Moscow: a State of Mind

by Vladimir Paperny

Reprinted from Magisterium International Magazine, Moscow, 1997.

This book doesn't fit into conventional categories. It is no art criticism, theory of architecture or a study of local lore and history; nor is it a tourist guide, a piece of research into the collective unconscious, the result of delving among some archival stocks or a photograph album. The authors of the book are Muscovites, including the writer of the present lines currently living in Los Angeles, but still as much a Muscovite as ever, for the phrase "an ex-Muscovite" sounds as absurd as "an ex-poodle". The Muscovite is more than a resident of a certain type of urban locality. This is an individual with a distinctive manner of talking, walking, hearing, eating, dressing, sleeping, moving about, building, defending themselves, discoursing, in short, a person with a mentality of their own. This mentality type has not remained intact; it developed, underwent transformation, alternately incorporating and shedding various ideologies, forms of social organization and ideas of one's own role in the world. And although both the mentality type and the space it had engendered kept changing noticeably, each of the book authors undertook this work, convinced that some kind of immutable nucleus had always been in place.

The Muscovite is a species of animal immediately and unmistakably recognizable at all times, in the fifteenth century, as in the nineteenth and the twentieth. In the sixties I was instantly identified as a Muscovite, when I went to Leningrad. In the eighties, I was just as instantly pronounced a Muscovite by Odessa natives in New York. "How do you know I am from Moscow?" The reply was usually a shrug, "Well, how shall I explain? When you see a dog, you don't need a label saying 'dog', do you? You just see it is one."

When one tries to take a look at Moscow from the outside, one realizes the truth of that. You just see it. A poodle and a St. Bernard dog are rather different in appearance. And yet one look at either is enough to tell you that this is a canine. Similarly, two such Muscovites as Vassily Bazhenov and Konstantin Melnikov, for instance, even though they lived centuries apart, were dressed differently, had different manners of writing and pronouncing words, used different tools and different building techniques, still reflected on their city's space in one recognizable way; it is enough to look at Bazhenov's design of the Grand Kremlin Palace that has never been built, and at Melnikov's design of the Heavy Industry People's Commissariat head office intended for Red Square opposite the Kremlin and likewise never materialized. Both speak of a desire for grandeur, exaggerated massiveness, of an attitude to the existing city as a quantity of raw material that can be sculpted into a new vision of the end of history, when one's design is assumed to be the final, crowning part of a certain cycle.

This is a book about a state of mind, so when the authors talk about material items, buildings, emblems, squares, pictures, monuments, trams, blueprints, asphalt, stage scenery, cine film, it is the state of mind they are interested in above all else; either the state of mind that has brought forth (or else destroyed) these material items, or the kind that has imparted some other meaning to the items already in existence, incorporating them in some other mentality structure. Surveying the interior of the foyer in the Hotel Moskva, for instance, one may recall the designers' instructions of 1933 which demanded "a sense of space and magnificence", or the impression of writer Ilya Ilf recorded in his notebook in 1936, "this time the Muse has been guiding the hand of a hopeless idiot". This clash between the author's and viewer's state of mind (or the customer's and end user's) interests the book writers more than the construction history or compositional features of the Hotel Moskva. Just as while discussing Le Corbusier's Tsentrosoyuz building in Miasnitskaia Street, the authors will be interested not so much in the brilliant architectural finds of the French master as in the gap between his vision of the world and the rejection of that vision in these lines by Ossip Mandelstam, "These crystal palaces on chicken legs I will not enter even as a light shadow".

The city as a state of mind is an inexhaustible topic. The city-engendering mentality is never uniform; it is a countless multitude of mentalities that maintain complex, and often hierarchical, relationships with one another. Even in the case of St. Petersburg, where the city emerged originally as the reified will of one man, where householders were instructed from "on high" as to the design of their dwellings, the physical space which was actually taking shape in the early eighteenth century reflected the complicated interplay of the urban ideas of Peter the Great himself, of Frenchman Leblond, of Italian Tresini, of the townspeople brought over by force from Moscow, and of all the nameless builders.

