There are certain places that seem to pulsate with the tremors of historical significance. Entering Red Square through the twin peaks of Resurrection Gate, and walking across the subtle camber of the cobblestones for the first time, you get the sense that you’ve stepped into some kind of vortex in which history and the present intertwine in helixes of simultaneity.
The sheer weight of history applies almost physical pressure as though all those people ambling across the square were subterranean marine life pinned down against and crawling across the ocean bed. The birth and rebirth of a nation, the revolutions inspired, the grand displays of power, the meetings of minds and ideas, the quashing of insubordination; all have wrought their psychical energy upon this place. Whilst Red Square might appear openly flat; imaginatively it is wrenched upwards with peaks and troughs of historical import like a colossal mountain range.
Directly ahead, St. Basil’s Cathedral is bulbous and abloom with colour, like a cluster of hot air balloons ready to float untethered from the ground. In terms of its symbiotic relationship to ‘Mother Russia’, the cathedral is as synonymous as the Statue of Liberty to America or the Eiffel Tower to France; and yet it retains an almost comical fascination, as though it were liable to morph into fresh and more flamboyant forms by the day like an exotic plant.
Juxtaposing this architectural abandon, the Kremlin citadel with its turrets, golden domes, crenelated red-brick walls and towers, is almost the physical embodiment of ‘statehood’ and power that has remained fortified here since the original settlement in 1147. A shining red star gleams atop the Saviour Gate Tower like a kitsch decoration upon a stern brick Christmas tree.
Hunched against the wall is the mausoleum playing host to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body. The room is hushed and reverential with synthetic chilled air, spotlights bathing the corpse in light, and statuesque guards monitoring for no dawdling, no talking and absolutely no photographs. At the behest of Stalin (himself afforded a more modest burial just outside against the Kremlin wall), his body was to serve as a relic of the communist revolution, and legions of scientists tasked with concocting a formula of preservatives, dissecting his brain to uncover the chemical genius therein as though it were a neurological genie waiting to be released.
The personality cult of Lenin that has been cultivated since his death 90 years ago is something of a socialist mythology, very similar to that of Che Guevara who is now little more than a production line image for mass consumption. Lying in state in such pope-like repose, Lenin is now little more than iconography, a 20th century Tutankhamen whose principles and influence have long been contorted by analysis to fit the particular agenda of ideologues.
Flanking the opposite side of the Square is the GUM shopping mall, its resplendent curved glass roof invoking Paxton’s Great Victorian Way that was to encircle 19th century London. Strolling around this cathedral for the new faith in consumerism and purchase power, I can’t help but wonder what Lenin would make of it were he to roll back the stone on his tomb and walk amongst this new proletariat with their Louis Vuitton handbags and Gucci shoes?
It is this cognitive dissonance (the presence of two contradictory ideas at once) that I find initially jarring and, after a week or so, quite puzzling. Everywhere the Soviet hammer-and-sickle is emblazoned as wantonly as the golden arches of McDonald's or the red bubble of Coca-Cola. Touring the metro system, with its opulent mosaics, bas-reliefs and marble sculptures, I marvel at the evocative symbols that persist. The glory of the Bolshevik revolution, the resilient peasant women toiling on the land, the bouquets of wheat, the proud soldiers marching off into battle, the strong-willed workers standing their ground at the factory gates.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Gorky Park on the south bank of the Moscow River, where people roller skate and pose for photographs amongst the statues and monuments celebrating Russia’s past. A grand monument of Peter the Great looms over the point at which the river splits in half, his ship pointed defiantly towards St. Petersburg, the city he would champion, in the process consigning 18th century Moscow to pestilence and ruin.
There is scant subtlety to these installations; instead there is a pervasive sense of proud nostalgia, the continuation of the urban space as propaganda, from the extravagance of Stalin’s metro system (designed to shore up the Muscovite workers’ morale), to the VDNkH Soviet Exhibition park – a demarcated zone for the fulfilment of leisure.
