Alumni Profiles

Russian Riddle Travel abroad has broadened Andrew McKernan's perspective By Virginia Stuart '75, '80G

It was on his first semester abroad that Andrew McKernan '09 started seeing beyond the American stereotypes: Russians aren't all spies or femmes fatales, he reports, and they're not even particularly stern. "Russians don't smile as much we do in public—why would you smile?" he says, with a smile. But they become quite animated when meeting friends on the street, and their hospitality is legendary. Witness the eight-egg omelets McKernan's host mother in St. Petersburg used to make for him. ("I exaggerate," he admits, "but they had at least five or six eggs.") Then again, he adds, maybe she was simply cooking for the Russian stereotype of the American appetite.

Churchill's famous observation still rings true for McKernan: Russia is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." It was on his second trip—a summer research project in Moscow funded through the UNH International Research Opportunity Program—that he began to delve into some of the enigmas of Russian architecture. A dual major in Russian and linguistics, McKernan has taken a particular interest in the ways in which structures affect the urban environment and the people in it.

Just mention Moscow—or any place in the former Soviet bloc—and a gray filter tends to snap into place over the American mind's eye. In addition, the phrase "Stalinist architecture" can conjure up brutally modern, dreary apartment blocks. McKernan knows better. Moscow is a vibrant city, and Stalin was the one who lit up the Moscow skyline with the grand, tiered "wedding-cake skyscrapers" known as the Seven Sisters.

Before the Russian Revolution in 1917, notes McKernan, Moscow pedestrians tended to orient themselves in relation to the city's ancient churches, many topped with brightly colored onion domes, instead of compass directions. After the revolution, an increasing number of five-story buildings began to obscure the churches, and ultimately the Communist party sought to reorient the population, in more ways than one. Some churches were destroyed and others were "repurposed." One served as a prison camp, while another became a museum of atheism, in a classic Soviet attempt to change reality with rhetorical flourishes—including slogans in huge letters—that strikes McKernan as humorous and almost poetic.

When Stalin came to power in the 1930s, he razed the landmark Cathedral of Christ the Savior and, exhibiting what McKernan describes as "gigantomania," unveiled plans for its replacement: the Palace of the Soviets. This enormous structure, topped with a statue of Lenin roughly three times the size of the Statue of Liberty, was designed to house the largest congress in the world. World War II, soggy land, and a change in ideological strategy all prevented the project from going forward. The foundation, instead, was, yes, repurposed—as the world's largest outdoor swimming pool.

Stalin wanted to reorient the city—both its avenues and its citizens—toward the "radiant future" he envisioned for the Soviet system, as symbolized by the proposed palace, which was never built. (The whipsaw of Russian culture came back the other way at the end of the 1990s, when a replica of the original cathedral was built.) Instead, Stalin turned his efforts, and an inordinate amount of resources, to building the Seven Sisters, which he called "lighthouses of the future." Like the monumental architecture in Washington, D.C., the Stalinist skyscrapers nodded to the classical period of Roman and Greek architecture, but for entirely different symbolic purposes. American's Federalist monuments hark back to Roman times to demonstrate an evolution that has led to democracy, says McKernan, while the Russian buildings are saying, "We have grandeur." They were designed to impress the West while offering Soviet citizens hope for a future that would never exist. "Lighthouses to hopelessness is more like it," says McKernan ruefully.

An interesting development in Russia today is a revival of Stalinist styles, as evidenced by a new apartment building inspired by the Seven Sisters (in stark contrast to the depressing apartment blocks of the Khrushchev era). McKernan interviewed a number of young architects in Moscow last summer. "They don't think Stalin was good," he explains. "They don't think sending people to Gulag was good." Instead, they focus on the elements of grandeur and hope in the Stalinist style. McKernan plans to use his Fulbright to dig deeper into the connections between the Soviet creed and the imposing structures he calls "temples to the Soviet regime."

As an undergrad, McKernan received scholarship and grant support from UNH Foundation board president Frank Noonan '64 and his wife, Patricia, as well as Margaret Clarke Norman '68 and the Norman Gagnon Fund. Now thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, he is back in Russia once again, looking to dig deeper into the connections between the Soviet creed and the "temples to the Soviet regime."

After his Fulbright year, McKernan will enter a doctoral program in history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign next fall in preparation for a career in college teaching. But he knows that whenever he's back here, all it takes is a taste of dill or the odor of a car with a bad transmission to transport him back there. He may recall a wonderful meal—or the lingering sense of paranoia that dogs him on the street. "I've never actually been accosted by a police officer, never been mugged or pinpricked by gypsy woman, despite all the stories I've heard," he says. "But I'm always nervous and I shouldn't be." He doesn't expect ever to fully grasp the Russian culture—or solve the riddle wrapped within it—and that's what keeps drawing him back.