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| Moscow’s new Triumph Palace Tower of luxury apartments is a pastiche of Stalinist architecture |
Behold the Moscow International Business Centre. Popularly known as “Moscow-City,” it is for me the most striking symbol of the oil wealth Russia has enjoyed since I was last here 10 years ago. It is Moscow’s answer to London’s Canary Wharf or La Défense in Paris.
Moscow-City also sends another message to the world: that Russia has never liked to be outdone. There are echoes here of the 1930s Palace of the Soviets, designed to surpass the Empire State Building, but then abandoned; or of the space race and arms race of the cold war years. Moscow-City may look futuristic, but a desperation to catch up with the west is ingrained in Russia’s DNA, from Peter the Great to Khrushchev’s boast to western ambassadors in 1956, “we will bury you.”
As I walk around the city, I cannot resist comparing Moscow as it is today not only with the Moscow of my last visit but also with the pre-Yeltsin stereotypes that persist in many a western mind. Until the 1990s, for example, foreign visitors would sneer at Soviet cars: the hopelessly dated Ladas and Volgas rattling along near-empty highways wide enough for columns of tanks. Those eight-lane highways are now choked, and Ladas are a rarity amid a seemingly permanent snarl-up of Mercs and SUVs.
Despite the jams, despite the pollution, there is no let-up in the love affair with cars. Downriver from Red Square, I saw a BMW advertisement hoarding that took up almost as much space as an entire Kremlin wall; to the south, there’s a Mercedes dealership so big it is said that its rooftop logo, the famous three-pronged star, can be seen from space (well, on Google Earth). To cope with the many new cars, an additional eight-lane ring road has been built from scratch, joining a succession of concentric beltways that radiate from the Kremlin.
A city that was always muscular now looks as though it’s been on steroids. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former president, and Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov have left an unmistakable stamp on their capital. Theirs is an architecture of triumphalism, of a resurgent nation with a swagger in its step. One recent block of luxury apartments, tellingly named “Triumph Palace”, has been built in a pastiche of the Stalin-era style: it is an uncanny match for the “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers of the 1950s, all soaring spires and bristling with statuary.
Until the recent financial crisis, Moscow boasted of having more billionaires than New York or Dubai. To visitors stuck with Soviet-era images of queues and empty shops, it comes as a shock to witness this vast city caught up in an orgy of consumerism.
Lenin would be turning in his grave. Or at least he would be if his embalmed corpse were actually in a grave, and not on view in an illuminated casket. His mausoleum on Red Square famously served as the Politburo’s ringside seat for parades of tanks and rocket launchers.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, that vision has been replaced by a penchant for excess that Russians call bespredyel – “without limits”. There is no limit to the wealth of their oligarchs, the debauchery of their nightclubs.
I almost despaired that the “real” Russia had been lost for good. Yet I found an antidote to the consumerist blitz amid the outcrops of onion domes embedded in the Moscow skyline. Russian churches are always thronged with worshippers, and they kiss the icons, light candles and pray with such fervour that you cannot doubt their belief in something higher. Russia’s Orthodox faithful, chanting amid the glimmering icons, are a moving spectacle.
I was similarly inspired by the Tretyakov Gallery, which sits in the crumbling but unspoilt-by-Stalinism neighbourhood of Zamoskvareche in central Moscow. From the icons of feudal Muscovy to the late 19th-century symbolism of Mikhail Vrubel, I meandered through Russia’s art history in a gallery equivalent to Tate Britain. Elsewhere across the city, I still sensed the reverence for culture that has seen the giants of Russian arts canonised in place names: Pushkin Square, the Stanislavsky Theatre, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.
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| Moscow’s ornate Novoslobodskaya metro station |
More beautiful, however, and surely more representative of any triumph for the Soviet system is the Moscow Metro. Although I travelled on it most days, its well-documented splendours are worth restating: marble-clad stations, lit by chandeliers and decked out with sculptures and murals. My favourites are 1938’s Mayakovskaya with its utopian ceiling mosaics and slender arches, and 1952’s Novoslobodskaya, whose backlit stained glass gives it a church-like ambience.