By contrast, just around the corner from the Metropol Hotel at Lubyanskaya pl is the humble Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism, understated to the point of invisibility, a chunk of stone lifted from a labour camp to which untold numbers were exiled during Stalin’s ‘Great purge’. State-sanctioned terror as an instrument of civilian control. The anonymous masses disappeared to Siberian gulags, Stalin’s mere statistics.
My workmate and I ponder on the contemporary implications of all this persistent semiology left by the Soviet Regime. Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation schemes of the 1930s – enforced agricultural austerity – led to the deaths of several million Russians. I cannot help but wonder whether this would have been the fate of the Third Reich had a less-megalomaniacal and war-hungry tyrant than Hitler steered the Nazi party to power; Nazi aesthetics persisting as proud icons of a once mighty state power, coming to embody little more than sentimental historical intrigue?
Across the river sits the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the site of the protest group Pussy Riot’s infamous performance in 2012. Western media agencies threw their grappling irons into the story with an eagerness that belied the old narratives of intolerance and authoritarianism that they were glad to see Russia conforming to. Although, as my workmate commented, “in what kind of church could you sing a song like that and not get arrested?”
Nevertheless, it reveals the moral dilemma currently facing modern Russia. After Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia threw itself headlong into capitalism, enthused by the perceived ‘end of history’ which unshackled it from its austere past. For all the nouveau riche in their blacked-out Mercedes, and the oligarchs buying up half of West London, you can discern a wider sense of disenfranchisement, hence (presumably) the candles still being held for the security and familiarity of the old regime.
Strolling down the Arbat, I pass an openly gay couple and almost feel tempted to applaud them for such an audacious display in contravention of Putin’s punitive legislation. Meanwhile, I walk the streets keeping an optimistic eye out for the exiled fugitive Edward Snowden, domiciled here in Moscow after spilling America’s surveillance secrets.
Keen to bake in the authentic Russian culture, my workmate and I visit the Sanduny banya, the eldest in the city (established 1808). Instantly clocked for the novices we are, a pair of well-built and well-nude Russian men demonstrate the soaking of the birch branches in warm water before beating your partner with them, thereby aiding circulation. It’s said that in Britain business deals are often secured on the golf course, whereas in Russia it is within the masculine sweatbox of the local banya. Which makes perfect sense, for once you’ve beaten someone across the bare arse with birch branches it’s likely to perspire away any of the egotistical bluster that might act as a barrier to a smooth deal.
Fleeing from the lobsterific heat to plunge in the ice bath, I see the two Russians – clearly banya aficionados – taking it in turns to rub lotion into one another’s broad backs, which is where my workmate and I resolutely draw the line. With open homosexuality increasingly subject to prohibition within Russia, perhaps it is inside the confined and steamy quarters of the old banyas that such activity bubbles to the surface; latent desires summoned forth from the hot coals in these gay speakeasies.
Not to be swayed by such temptations, my workmate, who had been playing the Tinder fruit machine all week, finally landed on a jackpot; further proof, as I see it, of the instrumental powers of web technologies to realise instinctive and primitive sexual encounters without the awkward frigidities of social convention or cultural differences.
Free from such distraction, I began to feel desperate to break out of the central fist and explore the wide arms of the city. I set off early one morning, keen to plot a path linking the literary coordinates of the great Russian writers as though I were a detective tracking the crimes of a serial killer – the Tolstoy estate to Pushkin House, Lermentov House to the Bulgakov Museum and Gorky House, and north from there to pay homage to Dostoyevsky’s childhood home. The plan being to complete this circuit before meeting up again with my workmate at the Cosmonautics Museum in the northern district of Ostankino.
Almost instantly I feel an encroaching sense of entropy seal itself over me like a dawn fog. I felt the same on my first explorations in Los Angeles, the gigantic geographic scale of the city acting as a hobbling agent, trampling down my endeavours into the mud of insignificance. There seems no feasible way of escaping the vast thoroughfares; thick spokes in the concentric wheels of the Golden and Boulevard Rings that encircle the city centre.
