Speaking with friends before I leave, I realise how strong our associations remain between Russia and those images of empty supermarket shelves and queues for basic foods that were so prominent in the 1980s, or of the acute poverty that made headlines again with the economic crisis in 1998. From a personal angle, the 1980s were also the time when the only bananas my friend from Samara, then a child, remembers tasting were dried; and in a city now renowned for its chocolate factory, he ate chocolate only if it was concocted at home from cocoa powder and a form of milk, by the ingenuity of his mother.

Known as Kuibyshev until 1991, the city was closed to foreigners until that year. The city first became off limits during World War II to protect the Soviet government, which was evacuated there, and also to protect the valuable industrial base of the city, including the sensitive aerospace manufacturing sector, which would later produce the rocket that propelled Yuri Gagarin beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Many public spaces in the city now bear Gagarin’s name, and the association may be apt. I see a city launching itself into its future with, at once, vertiginous speed – pulling free of history’s gravity – and the vertiginous slowness of Benjamin’s Angel of History, blindly flying backwards into progress. I found Samara’s own Angel in the flat, wrought-iron butterfly on the gates of the Dom Kurlinoi, a local history museum, that housed the Swedish consulate from 1941 to 1943.

The local history exhibits are closed the day we visit, standing aside for an exhibition of ‘fairy-tale waxworks’ from St Petersburg. From the posters, we expect an array of traditional characters; I hope to learn something about Russian folk literature. But passing the (not so long) lines of life-size figures, I am surprised to find Hollywood movie stars and heroes – Sylvester Stallone, Leonardo di Caprio, Batman, Catwoman – in an installation nonetheless entirely innocent of any intended postmodern irony. Such an apparent seamlessness of memory and the contemporary is startling to find in any country. In a country where, in living history, the shifts in public and private visions of life have been so seismic, one might expect the fault-lines, and friction between them, to be more starkly visible. But I don’t know where to look – nor what, exactly, I should look for.

In the city centre, a dark bronze statue of the city’s Soviet namesake, the Communist functionary Kuibyshev, still stands aloof outside the monumental Opera and Ballet Theatre, over a square that on this Christmas night is awash with revellers, of which he would not have approved. Some of them are swung slowly around through the musical air, the lightly falling snow, in love-boats the shape of Donald Ducks, each duck attired in a bow tie and black top hat: the archetypal capitalist duck of old cartoons.

Under a huge yolka – the Christmas pine tree, draped in coloured bulbs and other lights that form an open tent – younger men and women in high heels play tug of war, and jump ropes to the rhythm of a tambourine. On a stage, men hold one arm behind their backs and hop on one leg trying to bump each other over in a game called ‘folk walking’. In the city’s historical centre, wooden houses with beautiful ornate carvings over the windows and on the eaves, and remnant traces of paint from prouder times, are slowly sinking and collapsing. With a few exceptions, they are being allowed to do so. One of the notable exceptions is the house of the tea merchant Rytikov in Leninskaya Ulitsa, which Lenin frequented during his years as a student in Samara between 1889 and 1893. During this time, he translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian.

The rapid changes in the economics of scale in the city mean that the wooden houses without important pasts are being replaced by multi-storey buildings, permanently altering the city’s architectural and human scale. Even in 1869, when new wooden buildings were forbidden to be built in the city centre, they were, it seems, already outdated – the kind of houses found in peasant villages. Yet many linger on into the present. Released from Soviet regulations limiting the height of city buildings, the city’s skyline now bristles with cranes. Stylish new apartment and office blocks – many developed by oil companies – compete for higher vertical status. Façades and ornaments in art nouveau style are popular on the most elegant of these. However, as a young local architect observes, almost none of the new apartment buildings provide basement parking for the owners’ cars, which will have to be left in long-term garage spaces often quite far from the apartments. Several new shopping centres house level after level of luxury goods stores, which seem to be anticipating customers to come. For now, they are quite perfect and quite empty. Their prices are European or American; but a local assistant professor, teaching at several of the best regional universities, earns only US$250 a month in roubles, and such a salary is typical.

The cranes are also working toward a spiritual renaissance, or perhaps a new era of spiritual capital. In Soviet times, stadiums were often constructed near or over the sites of demolished churches. Now, in one street we visit, a sunstruck golden dome has mushroomed again beside an ageing stadium. Some days later, walking in the snow, we catch sight of a great cathedral, almost hidden among houses, rising up behind a small, old, blue-painted chapel, with a lit lantern in its doorway. There is no ceiling to it yet, but in one towering wall, a set of great bells hang already in their alcove. Another new church – in a prominent position on the bank of the Volga River, across from a silver statue representing the city’s aerospace triumphs – is rapidly becoming a symbol of the city, a favourite image on postcards, tourist guides and traditional lacquer boxes. Indeed, the Orthodox Church’s renewal in Russia is itself drawing tourists. On the afternoon I fly out – beginning the day-and-a-half-long journey that will take me home to Sydney via Frankfurt and Tokyo – I am joined at the small airport gate by a group of fifteen women seminarians from Ohio. Looking out the window for a sign of our plane, we see a German shepherd being chased joyfully across the tarmac by a dog the size of a terrier; then the chase reverses, but in equally good spirit. I leave Russia with images of change tinged with a hope that is itself tinged with the certainty of change.