Less well known is how deep the metro is. Its escalators seem to descend into the bowels of the earth; steeper and faster-moving than those of London, the crowds they disgorge seem even more inclined to push and shove. And yet the Moscow Metro is still dirt cheap – a flat fare of Rbs22 (about $0.68/£0.42) and there are rarely delays. Capitalism may have triumphed above ground but down here in a dimly lit netherworld where Moscow’s moneyed classes rarely deign to venture, socialism seems to be muddling along just fine.
Paul Gould is the translator of ‘Russia and the Arabs’ by former Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, published in September by Perseus Books
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Getting a visa
Russia can be a frustratingly difficult place to visit. Package tours are no problem; but for independent travellers, the biggest hurdle is the visa regime .
Independent travellers must first secure an invitation from the Russian side before even applying for visas. Invitations from private citizens are the trickiest: they involve sending copies of passports to your host, who then applies to the visa authorities (taking up to six weeks). Eventually you are sent your notarised invitation through the post.
A simpler option is to pay for an invitation from a tour agency, hotel or hostel accredited with the Russian authorities. Hostels such as Moscow’s Travellers Guest House or the St Petersburg International Hostel can provide this visa support even if you spend only one night under their roof.
Once you’ve secured visa support, you have to apply for the visa itself. Although forms are available online, you still have to check whether you need to provide a copy of your airline ticket (which varies according to your nationality) and whether you require medical insurance.
London’s Russian National Tourism Office charges double the consulate’s fee for processing visas but is open longer hours and always answers the phone. Many agencies have sprung up to provide invitations and handle visas; some of them will also deal with the consulate on your behalf.
Russian consulate in London, www.rusemblon.org
Russian consulate visa service, 15-27 Gee St, London EC1V 3RD. http://ru.vfsglobal.co.uk, email:inforuuk@vfshelpline.com
Russian National Tourist Office, 70 Piccadilly, London W1J 8HP. tel: +44 (0)20-7495 7570 www.visitrussia.org.uk
Travellers Guest House, Moscow tel: +7 495-632 4059 www.tgh.ru
St Petersburg International Hostel, tel: +7 812-329 8018 www.ryh.ru
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Where to stay in Moscow
Next year, after prolonged development, the Four Seasons is expected to open a property in Moscow, close to Red Square on the site of what was the Hotel Moskva, writes Claire Wrathall. Few tears were shed when this 1930s behemoth was demolished in 2004, certainly not by those who had stayed there, nor by anyone who appreciates aesthetics. Frank Lloyd Wright judged it the ugliest structure in existence when he addressed the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937. Once the old Moskva was gone, however, the city regretted its loss; it was, after all, the image on Stolichnaya vodka bottles. So it is being rebuilt as a facsimile of the original, and soon its imperfect exterior will look as it once did. It will not be alone in evoking nostalgia for old design, if not erstwhile standards of service. The Ritz-Carlton (doubles from Rbs16,900/£320), which opened in 2007, is a faux-belle-époque palace of glitz built on the site of the old Intourist Hotel on Tverskaya, at the Red Square end of the city’s clogged main artery. And while the glass-and-steel atrium at the Ararat Park Hyatt (doubles from Rbs11,900/£226), near the Bolshoi, might make it seem modern, its Armenian restaurant, Café Ararat, replicates the popular 1960s hangout of the same name. At least its sister property, the Grand Hyatt Moscow, which opens this winter, aspires to look 21st-century. The Hotel Metropol (doubles from Rbs14,400/£273) occupies an authentic art nouveau building. The Golden Apple (doubles from Rbs6,300/£119) near Pushkinskaya fuses “innovative design in a historical surrounding”: brightly coloured minimalism within a 19th-century shell.
