Ghost Town

National Review, March 27, 1998

Stalin, behind Lenin, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

You wouldn't have wanted to live there, but the Evil Empire was fun to visit. Every empty shop was an ideological vindication, each dismal meal the basis for a grimly amusing anecdote. The tourist could play Dissident (Visit an oppressed church!) or Spy (Lurk outside the Lubyanka in a raincoat!). And what about that air of menace? You could be tailed by the police, harassed by goons, or even, if you were very, very lucky, get caught in a KGB sex trap. Everything was forbidden, and thus enticing. Pointlessly, but excitingly, train stations could not be photographed. Nor could bridges. Take that, Mr. Reagan! And as for bringing in Samizdat? Try explaining freedom of the press to the suitably surly ("You want to make trouble in our country?") border guards as they confiscate The Hunt for Red October. These were people who wanted to bury us. And they were not going to apologize. And they still aren't. Which is why, even now, Moscow remains the place to go for a sinister, Stalinist thrill. To be sure, there have been changes, but many of the old Soviet ways persist. That Russian talent for the gothic and the just plain weird has also survived. And so will most visitors.

Even if, as true nostalgics should, they check into the Hotel Ukraina. Not the usual Intourist concrete block, the Ukraina is one of the six Stalinist wedding-cake skyscrapers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. It is a grimly lit and exuberantly totalitarian hulk, festooned with crumbling concrete stars, hammers, and sickles. Other Cold-War relics can be found inside, including seedily threatening security men, a jolly mural of Soviet Ukraine, and, incredibly, a group of earnest Americans over to talk "people to people" about peace. In a few years, the Ukraina will be a place of luxury and pseudo-sophistication filled with New Russians and old investment bankers. But that moment has not yet arrived. Like Russia itself, this hotel is in transition, and the journey can be a little rough. Which is why it is better to dine elsewhere.

Ukraine Hotel, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Just down the road, in fact, by the cheerfully unrenamed Barrikadnaya (Barricades) Metro station. Le Gastronom is one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Located at the bottom of another Stalinist tower, it promises yet more dictatorship chic. Vast, dominated by overlarge chandeliers, over-officious security men, and clumsy marble pillars, it is a Cecil B. De Mille, nose-pressed-to-the-window idea of how the rich should live, something all too suitable for the Stalinist bureaucracy and the morbid tourist. It's bogus, unfortunately. Gastronom was a food store, not a restaurant. Stalin never ate there.

Nor did he dance his cares away at the nightclub called Titanic. In his day, the evening was for arrests, not discos. Now there is a nighttime scene as shifting and evanescent as anything found in Manhattan. If a bit tougher. That explains the airport-style weapon detectors at the entrance to many of the better spots. In New York they may be the sign of a bad high school. In Moscow they herald a great night out.

And having them may be prudent. At Titanic, notes one English-language paper, "you won't get laid, but you might get shot." But then this is typical of an expatriate press only too pleased to wear its "aren't we tough to be in Moscow" credentials on its sleeve. Amid the stock prices and the guides to eating out, the pages are filled with entertaining summaries of recent scandals, crises, and crimes. Cannibalism seems unusually popular at the moment. Perhaps the restaurants are to blame.

The determined tourist can also visit the sites of earlier, more traditionally Soviet atrocities. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria's Moscow mansion, for example, still stands. These days it's the Tunisian Embassy. Tunisian diplomatic intrigues take place over the network of cells in which Beria's victims were tortured, raped, and murdered. For the Tunisians have left the basement much as they found it. The cells are dank and sinister, accessible by dark stairs and gloomy passages. "I don't believe in ghosts," explained one diplomat.

That's strange, as Moscow is a city where the dead don't always know their place. Hitler's jaw is on a shelf in the archives of the Russian Counter-intelligence Service and, some say, can be viewed for a fee. Meanwhile, at Moscow's Brain Institute they have Lenin's brain, sliced into 31,000 pieces and carefully preserved on microscope slides. Famously, the rest of the old Bolshevik's remains remain in their mausoleum above ground, as embalmed as the attitudes of his supporters. In the Duma they continue to talk of the proletariat, imperialism, and the Glorious October Revolution. Outside, where the Lenin Museum used to be, unpleasant old people still gather, Stalin banners in their hands, anti-Semitic pamphlets in their pockets. A tape of some of Stalin's better speeches can be bought for $1.

Outside the old Lenin Museum, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

An even less reliable record of the past is available down the road, at the Lubyanka. K, G, and B have been replaced by more tactful initials, but the old yellow building still holds secret policemen and a small museum that details some of their achievements. With a few gaps.

Elsewhere, Moscow could do with a few more gaps, particularly where statues are concerned. For all the changes, the hugely increased freedom, and the chance of a greater prosperity, this is still too much the city of the Soviets. Its buildings, its monuments, its manners and morality still deliver that old malevolent charge. Looking at the St. Petersburg of the 1830s, the waspishly reactionary Marquis du Custine snidely noted that it was "barbarism plastered over." Well, at least someone had tried.

It would be more difficult to say the same of the Moscow of the 1990s. Lenin still enjoys his public spaces. Lenin in iron, Lenin in concrete, Lenin as statue, bas-relief, or painting, thoughtful, brave, and wise. His victims? They get a bare rock taken from the site of the first Gulag. It sits across from the Lubyanka, just a few minutes' walk from a monumental statue of Karl Marx.

That comes as no surprise. To be fair, some streets have been renamed, and a Bolshevik statue or two taken down, but for the most part the relics of the ancient regime survive alongside, or under, the shiny construction of the new era.

And so Stalin's Metro, the showpiece that actually worked, continues to function. Its escalators still thunder at alarming speed down past marble torn from a cathedral. And the idols still stand in its halls: Red Army men, workers, and peasants reminding you that the State will prevail and that, yes, the train will arrive soon. And it just might.