One Russia, Two Chinas. George Fetherling

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       On the Loose in Moscow

      I once departed Canada for France aboard a ship with a Russian crew and came up on deck at dawn the next day to find them doing callisthenics in the rain. That had been my only experience of Soviets in groups. The recollection came back to me at once at Mirabel, that vast empty white elephant of an airport from which Aeroflot flew to Moscow several times a week. A crowd of a couple hundred people with the distinctive blood-coloured CCCP passports was going home—people with wide Slavic faces, many of them, some of the women with scarves on their heads and a large number of bulky bags or cartons tied with rope, some of the men wearing sweatshirts under their copious blue business suits. At neither end of the departure process—at the check-in counter or at the gate—was it necessary to ask them to form a queue, for they did so automatically day in and day out, though they didn’t make a religious obligation of neatness the way the British do. Everybody jumped ahead of everybody else while somehow preserving the queue idea, despite the way that the lineup once threatened to become as wide as it was long. There was much weeping and waving goodbye to relatives. One man in his sixties wore not miniature decorations but full-size tin replicas of his military ribbons but was not otherwise formally dressed (I would see many such people in the Soviet Union). Quite aside from questions of age and fashion, the people of that generation look fundamentally different from their sons and daughters and grandchildren. The younger people are simply more European.

      The aircraft was bare-bones and the flight long—an all-nighter. Although, in obedience to Mikhail Gorbachev’s drive against alcoholism, a light beer was the only strong drink served, the passengers became restive, shouting across the aisle, socializing, fiddling with all their bloody packages, a number of which, I observed, contained VCRs. If they had held live pigs instead, the level of tranquility would have been about the same. People were alert with anticipation. When they did settle down to sleep, a few slept with their heads on their crossed arms and their arms on the folding trays in front of them.

      Sherenetyevo-2 Aeroport, the one where foreigners usually landed, resembled Mirabel in being big and empty and surrounded by farms and patches of boreal woods. In the Soviet Union many things resembled Mirabel. The wait lasted almost two hours, but when my turn came I breezed through passport control and customs. I struck up a conversation with the clerk while buying currency at the bureau de change, and she told me that the taxi fare to central Moscow should be no more than 15 rubles. Outside I was approached by six drivers in turn, each of whom refused to take me anywhere except for U.S. dollars or Marlboro cigarettes or some combination of the two. Finally I told one of them what they all knew already—that one’s foreign currency is scrutinized and counted when one comes in and all hard currency exchanges (but not, it’s true, purchases) are recorded on a customs form and must tally on one’s departure with the amount remaining. The airport was full of warnings about the danger of selling dollars except at official kiosks; in the customs hall there were posters with photographs of the black marketeers of the week. It seemed clear that there was great pressure by the government to keep people from using dollars except in those places, run by the government and patronized by foreigners, where dollars were used exclusively. But no driver would take me on any other basis, and so I lugged my bags back inside and reported my consternation to Intourist. A young woman there shook her head sadly.

      “Where do they think they are?” she said. “In U.S.S.R. or in U.S. of A.?” I responded sympathetically, but kept to myself the realization that I had just stepped into the present and learned my first lesson.

      The driver who was shamed or browbeaten into accepting me for rubles was grumpy and sullen as we darted along the Leningradsky Highway, the main road linking the capital and the second city. He swerved in and out of traffic. On both sides were long buildings of various styles and ages, all impressive though many seemed a little shabby, albeit with the shabbiness that came with long use, not neglect. In the grassy median dividing the highway stood a modem sculpture, dedicated in 1966, that resembled a child’s jacks but on a giant scale; it was a memorial to the citizens who had defended the city against the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War and was meant to suggest the hedgehogs, or tank traps, that had laced the eastern approaches. This stretch of highway was a showpiece, clearly. We roared past parks and stadiums and the Northern River Terminal which, with its open arches and high clock tower, suggested what the Ferry Building in San Francisco would have been like if an Italian had designed it. We rumbled past the Petrovsky Palace of Peter the Great, where Napoleon did his hasty logistical planning for the retreat from Moscow. This section was a distant suburb then, and clusters of small single-family homes show that it remained so until the 1920s, perhaps even as late at 1937 when the Moskva was connected to the Volga by canal, and Moscow, after 500 years as an inland city, finally became a seaport. At the House of the Newlyweds I spotted a bride getting out of a car with red and blue streamers tied to the rear bumper. The highway had long since dissolved into Leningradsky Prospekt, one of the 11 wide spokes that cross three ring roads before coming together at the Kremlin and Red Square. The driver was still glum when we arrived at the hotel. He wore jeans. Rubles in one pocket, dollars in the other. He made a big display of dredging up change from the one and not the other.

      The next morning I watched dawn break over central Moscow from a hotel window on the 15th floor. It was like being in a photographer’s dark-room, seeing the image come to life in the bath of developer. As the sky grew lighter—but without ever losing the suggestion of pewter—buildings were revealed row after row, following the contours of the river or else standing at attention along either side of the main boulevards. There were large patches of green everywhere, for a surprisingly high percentage of the city’s area is given over to parks. Ugly high-rises jutted up from the trees in the foreground and in the distance, some with the construction cranes still in place, others dating, I would guess, from the 1960s or early 1970s, when the much-reported-on housing crisis was first addressed seriously (but of course never solved).

      At a distance, it was not always easy in the Soviet Union to distinguish residential buildings from office blocks, owing in part to the absence of signage. One distinctive structure, which I soon learned was one of the seats of the government of the Russian Federation, resembles New City Hall in Toronto except that the two halves of the clamshell are back to back rather than face to face and so take on an X shape when viewed from above. There are also the seven High Gothic skyscrapers, serving various functions, built by Stalin, who compared them to the seven hills of Rome. One is the Ukraine Hotel; another is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which sits across from a little pie-shaped park where I would see big protest demonstrations when Li Peng of China came to town. A third is the Moskva Hotel, which has mismatched wings. It is said that the architects submitted two plans to Stalin, expecting him to state his preference; when he did not, they built one of each and hoped for the best. As for some of the older structures, I noticed what I later saw confirmed in China as well: how one of the consequences of a revolution is that buildings are put to new uses that never quite eradicate all traces of their original purpose. Moscow’s ordinary domestic architecture tends towards long blocks, four or five storeys high and with steep metal-ribbed roofs, such as you expect to see in the workaday parts of Paris and in the centre of the other old European capitals.

      This was a special day, the 120th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, and I decided to get my sightseeing out of the way and pay my respects to his mummified remains. After a breakfast of coleslaw and what I would call latkes, I bounded out into the crisp morning air for my ritual argument with a cab driver.

      “Rubles!” he said. “Rubles I got here. And here and here.” He touched all the pockets of his coat and trousers and a zippered bag on the dash-board. We eliminated dollars and cigarettes, leaving him to suggest that I might like to pay in caviar. A coals-to-Newcastle proposition, I would have imagined, though he perhaps meant the white variety often reserved for hard-currency tourists. I decided to walk to the Kremlin.

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