Another example of the complex mentality hierarchy that has affected the physical aspect of the real space is probably Patriarch Nikon's New Jerusalem, likewise the implementation of one man's will initially. The Resurrection Church of the New Jerusalem monastery had been conceived as a replica of the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem which was specifically measured for the purpose and the drawings handed over to the builders. What was eventually built looked like a typically Moscow piece of masonry, miles away from its Jerusalem prototype in character and appearance. The Temple of the Holy Sepulchre, deflected in the minds of those who measured it, those who interpreted the measurements, those who did the building work and decorated the church, turned into an unmistakably Muscovite architectural specimen, into the Resurrection Church, taking its place somewhere halfway between St. Basil's Cathedral and the building of Tsentrosoyuz by Le Corbusier. The church was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, by advancing Germans, as the official version of events insisted, or by the retreating Red Army loath to leave a virtual fortress to the enemy, as some local people told me in 1975.

If we try to picture the state of mind that has produced Moscow as a kind of collective mentality, then within this mentality we shall have to single out a variety of levels. At some bottom level, deep down, one can speak about primary elements and mentality categories traditional for cultural anthropology. To the Moscow state of mind the notions of truth, border and power, inter alia, prove particularly important. In addition to that there are several "elements" that were crucial to the shaping of the Moscow state of mind. These are the elements of fire, water, heavens and the dungeon, as the heaven's opposite. And the theme of both heaven and the dungeon has found the most vivid expression in the Moscow Metro mythology.

At a higher level within this collective thinking there are different ideologies replacing one another. The most important for the physical appearance of Moscow, in the book authors' view, were the following six themes: the Third Rome, Heavenly Jerusalem, Moscow of the Golden Domes, European Moscow, Communist Moscow and, finally, Moscow the Megalopolis. Each of these ideological formations has a well-defined beginning (thus, the idea of the Third Rome, for instance, did not emerge till the fifteenth century, while the idea of a Communist Moscow dates from the twentieth century) but is practically without end, for all ideologies tend to get stuck in Moscow for good. And it is this remarkable ideological capacity of Moscow, its ability to absorb, digest, preserve and store incompatible ideological constructions that makes Moscow such an extraordinary subject of research. This is a city where nothing ever disappears, though lots of things are meticulously demolished. In a sense, this is a film-set city where beside noble Hellenistic capitals one can equally well stumble on a fragment of Gothic sculpture, or on an empty coke can, or on a scrap of a script about the radiant future.

So the overlapping and collisions of various Moscow mentality levels were the building bricks of the book composition. The six fundamental ideologies have been represented by six all but academic papers written from the vantage point of more or less traditional art history. The "elements" and archetypes of the Moscow state of mind have been represented by a kaleidoscope of short author essays focusing either on specific items, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, the Moscow Metro, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the Moscow tram, sculptural monuments, the Lenin Mausoleum, or the Kremlin red stars, or on Moscow mentality categories, such as "the truth" or "the border". Finally, the third constituent of the book composition was the visual sequence interpreted by the authors not as a set of illustrations for the text, but rather as a narration layer in its own right that entered into complex polyphonic relations with the texts. The editor and the designer wanted the book, even if casually thumbed through, with nothing but the pictures glanced at, to elucidate still some vital aspects of the Moscow state of mind.

There is not another city in the world where everything would be quite as mobile, fluid and unstable. Monuments keep moving about: Minin and Pozharsky are shifted closer to St. Basil's Cathedral; Pushkin crosses over to the other side of Tverskaya Street; one Gogol retires from the boulevard into a courtyard, while its place is taken by another, more cheerful Gogol. Buildings are rebuilt, refashioned, redesigned and moved: St. Savva's town house is pushed deeper into Tverskaya Street; two extra stories are added to the Moscow City Council building; the constructivist Hotel Moskva is adorned with a new asymmetrical facade.

