March 20, 2008...1:48 pm
A Moscow Diary
(So it took a while, thanks to deadlines and various celebrations and illnesses in the family, but here is some more on our trip to Russia…beginning with Moscow, with St Petersburg to follow…)
First impressions and an old French general 
(above: A view from the entrance to the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds to the Hotel Kosmos)
A few minutes out from Domodedovo Airport and our plane finally emerges through the low clouds to give us our first glimpse of Russia. A light drizzle is falling, spotting the small window on the Airbus, and below us a forest of bare birch trees spreads out towards the horizon. Here and there the forest is broken up by frost-covered fields and smallholdings, the smoke rising out from the chimneys of wooden farmhouses. Not far from the runway we pass over the rooftops of a small town, populated with boxy six-storey housing blocks similar to those we left behind in the eastern suburbs of Berlin. Both Katrin and I are excited. We’ve talked about Russia for a long time, and now we are finally about to arrive.
At immigration we wait patiently whilst the female officers, immaculately made-up but stony-faced like immigration officers the world over, make sure that our papers are in order. Beyond customs and into the arrivals hall we are plunged into a crowd of taxi drivers hustling for business, but someone is waiting for us, and she takes us through the crowds and beyond the metal detectors, out into the light rain.
Traffic has jammed all routes through the centre of the city, so we circle this great metropolis on the ten-lane ring motorway, awash with slush and grit, waiting for the best place to plunge in. We pass by car showrooms and garden centres, an IKEA and a huge water heating plant powered by the gas that is helping fuel Russia’s economic boom. After about thirty kilometres we reach our turn-off, and a sign greets us as we swing down the off-ramp. Welcome to Moscow. Slower now, we cruise through the housing blocks of the northern suburbs, the television tower looming ever closer through the mist until we are almost upon it, and our hotel appears on the left. It is an enormous construction, a twenty-five storey horseshoe, and the slightly surprising vision of Charles de Gaulle, imperious in bronze, standing guard in front of the main entrance.
Memories of a lost empire
(above: Lenin and the House of the Russian People)
The Hotel Kosmos was built by the French, which explains the statue of their former President, and was erected to house the visitors that descended on Moscow – those who were not boycotting at least – for the 1980 Summer Olympics. With 1700 rooms it is a monster, the lobby alone occupying the first two floors. If you have the money you can make use of numerous bars and restaurants, hair salons, souvenir stores and blinking musical gaming machines, whilst all the while flashing signs tempt the weak-willed to the roulette tables of the casino or the scantily-clad dancers of the basement nightclub. At all times of day and night the lobby is thronged with people; drivers waiting for pick-ups, Chinese tour groups, American businessmen, stern security guards, and the odd prostitute looking for business.
Our room looks out over the French General’s head across the eight-lane Prospekt Mira to the grandiose pavilions of the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds. We head out to explore, passing under the street through a damp, crowded underpass, filled with tiny kiosks where customers bend to waist height to order drinks, pastries, a DVD or a patch-up job on their trousers through tiny windows. Out the other side and we are soon passing through a triumphal arch and into the exhibition grounds. Built in 1939, these pavilions and gardens were designed to showcase the economic achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the constituent parts of empire had their own building, from Armenia to Uzbekistan, but it is the neo-classical columns and soaring star-topped spire of the House of the Russian People that takes centre stage. It may be bombastic and dramatic, with a statue of Lenin striking a typically iconic pose out front, but inside the heavy doors the effect is somewhat underwhelming, as we find our selves in a labyrinth of yet more mini-kiosks, this time devoted to second hand cameras, universal remote controls, and Playstation games.
We are not here for shopping, so we stick to exploring the grounds from the outside, past the pavilions designed to reflect the republics or the activity they were supposed to represent, pine trees lining the route down towards the pair of Aeroflot planes and a space rocket that is all that is left of the technological collection, most of which was sold off following privatisation in the early 1990s. Inside what was once the technology hanger stalls are selling more earthly products, such as seeds and fertiliser, rakes and lawnmowers, and other gardening supplies. Despite the limited attractions of the low-level economic activity that now makes up much of the All-Russia Exhibition Grounds, it remains a fascinating place, and as with so much in this city, it is built on a grand scale. Over the next few days, as we wander along the wide open boulevards of Moscow, or plunge into the depths of the Metro alongside the nine million other daily passengers, we will be continually reminded that this city – often grand but sometimes garish, occasionally beautiful but ugly in parts – reflects the image a procession of leaders, regimes and systems wanted to express. Moscow is a city that has been reinvented and rebuilt a number of times but always with the same idea in mind. This city has been built to impress
The Mother City and a view from above
(above: The view from Sparrow Hills)
Talking to Muscovites you get a sense of pride in their city similar to that of inhabitants of those other iconic metropolises, London and New York. For our guide, Galina, nowhere on earth comes close to the Mother City, and especially not that upstart on the Baltic coast: “St Petersburg is nice enough,” she says, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “but they have no style of their own. All they can do is copy the Europeans. But in Moscow…” and she trails off, as if no adjectives can do justice to the glory that is her hometown.
