MOSCOW — When Russian businessman Yevgeny Ostrovsky decided to name his kebab joint Anti-Soviet Shashlik, he thought of it as black humor.
It was a little tongue-in-cheek, a little retro, a little nod to the old-timers who still remembered when the meat grill, across the street from the famed Sovietsky hotel, was known by just that nickname.
But it was also, in that ambiguous, extrajudicial way so common in today's Russia, a little bit illegal.
Three applications for an "anti-Soviet" sign were rejected by the city without explanation. And when Ostrovsky went ahead and hoisted one without a permit, a local politician warned him that he was insulting the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is locally known.
Then came the coup de grace: a crane and work crew, accompanied by police escorts. With a groan and a clatter, the government of Moscow erased all evidence of lingering dissidence against the bygone Soviet Union.
Ostrovsky hadn't banked on the burgeoning admiration and nostalgia for all things Soviet -- a sentimentality tangled up with pride that has come about as the government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seeks to restore Russian patriotism and reawaken imperial self-regard.
"The authorities are just taking advantage of Soviet symbols and values to secure their own personal interests," Ostrovsky griped.
But the visceral attachment to the icons is also the consequence of a country that never quite shook off the shadow of the Soviet system. The world may regard Russia as a place utterly distinct from the Soviet Union, but here in Russia, where government buildings are still festooned with hammers and sickles, there is an abiding sense of continuum.
"The same doctors, teachers, builders and steelworkers continue to live and work in the same country, and everything in our midst was built by the hands of people in the Soviet Union," said Russian author Mikhail Veller. "The state changes, but the country remains the same."
The kebab house quarrel was one small battleground in a swelling war over identity. The unresolved question of how modern-day Russia ought to relate to its Soviet past continues to rattle through society, one culture clash at a time.
On Friday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took to his blog to decry the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens killed "as a result of terror and false accusations" -- and to lament the revisionism that seems to blanket contemporary Russia's remembrance of its past.