The names of streets, lanes and squares do not stay the same for long. Tverskaya Street turns into Gorky Street, then back into Tverskaya again; Greater Dmitrovka becomes Pushkin Street, after which it, too, reverts to its original name. Miasnitskaya Street is renamed Pervomaiskaya, then Kirov Street, then again Miasnitskaya. In the sixties I felt a custodian of antiquities, because I knew that Metrostroevskaya Street used to be called Ostozhenka. Now, in contrast, I feel an old Muscovite because I can remember that there was a time when Prechistenka was Kropotkin Street.

Monumental town-planning ideas override one another, colliding like ice floes. In 1812, it is decided to build a Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer on the Sparrow Hills, to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. Some time later the architect is incarcerated, and the construction site is transferred closer to the Kremlin, to replace St. Alexius' Monastery which, in its turn is moved to Sokolniki, to the Red Ponds area. I well remember the monastery building, as it housed the Young Pioneers Center where I attended the Young Hikers Club as a boy. Under the monastery vaults painted a dingy green we were taught to pack rucksacks and tell the sides of the world by the rings on tree stumps. The packed suburban train that carried us from the Savelovo Station to Yakhroma (so named, as an apocryphal legend goes, after Catherine II, having twisted her ankle, cried out "Ya khroma" ("I am lame") resounded to our singing. The song we sang was the anthem of the Moscow University Geography Department: "Whirling past are foreign lands and cities, latitudes and longitudes, but it is not the kind of map we'll use to roam the wide world, when one day we leave home." It may well be that it was that impulse of moving in space I had got from the club that eventually dumped me on the Pacific coast. Tree-stump rings in a forest near Moscow had unequivocally pointed to the West.

In 1934 the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer is pulled down, and in its place they begin to build the world's tallest edifice, the Palace of Soviets topped by a statue of Lenin and intended to outdo the recently completed Empire State Building by a matter of several meters. The mammoth structure will be soon dismantled to be replaced in 1960 by a swimming pool named "Moscow". Word goes round that swimming there is not safe, as religious fanatics in aqualungs strategically positioned at the bottom try to pull underwater the happily gamboling infidels. In the 1990s, a new generation of religious fanatics maintain that the swimming pool, in defiance of the atheistic intentions of its builders, was a sort of giant font for Moscow, and any kid coming for a swimming lesson with their class was unwittingly subjected to baptism, for the holiness of the place had overpowered the builders' theomachy. Thus Moscow turned out to be guilty of the sin Mother Teresa is blamed for by her Christian critics, namely forced baptism of unsuspecting infidels. In Mother Teresa's case baptism was performed by placing a wet towel over the forehead of a terminally ill patient. In the case of Moscow, this was done by teaching hopeless unbelievers to swim.

The idea of a Soviet temple, however, lives on; the Palace of Soviets Design Institute continues to churn out blueprints as late as the 1960s, while the building site has again been transferred to the Sparrow Hills by then already crowned with the oblong of Moscow University. Later there appear plans of rebuilding the cathedral, of which the most interesting was Yuri Seliverstov's idea made public by him in 1990. He suggested rebuilding the cathedral as an empty metal contour, a mournful symbol of remembrance and humility, a monument to the spirit instead of to the flesh. In the end the idea of humility and sorrow gives way to the purely Moscow feeling of earthly and sensual joy, and the cathedral is reconstructed almost exactly as it was built by Konstantin Ton in 1883. And all of a sudden it becomes obvious that although the idea of restoring it seemed at first unspiritual and almost heathen, although the artistic value of Ton's "Russian-cum-Byzantine" architecture is plainly of modest proportions, the very physical presence of this huge mass of gilt-domed masonry within a certain space permeated by the magnetic fields of alternating ideologies is having a near-therapeutic effect on the Muscovite's perestroika-wounded soul. It becomes abundantly clear that this particular mass of masonry ought to stand right here, on this particular spot.