The best place to appreciate the scale of Europe’s largest city is from the windswept plateau at the top of Sparrow Hills, where you can gaze across the city in the shadow of the largest of Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers, the 240 metre-high Lomonosov Moscow State University. With 5,000 rooms occupying 36 stories, and an estimated 33 kilometres of corridors, the Lomonosov was the tallest building in the world outside of New York when it was completed in the early 1950s. It remained Europe’s largest until as recently as 1988, but it continues to be dwarfed by new pretenders, not least in its own city where a number of new mega-scrapers have risen in recent years, the most ambitious of which is the 600m Russia Tower which is due to open in 2012.
Development in Moscow, whether it is new skyscrapers to house business, apartment blocks to provide refuge for oligarchs, or huge shopping malls filled with designer boutiques for the beneficiaries of the recent economic explosion, the aim seems to be to think big. This has always been the case, as is apparent as you take in the view from Sparrow Hills. New developments cannot completely dominate the six gothic skyscrapers of the Stalin era, the sister buildings of the Lomonosov, and in turn they did not completely overshadow the golden domes of the Orthodox churches or the Baroque-spires of the Novodevichy Monestary. Each era might build larger and higher than the last, typical of the architectural willy-waving that is common in self-conscious regimes the world over, but the message these buildings send out is the same.
Point Zero – the centre of a world
(above: Red Square and the GUM department store)
However much all these constructions hope to reflect the power and wealth of their time, the heart of Moscow and the seat of the power remains the same as it ever was. Close by the entrance to the undulating cobblestoned expanse of Red Square is point zero, the marker from which all distances in relation to Moscow are measured. Here locals stand and toss a kopek or two over their shoulder for look, causing a scramble amongst the elderly beggars, whilst look-alikes of Lenin and Peter the Great share a cigarette and a chat between posing for tourist holiday snaps. As we walk through the archway and onto the square itself, a parade of images comes to mind, from Boney M music videos to military parades, Khrushchev banging his shoe belligerently on the table at the UN and Gorbachev booed, Stalin’s giant portraits in the Tretyakov Gallery, and the colourful onion domes that seem to provide the front cover for every guidebook and novel based in this city.
No matter how many times you have seen it elsewhere however, nothing can prepare you for the beauty of Red Square. Those domes of St Basil’s Cathedral are suitably exotic, reminding you that although Moscow may be Europe’s largest city there is much about Russia that sets itself up as a place apart. The heavy red walls of the Kremlin run down one length of the square, combining with the squat Lenin Mausoleum that stands in front of it to provide a suitable atmosphere of reverence and authority to go alongside the religion. And from Orthodoxy to Communism to Capitalism, as across the square from the Kremlin the fairy lights of the GUM department store add the final piece of the jigsaw, where once queues formed for the most basic of household goods, now the covered walkways are flanked by the boutiques of the world’s designer labels, all protected from the Russian winter by a soaring glass roof.
We return many times to Red Square, at different moments of the day, and there is something about this, one of the world’s greatest public spaces, that keeps drawing us back. It does not matter that Lenin is away to be cleaned and bathed, denying us the view of shuffling queues there to pay their respects, or that someone has taken the aesthetic-disaster of a decision to erect an ice rink in the heart of the square, nothing can completely erode the dramatic majesty of the place that proves that it is possible to visit the world’s most photographed sights and have them exceed all expectations.
Lenin, Luis Vuitton, and the man in the Kremlin
(above: Inside the GUM, home to Gucci, Prada and Luis Vuitton)
Lenin on one side, Luis Vuitton on the other…a contrast that is often repeated as we tour the city that has become a celebration of 21st Century consumerism, whilst still littered with memories and memorials to a Communist past. It’s a kind of Ritz-Carlton-Marxism, where Karl and Friedrich statues stand proudly in place as they have done so for decades, on streets occupied by branches of Toni&Guy hairdressers, Nike superstores, and advertisements for the smash hit musical Mama Mia – now in Russian! The souvenir shops are filled with all kinds of Communist-era nostalgia, but the icons of the previous religion are no longer sacred, as evidenced by the t-shirts featuring Lenin with bunny ears, the leader of the October Revolution now appropriated for Playboy.
