Moscow's Bowels

I love my little hotel in Moscow. It’s on a quiet street with a bunch of great old buildings in various states of decay, an outdoor farmer’s market, a local café chain outlet and a dribble of stolen wifi access. I trust the nation’s deteriorating relationship with the Ukraine to ensure that none of these farmer’s market pears are in fact from Chernobyl. And one block away a portal into the Moscow underground, by far the coolest subway system on the planet, redolent as it is of faded social realist opulence. I ended up spending much of the day travelling from one station to another and then getting out and exploring the environs for an hour or so. A great way to get to know the city, lots of surprises. And a great way to start this massive train voyage to end all train voyages.

Each Metro station is unique, apart from being slathered in high-end marble blocks head-to-toe. In one there is an impossibly enormous chandelier and preposterously imperious marble benches, in another there are mosaics with tractors in wheat fields and schoolchildren cheering as Soviet bombers pass overhead. One has cartoonishly huge marble Olympic torches punctuating the train platform, another is dominated by a series of social realist sculptures of workers heroically plowing fields, and Bolshevik insurgents male and female armed with rifles and accompanied by their loyal dog companions as they crouch and lie in wait for a whiff of the bourgeoisie. Muscovites touch the dogs’ noses for good luck as they pass en masse through the transit system, so that the snouts are rubbed to a shiny silver. Perhaps that’s why so much Egyptian statuary is missing the nose? The dogs’ won’t last into the twenty-second century. And it’s funny to see given the context; just as bland, rote superstition infected the monotheism that prevailed before, so it did into these temples of the communist mythology, and survived it. Knock on wood.

Inserted into all of the little unobserved bits of the train stations are jaw-dropping old deco light fixtures, air vents shaped in the form of stylized wheat stalks, etc. They are modernist aesthetic statements to rival the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, and it becomes clear that at the same time these two capitals, Moscow and New York, were engaged in a deadly serious, tooth-and-nail brinksmanship and competing global reaching there was a common aesthetic undercurrent at work in the great towers and infrastructure that nodded to one another and acknowledged they saw something common and new, and were creating it together. Art Deco really consists of borrowing all of social realism’s aesthetic trappings and bleaching out the ideology.

Over nine million people pour through this underground transit system each day, more than London and New York combined, and there is an etiquette to the chaos of being buffeted like a log down the Moscow Metro rapids that I haven’t managed to quite pick up. The New York choreography doesn’t cut it, I’m invariably in someone’s way. The locals seem nimble enough, even effortless as dancers, though mornings on the subway all of them are gruff as the stocky female attendants with scratchy woollen military uniforms, seemingly ripped from the era of Stalin, who sit in booths on either end of the platform and glower in an authoritarian manner to no apparent purpose.

Trying to make out the Cyrillic station names is no fun. Earnest as ever, your brain’s pattern recognition system keeps telling you it’s about to sort out the whole puzzle, there are short little stretches where they seem to converge, but for the most part it might as well be in “Alien”.

Things are considerably more chilled in the evening as people come home. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and heads to the nearest bar. As you rattle up the steep white semi-circular canyon of the station’s surface tunnel via escalator, you pass couples making out with abandon, teenagers surreptitiously passing around a bottle of vodka, businessmen with their ties askew and an unlit cigarette at the corners of their mouths, and an avalanche of handheld texting that could probably bring down a mid-sized cell phone tower. Up top, Moscow at the end of the workday becomes a vast sprawling hang-out, as if that rural Duane Reade parking lot where the kids from your home town in Topeka, Kansas hung out sitting on car hoods smoking, drinking and blaring crackly FM tunes from the dashboard radio exploded out into a vast multi-million-person mega-labyrinth. There are few more fun places to hang out at night, and with a distinct, unbending blue-collar “back in the concrete high-rise” vibe.

Finally, the musicians of the Moscow subway system are so far superior to those of New York that it’s like comparing John Coltrane to a junior high school kid learning to play a plastic recorder. And they have the guitar case out just like any random shmuck playing Hotel California over and over again at the Coney Island stop. In one station outside the Kremlin I saw a wind group nailing the Stravinsky Octet. A string quartet under Pushkin Square was rocking out to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. A lone violinist parted the commuter waters of Mayakovskaya like a dangerous rock in the middle of a river and planted every note of one of Paganini’s most perilous caprices. That was some bad-ass shit.

Oh, the city’s pretty cool too. Everyone is guarded here, but can be goaded into flashes of genuine warmth. It’s not even remotely as dangerous as Muscovites try to tell you, partly as a matter of pride – sorry buddy, you’re no Bedford Stuyvesant, you’ll have to try harder. There is radical affluence in many sections of Moscow, lots of jet-black Jaguars and Maseratis prowling the impassable ring roads, and some bang-up restaurants and clubs (thanks to Tim Evans for steering me to Propaganda). But the prosperity here is more widely shared than originally advertised back home. The post-apocalyptic expanse of concrete block skyscraper housing ringing the city is delivered almost as promised, except that most are clean and well maintained, have pleasant adjoining parks and posh adjunct shopping malls with neon movie multiplexes and brand name shops inside like Ikea and J Crew. There are even new, swankier looking high-rise concrete housing projects with signs up offering units for sale; the collectivist urban way of life appears set to continue under an improved economic setting. In the city center you have a real restaurant culture for all classes, with restos and cafes packed late into the evening across all of Moscow. Downtown is decidedly European, imposing urban piles tattooed with adverts for Nikon and Pepsi in Cyrillic, and the Kremlin is flatly magnificent. Unnoticed in the corners are all manner of hidden architectural gems like surviving wooden houses from the nineteenth century stranded on residential blocks, factories tattooed with hammer-and-sickles, used book stores with unwieldy piles of scientific texts stacked to the ceiling, and lost little stone churches that look more like Turkish mosques, boarded up for decades and starting to crumble.

All in all, a good day. My one disappointment is that they’ve shut down the Bolshoi ballet house for renovation. But then I remembered the night in music school when the Bolshoi came to town, my friend Karl Seeley snuck them out from under their handlers’ noses and brought them to a party at Jennifer Griffin’s house, and we proceeded to get them completely wasted -- until the US Secret Service showed up, castigated us menacingly and banished them back to their hotel. So I guess I’ve already had my Bolshoi experience.