In a city where everything is pliant and unstable the issue of memory proves to be one of the most topical. The cyclic nature of the Moscow state of mind prompts a desire to accept the current change cycle as final, definitive and authentic: from now on everything will be just so for ever and ever, never to be altered. There is evidence of the same feeling in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and under Alexander III, and in the years of Stalin's rule, and even today. The final and total triumph of socialism turns into an alloy of Orthodox Christianity and capitalism. It is extremely tempting to pronounce all the earlier cycles a delusion and to begin editing history from scratch. When in the sixties I stepped out of the GUM department store into October 25th Street, I found it shocking that none of the passersby were aware that where the public conveniences stood there had once been the Kazan Cathedral. Now that the Kazan Cathedral is back in its place and the street has resumed its original name of Nikolskaya, I find it annoying that no one remembers about the public conveniences.

A few years ago artists Komar and Melamid invited me to take part in a show where projects of preserving the Stalin era monuments were to be displayed. I sent them a project of restoring the Palace of Soviets in the shape of a transparent inflatable roof over the swimming pool (see photograph). The idea, for all its ostentatious levity, is not unlike the perfectly serious idea of Yuri Seliverstov. Both suggest a notion of multistratal memory.

In a sense the whole of this book is an attempt at recreating the multiplicity of Moscow memory, an attempt at looking at the ideologies that molded Moscow and were molded by Moscow from an ideologically extraneous vantage point. I saw my task of a creative director in matching and reconciling the outside view of Moscow (here it is mainly represented by an anthology of foreigners' utterances) with that from within. This is basically the task of a translator or interpreter. My fifteen years in Los Angeles superimposed on the thirty-five-year experience of living in Moscow give me, I hope, a unique chance of a stereoscopic view of the Moscow state of mind. I act at once as a carrier of that state of mind and as its observer.

The first and main lesson to be learnt by a Muscovite finding himself in the West is that the West does not exist. There is Britain which is in opposition to Europe. There is Europe in opposition to America, Europe which, seen close to, turns out to fall into a number of highly dissimilar countries. There is America that while being aware of other continents, nevertheless lives as though they were not there. So a look at Moscow from the outside is a fairly artificial thing. And yet a certain median European view of Moscow is possible to distill. Our anthology contains mostly British, French and German views. They are all alike. They all, intentionally or otherwise, register the same set of contradictions. Here are a few of these contradictions.

Muscovites are seen by European travellers as deceitful rogues, one can't believe a single word they say. Whereas pravda ("the truth") is one of the key notions with the Muscovite. It is no accident that the daily of that name was Moscow's chief ideological implement for seventy years. "Truth" and "verity" are words that have always had an exclusively positive connotation in the Moscow mind. And the solution to this contradiction may conceivably be a specific vision of realism which makes the Moscow state of mind akin to medieval philosophy, when realism is seen as the opposite of nominalism, as a concept holding universals' existence real.

The Moscow state of mind, argue European travellers, is totalitarian. It is based on the notion of any power being boundless; the power of a husband over his wife, of a master over his servant, of a ruler over his subjects. For all that, the Moscow state of mind bears traces of wild outbursts, schism, scattering, disobedience, evasion and spilling. Possibly the roots of this contradiction are in what historian Kluchevsky used to call "a habit of straggling in the populace and the desire of the government for catching, settling and fixing", while the habit itself may stem from cut-and-burn farming, from the habit of burning everything down and moving on to a new bit of land.