Regardless of one’s political persuasion, there is no question that the USSR was one of the dominant forces in international affairs during the majority of the 20th Century, which gives you the feeling that the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent upheavals and crises of the Yeltsin Presidency during the 1990s must have come as something as a shock to a proud nation. The fact that Vladimir Putin, in his eight years as President, has restored some stability helps explain why – despite alleged electoral abuses, the complete destruction of a free press, and the brutal and cynical prosecution of the war in Chechnya – he remains a fairly popular figure for many in the country.
Later, in St Petersburg (Putin’s hometown) we spoke to a woman named Natalya. It was two days before the election, and we asked her whether or not the outgoing President was genuinely popular amongst ordinary Russians, and if so, why. Her answer was a simple one. “He gave us our pride back,” she said. “He made Russia proud again. And strong. To be strong you need a strong leader, and only a strong leader can rule Russia properly.” Yeltsin had been a “catastrophe”, she continued, but as a committed Tsarist she had little sympathy for the “demons” that had come before. The only Communist she had any slight respect for was Stalin. “Another strong man,” she said, emphasising the point she had just made.
The New Russia – Running on gas and a widening gap
(above: Putin and Medvedev on a Moscow election poster)
There does seem to be broad agreement that Putin has brought some level of stability to Russia during his Presidency, getting inflation under control and overseeing a creation of wealth through an economic boom fueled by Russia’s ample natural resources, in particular oil and gas, resulting in an overall rise in wages, consumption and living standard. But the fact remains that although Moscow in particular is booming in macroeconomic terms, the reality is one of an ever increasing wealth gap that is obvious as you wander the streets of a city that has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else on the planet, and yet pensioners survive on less than a hundred euros a month.
According to many sources the health, pension and education systems remain in a state of crisis and near collapse, and whilst the unemployment rate in the country is around 6%, comparable to the UK and Canada, the Moscow Institute of Social and Economic Studies of Population report that 30% of salaries in the country are less than the “minimum required to live”. The Russian Orthodox Church, otherwise a friend of Putin, has also expressed concern about the growing wealth gap, making the point that no real middle class is developing, and that 20% of the population, mainly in rural areas, are living below the poverty line.
Beyond the economic inequalities, it is clear that elsewhere in society the stability of the Putin era has come at a price. Under his watch, Russia has become a country where critical journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya are murdered in their apartment buildings, and other in the media have been locked up or intimidated. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International report widespread abuses, including the complete erosion of press freedom, a wholesale clampdown on rights to expression and assembly, not to many any number of “Extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and abductions, torture including in unofficial detention centres, and arbitrary detentions continued in the North Caucasus region, in particular in Chechnya.”
On the day we left the country Medvedev, Putin’s hand-picked successor, won the election, and I found a copy of the Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper, in our hotel reception. On the front page was a story of opposition supporters being beaten and arrested by police. Their crime? The unauthorised carrying of a banner that protested the “New Iron Curtain” fifty yards down a street. This was no mass demonstration, just two men and a hand-painted placard. The police made no statement, and gave no reasons for the arrests, whilst the journalists bemoaned another example of the creeping authoritarianism of the new Russia.
Guest workers and a night train from Leningrad Station
(above: A guard at the Kremlin)
One day we take a trip to the picturesque monastery of Sergei Posad. As we pass underneath the Moscow ring road, we come across a gathering of men dressed in black, waiting on the snow-lined hard shoulder of the road. We ask Galina who they are, and she explains that they are “guest workers”, who do not have permits to live in Moscow itself, but are waiting on the edge of the city for casual work to come their way, perhaps on a building site, or in some rich Russian’s apartment painting the walls or plumbing in a washing machine. Formerly, she tells us, these “guest workers” came from the Ukraine, or Belarus. Now they are more likely from one of the central Asian republics, such as Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. This moves her to talk about the inadequacies of state pensions, and the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, and she does so without comment, as if it is inevitable, in the same way she describes Dmitry Medvedev as “our new President” days before the election has even taken place.
We leave Moscow from the Leningrad Station on a journey through the night to St Petersburg, and as the high rise suburbs of Moscow give way to the darkness of the countryside, Katrin and I sit in the restaurant car and sip on Baltica beers, trying to come to terms with the impressions and memories of our visit to the Russian capital. One theme comes around time and again in our conversation is that Moscow gives the impression of being a tough city in which to live, and that to make it there you need to be hard, because otherwise such a large, brutal and ruthless place will spit you out with no remorse for your plight. The rewards on offer are seemingly endless, if you have the right connections and access to the opportunities on offer, but for a lot of the population you get the feeling that life can oftentimes be a struggle.
As our train makes its progress across but a tiny fraction of this enormous country I try to give voice to my feelings about Moscow, a city that is completely overwhelming, undoubtedly impressive, most definitely fascinating and certainly troubling. I am looking forward to return.
On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘Winds of Change’, The Scorpions.
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