From Russia with Love | Ulan-Ude: Big Brother is Watching You

From Russia with Love | Ulan-Ude: Big Brother is Watching You

“Here looking at you kid,” said Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in what was considered an all-time famous quote in the Hollywood classic “Casablanca.”

Ulan-Ude was no romantic Casablanca where Bogart’s character had a toast with his flame Bergman before letting her run off with her husband. Instead, it was a gray, noisy, crowded, ugly city in Siberia, and yet I felt the same effect seeing Lenin’s penchant eyes looking over the city, looking at me.

Why of all cities with much more cultural and political significance, Ulan-Ude, the capital of an Asian-ethnic Republic, made the cut to receive the honorable gift, the world’s largest Lenin head? Maybe this was the government’s way to revenge against local Buryats who opposed Soviet’s agriculture collectivization. No worry, the cheeky Buryats retorted that Lenin was one of their own because he had Asian eyes. I agreed because the longer I stared at his giant head, the more I saw my grandfather.

Travelers who straddled the Trans-Siberian route from Russia to Mongolia most likely stopped in Ulan-Ude to break their long train journey. They usually stayed a day or two since there was nothing to do here except to closely examine Lenin’s head, arrange transport to Lake Baikal or to Ulaanbaatar and visit the Datsan, a Buddhist Monastery in Ivolginsky, the most important center for Buddhism in Russia, famous for the preserved body of Khambo Lama which still sat upright in lotus position after his death in 1927.

I stayed in Ulan-Ude longer in order to see the Old Believers, a group of religious Russian dissenters who rejected the reforms enforced in the 17th century by Nikon, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Photos of Ulan-Ude

Asian Russians, the Buryats

Main square

The Datsan