The Moscow state of mind, Europeans insist, is essentially xenophobic. Muscovites fear and resent anything foreign. Stalin's spy mania, from this point of view, is deeply rooted in Moscow history. However, few places can rival Moscow in the ease with which it borrowed and absorbed western ideas and behavior patterns; suffice it to recall "Kuznetsky Bridge and its eternal Frenchmen" from Griboedov's famous play. Personally I find the most convincing instance of the latter my recent talk with Moscow designers who gave me some helpful tips on using a Macintosh computer, in spite of the fact that I have lived in California and used Macintosh computers for years and years.

Most ideologies that were at work within the Moscow thinking space had got there from the outside. Christianity, Hesychasm and the Third Rome idea were imported from Byzantium. The idea of the European city came to Moscow from St. Petersburg where it had in its turn arrived from Amsterdam. The ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were Paris-born. Communism strayed in from Germany. The 1930s cinema, from Hollywood. The 1960s industrial design, from the United States of the 1950s. The 1990s capitalism, from the United States of the 1930s.

Once they got to Moscow, ideologies did not remain as they had been. They came into collision with ideologies borrowed earlier on or from elsewhere; they fragmented; the fragments stuck together to form bizarre, unexpected and unpredictable combinations. As a result, all western and eastern ideas getting to Moscow lost their original impulse and turned into something utterly Moscowesque. The process has a readily observable spatial analog in the Moscow architecture of virtually any period. In St. Basil's Cathedral, in Moscow University on the Sparrow Hills, in the towers of Moscow's Kremlin one can see elements of nearly every architectural style, from Byzantium to Mauritania. And each building, at that, is immediately and unmistakably recognizable as belonging to Moscow.

Imported from Byzantium, Christianity was superimposed on paganism, yielding the phenomenon of "dual faith" described in great detail by Russian historians. Manufacturing industry on top of serfdom sired both the Stalin system of forced labor and the Brezhnev system of "fictitious production". The European city idea multiplied by Moscow suspiciousness and xenophobia created securely nailed up front entrances and tiny side doors, a phenomenon derided in the 1930s satirical articles by Ilf and Petrov. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, having mixed with Orthodoxy, Autocracy and National Roots, with the addition of the Third Rome idea, transformed into the ideal communist city.

Slivers of ideologies are at times more viable than the ideologies themselves. The idea of the Third Rome required Moscow to stand on seven hills. So of Moscow's many hills just seven have been selected and canonized. After the war it was decided to circle Moscow with high-rise buildings. And though the Third Rome idea was no longer voiced at the time, these buildings mysteriously turn out to be precisely seven in number, in perfect accordance with the Roman hills. Similarly, the idea of Heavenly Jerusalem required Moscow to have twelve gates in its rampart, in imitation of the idealized Jerusalem. The figure 12 also recurs in the number of stations on the underground Circle Line built after the war.

To get to know Moscow as it is today, one should first of all find a way of moving about the city. And here it is revealed that moving about Moscow is no easy matter; possibly owing to the traditional Moscow idea that locomotion in space is hazardous. It was no accident that Muscovites were once banned from building houses on former road sites. A road is dangerous. It can take one to the point of no return. Crossroads, ancient Moscow dwellers were convinced, were the meeting places of evil spirits (which, incidentally, is borne out today by any rush-hour crossroads in Moscow). The right of locomotion in Moscow should be granted to the chosen few and to the initiated. The right of fast locomotion, to the exclusively select.

At present, the most handy method of getting about Moscow, as well as about New York for that matter, is the Underground, though Moscow's Metro and New York's subway are about as similar as a piece of Byzantine mosaic and a computer screen. The Moscow Metro was born of two needs. Need number one was to protect people from air raids in a state that was actively preparing for warfare; the first line of the Underground was put into operation in 1935 with due ceremony, while a mere six years later the Underground was already being used for its proper purpose, as a vast bomb shelter. Need number two was to reward the Muscovites' feat of endurance. By the late 1930s, sixty per cent of Moscow's population were living in communal flats. The daily tragedy of communal existence has been described by Zoshchenko, and Bulgakov, and Ilf and Petrov, and Panteleimon Romanov, albeit often in a humorous form. At about the same time all labor had become essentially forced: in villages kolkhoz members were not given passports without which they could not leave their collective farm, whereas in Moscow anyone who was twenty minutes late for work was prosecuted. Under the circumstances the Muscovite's life afforded him precious few moments of glory; he only felt a victorious hero when passing through the Metro triumphal-arch entrances with their decor of hovering angels armed with 1890 rifles; beyond was the fairytale underground space ornamented with mosaics, frescoes and bas-reliefs, the kind of space where its underground nature was carefully and skilfully concealed, where the ceiling always gave the illusion of heaven and heavenly light.