The tyranny of traffic is complicit in my malaise, stacking up in stasis along 6-lane highways that teem with noise and fumes, forcing the pedestrian underground to subway systems. Very often these are patrolled by begging babushkas; old women whose pensions were lost without recompense in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The begging population of any city is a condemnation of the governing power, but somehow the sight of frail old women in headscarves and shawls is even more of an abrogation of the state’s moral responsibility.
Walking the sclerotic veins of the streets, I feel hemmed in by the bleak functionalism of the architecture, oppressive and uncompromising, evidence of Stalin’s slash n’ burn programme to remake Moscow anew, in the process culling so much evidence of the old Tsarist regime. Coming across an old church like the Upper St. Peter Monastery, its spiked domes like military zischagge helmets, is almost a visual sigh of relief.
I traipse past the Planetarium and the Narkomfin, an once-lauded exemplar of Le Corbusier-style urban habitation, now looking sadly dilapidated, much like similar complexes being purged across London like the Heygate Estate and Robin Hood Gardens. One of Stalin’s ‘Seven Sisters’ dominates the eye-line; these imposing art deco monuments standing as short and stubby interpretations of Manhattan’s skyscrapers that Stalin insisted on positioning around Moscow like sentinels keeping a tight watch on the movements of the subjects below. It’s hard to imagine any coalition with human agency, they seem to be unresponsive structures left, like the statues in Gorky Park, as remnants of an abandoned and discredited ideology.
I eventually locate the Bulgakov Museum; alas it doesn't open until the afternoon, and so I veer off the main road and down a side street to Patriarch's Ponds, featured in the opening of Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', two men meeting 'under the shade of freshly budding lindens'.
Instantly, the psychic energy of the area is displaced, from the sauna of the roadway to this pleasant ice bath of fresh air and quiet. There are locals walking dogs, running laps and sitting on benches to read papers and straight away I find the pressure of the stultifying cityscape being offered a brief respite.
Reluctantly, I abandon my literary walk and catch the metro to the area of Ostankino with its knitting needle TV tower which was, in 1967, the tallest free-standing structure in the world.
It is often said that history is defined by the victors, and in the case of the Space Race that is certainly true of how NASA have sought to dress the narrative with their characteristically patriotic gloss. The Cosmonautics Museum goes some way to tilting the balance the other way, honouring as it does several leading Russia cosmonauts, foremost of course Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel into outer space.
The Soviet powers used their space programme as a powerful propaganda machine, releasing fragments of information as and when they felt compelled to reinforce the conviction in the populace that the vast capital investiture was justified. Details of space flights were often confidential until after the event and several major accidents were brushed under the carpet of obliviousness; the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, a launch pad explosion that killed around a hundred people and was suppressed until 1989.
For all that Russia has reformed and to a certain extent embraced 'Western cultural values', it is my view that it now stands at a critical crossroads in its history. The Western powers of NATO, largely in collusion with the mainstream media, have succeeded in antagonising and backing Russia into a corner from where Putin still tries to exert dogged resistance, seeking to cement ties with a suspicious China and succeeding in extending revanchist tentacles around Crimea.
More concerning perhaps is the increasing level of authoritarianism and state censorship currently sprouting like very familiar weeds from the Kremlin soil; many journalists have found themselves imprisoned for 'subversive acts', and rules decreeing that an online blog with more than 2500 followers must be registered as a state organisation. In addition, Putin has condemned the internet as a 'CIA operation' and mooted plans to create a Chinese-style nationalist alternative.
John Steinbeck in his 'A Russian Journal' wrote -
“In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year, it is the comfort that will come in ten years, it is the clothes that will be made very soon. If ever a people took its energy from hope, it is the Russian people.”
How appropriate that quote can be applied for 21st century Russia is most uncertain. John Bowlby's famous Attachment Theory denotes that the level of security and reassurance experienced by the child is directly influenced by the stronger presence of a maternal figure. Perhaps for Mother Russia to move towards a better future in this uncertain era of late-capitalism and tense geopolitical relationships, the people need to step out from under the feet of the parental authority figures to whom they seem so obedient.
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