years, to yesterday when Stalin cried in his grave as four Americans stomped their way across Pioneer Palace grounds, taking pictures to send to their bourgeois families. No one from Chiatura really visits the palace, for understandable reasons of bad memories most likely, but we still think that even in its current condition, it'd make an excellent tourist attraction, as would the entire town. Soviet Disney! To boot, the aforementioned KGB building was blown up in 1989 by Georgians encouraged (communists prefer "confused") by democracy protests in Tbilisi, who then used the marble rubble to rebuild a monastery the Soviets had torn down.
So as you can see from this picture, the condition of the building is somewhat... unkempt. Even as the three Americans look bravely toward the future-- with rocks in hand to throw at the hostile feral dogs which call the palace home-- the palace behind falls apart, wishing for the past. No more little internationalist hymns singing down from the music rooms, no more excited groups of Soviet children trickling in and out of the doors.
Could we have in fact trickled into the door (it's locked), we most likely would have fallen through the floor. The walls are all sorts of lovely, tacky colors, which have only become tackier as the layers of paint peels away and one can see what lovely, tacky colors were plastered on before. Like history through layers of sandstone or tree rings, except with more lead.
The majestic cliffside view is still as majestic, if you're not bothered by things like rows upon rows of empty apartment buildings and half-finished hotels, but Ilya Ilyich's bald head no longer guards the palace. Its absence is marked by five holes on the monument that held the picture, though without the picture there, it's more apparent that this monument is weird. What shape is that? And what color, for that matter? As in the case of many Chiaturan post-Soviet modifications, we think it would have been cool if they left it the way it was; of course, our country wasn't left helpless in 1991 with an unduly complicated and shoddy infrastructure and an unsustainable economy, so perhaps our dreams of kitsch are somewhat outweighed in importance.
I hereby promise not to devote any more posts to Chiatura until I write one about my site-- which, you may have noticed, I haven't once mentioned by name in this blog. I was under the impression that to do so would be frowned upon by safety & security staff, but all the cool kids are doing it, so stay tuned for that.
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