The Metro became a sort of reverse world for Moscow, a world where a convict turned into a heroic victor, a place where it was pleasantly cool in summer and warm in winter. As a 1935 Soviet song went,

Well, now, isn't it jolly smart? Isn't is really and truly smart?
Isn't this Metro underground a fantastic work of art?
Glass and marble are the norm; light at night, dry in a storm,
It will keep you cool in summer, while in winter you'll be warm.

(Translated by Margarita Kvarstkhava)

The Metro of the 1960s was the place of secret meetings and a democracy of sorts. Unlike today's hierarchical Moscow where transport has been split into nonintersecting social strata. Some Muscovites ride in Chevrolet Tahoes with blue flashers along the fast lane, oblivious of the traffic lights. An altogether different species of Muscovite makes up the Metro crowd. "Beautiful women do not use the Metro," I was told the other day. In the sixties a phrase like that simply could not be uttered. Apart from a very limited exclusive set, everyone used the Metro. When my jazzman friend Herman Lukyanov, the son of poetess Musa Pavlova and on the whole a fairly elitist person, decided to find himself a girlfriend, he took random Metro rides studying the faces of female passengers. In one of the carriages he caught a glimpse of an attractive face and only just managed to squeeze in between the closing doors. Several weeks later Inna and he were happily married.

It is impossible to visualize all the friendships, meetings, important talks, break-ups, instances of having it out between Muscovites that took place in the Metro, on the marble benches growing out of walls, under cut-glass chandeliers casting spectral fluorescent light, against the backdrop of Florentine mosaics with unearthly fruit as plentiful as in the Garden of Eden, under the protection of bronze partisans watching hand-holding adolescent couples with a stern but forgiving eye.

Down in the Metro I once had an odd clandestine meeting in 1980, during the Olympics. "They won't let you out of the country," I was told by a smallish man in a dark-grey jacket. "They don't let anyone out now. You can only bribe them into letting you leave. I can help you. That will cost twenty thousand rubles. If you don't have the money, I'll accept heirlooms or sets of complete works." I did not have to worry about the moral dilemma: to give or not to give. I had neither the money, nor heirlooms, nor yet sets of complete works. My interest in the meeting was of a purely compositional nature, rather; I was curious to see how the dark grey of his jacket would look against the luminous fairytale colors of the Novoslobodskaya Station stained-glass panels. The jacket looked as it should have done, it was a fairytale sight.

The present-day Metro, like the whole of the surface city, is in transition. The Stalin Metro was built as a thing eternal and immune to change. And so marble benches grow out of floors or walls; and signs and notices are in bronze frames as though they were so many pictorial masterpieces. Capitalism has entered the Metro in the guise of makeshift structures, billboards, stalls and notices. Everything is made so as to suggest that at any moment this orgy of commerce may be over, any time now the billboards will wither, shrivel and drop off like autumn leaves, and within a dozen minutes the Metro will be back to its Stalinesque immobility.

My contacts with the surface city were chiefly confined to driving. When in the 1930s houses and churches were pulled down, when trees were felled in Garden Ring and streets were spread with tons of asphalt, the official explanation was the advent of the automobile. Meanwhile, when one looks at 1930s-1940s photographs of renovated Moscow, what immediately strikes one is the almost completely automobile-less streets which are wide, asphalt-covered and empty. Among the real reasons there were military considerations, too, of course, paved areas being easier to decontaminate. But the traditional hierarchy thinking doubtless had a part to play as well. Politburo members zooming by in their black limousines shouldered the difficult and hazardous burden of locomotion, as it were, and so spared ordinary Muscovites. In the same class of heroes taking upon themselves the excruciating locomotion burden were all the numerous Arctic explorers of the 1930s, ocean-crossing pilots, and rescuers of the Cheluskin and Papanin ice-bound crews.

Today the streets are choked with traffic. Driving has become a sport. The burden of locomotion is being apportioned in a far more democratic way. Every Moscow driver now is entitled to the hero image.

I learnt to drive in Los Angeles. Over there the roads are neatly marked with white and yellow lines, while in highways, on top of that, there are also white and yellow reflectors placed at regular five- to seven-meter intervals; street names and road signs are well lighted. If you do break traffic rules, it is always by design, not because you are unable to make head or tail of these rules. Drivers make way for one another occasionally, though you may get shot, too, if you chance on a particularly high-strung individual; but few would decline to socialize in one way or another. In the case of an accident, drivers would exchange data about their insurance companies and drive on leaving their insurance agents to sort things out. And all drivers at all times will let pedestrians pass.

The first driving impression in Moscow is of total chaos and far greater alienation and hostility. There is no communication whatever between the municipal authorities and drivers: no signs, lanes, or street and square names to be seen. Nor is there any communication between drivers themselves: no one will wave you by with a friendly grin; no one will give you a finger, either. The street is a battlefield. Each feels a tank driver and plunges into battle with grim determination.

The hierarchy feeling is very much there. In Los Angeles, where every pedestrian is a driver temporarily out of a car, there are no class antagonisms between drivers and pedestrians. Not so in Moscow. The enmity was recorded by Ilf and Petrov way back in the 1930s, when Moscow was virtually empty of traffic. But the drivers already resented the pedestrians. "No pedestrian has yet been known to run over a car," wrote Ilf and Petrov, "but for some reason it is the drivers that are disgruntled." Where does this animosity come from? Presumably from the hierarchy-based attitude to transport and locomotion at large. The hierarchy is determined by the amount of horsepower. The driver of a 400-hp Chevrolet Tahoe will never make way for a Lada 6-driving counterpart of a 100 "horses"; a Lada 6 will not make way for an Oka with its measly 40 hp, and all of them together would not dream of letting pass a humble individual on shank's mare.

But the most striking contrast between the life of a Moscow driver and one in Los Angeles, say, is of course the relationship with the police. If a Los Angeles cop stops you for some misdemeanor, he will hand you a "ticket", that is a writ for a court hearing. If you admit your guilt, you will mail a check for the amount of the fine specified in the "ticket". If you want to fight it, you will go to court, and there a judge, having heard both your version of the events and that of the policeman, will make the final ruling. Cases when the judge finds for the driver are not uncommon. But trying to bribe the cop would be tantamount to asking to be jailed there and then; chances are that this is precisely where you will end up in the event.

The Moscow traffic policeman is after money. This is the end that will justify virtually any means. A completely blameless driver is unlikely to be stopped, except at four o'clock in the morning perhaps. But little ruses are quite popular: a "no-entry" sign cleverly concealed behind trees; an unbroken white line made indistinguishable by rubbing; a poorly lit sign with an ambush nearby. On the one hand, this makes the driver-policeman relations beautifully uncomplicated: whatever the breach of traffic rules, you can always pay the cop off. On the other, this sets you thinking about the kind of human relationship present-day Moscow goes in for.

When historian Karamzin was asked, some two centuries ago, to sum up the Moscow situation in a single word, he replied, "Stealing." Does the word still fit Moscow today? With a feeling of deep national pride, one can answer in the affirmative; it is enough to glance through the crime section of a Moscow newspaper of any political hue. Obviously, stealing goes on all the time in any city of the world. But the kind of stealing done in Moscow is stamped with certain characteristic features. For starters, stealing in Russia has traditionally been a form of civil disobedience that peaked at the time of the so-called Great October Socialist Revolution, when the slogan of "robbing the robbers" had been officially sanctioned by the Communist Party. Under Stalin amateur stealing by the public had largely been replaced by the state variety which included confiscating the belongings of those subjected to repression, misappropriating the fruit of convicts' labor, and the spoils of war known as trophies. The word "trophy" meaning things stolen in Germany was most common in the postwar years. At the height of the "anti-cosmopolitism" campaign Moscow was chock-a-block with "trophy" cars, motorbikes, radio sets and movies.

In the 1960s, in conditions of universal shortages, every Muscovite broke the law in one way or another. Anything impossible to buy in shops was pinched at one's office or factory: writing paper, electricity wires, smoked sturgeon, bricks, rolls of film. But the main article to be purloined was of course the working time, which was reflected in the classical formula of the Khrushchev period: "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us wages".

The current situation is varied and in many ways unique. In some establishments the state has long since dropped the pretence of paying, while some of the more enthusiastic staff members (those who could not or did not want to leave the country) continue to work because they love their job. This is a type of anti-theft. There is a group of Muscovites who work at all kinds of joint ventures or foreigner-owned companies where the employer pays in earnest but also demands no-nonsense work. The commonest form of theft in places like that is income-tax dodging, that is, in effect, robbing the indigent classes. An average Moscow businessman making ten thousand dollars a month, say, would have to pay the state in tax something like nine thousand in Russia, and about three thousand in the United States, but in reality pays hardly anything.

The emergence of market relations requires certain guarantees of honesty; you cannot do business if you are not sure that your partner will meet his obligations. In America, say, the guarantor is the law. In today's Moscow, it is force. The result being, that the Brezhnev years of universal corruption turn out to have conformed to moral principles rather more than the present time. As Joseph Bakstein, director of the Modern Art Institute in Moscow, observed, "under Brezhnev, the notion of a 'scrupulous' and 'unscrupulous' man did indeed stand for something real; now it has lost all meaning in Moscow; money is paid only if the debtor knows that the creditor has the means to extract it by force".

The first layer of change that will catch the eye of someone coming to Moscow after a seven or so years' absence is the substitution of commercials for ideological advertising. What was the point of the legend "Communism Will Win"? On the one hand, no Muscovite tried to read these texts literally, at least in the post-Stalin age. Even if someone wanted to puzzle out the issue of whether or not communism would win, he did not take this text as an answer to his query. These texts were part of the dialog between the Moscow and the Central Committees of the CPSU rather than between the powers that be and the masses. Originally the texts must have been conceived as a spontaneous expression of the people's will: a group of Moscow proletarians racing up to the rooftop, on an impulse, and knocking together from whatever was at hand a placard with the words that came from the heart. Obviously, this spontaneity did not quite tally with the fact that the actual contraptions were complex engineering jobs designed to withstand strong winds, with a complicated lighting system, built and mounted, moreover, with the help of machinery and cranes.

On the other hand, the fact that no one took these texts seriously, in good faith, does not yet make them ineffectual. I remember reading accounts of psychological tests published in the sixties which suggested that if a text the reader disagreed with was repeated sufficiently often, it started affecting the person's behavior. The influence does not have to be direct; the reader may still disagree with whatever the ideological slogan is stating. The influence may consist merely in blocking a certain area in the consciousness of the slogan reader (viewer). It is as though the person was told: here in your consciousness some room must be reserved for ideology. You may reject this ideology for all we care. All we want is to keep this area in your consciousness free from anything else. The result was a consciousness that was handicapped to a degree, even in the case of self-confessed fighters against ideology. That was why I could not leave Moscow until I had written a book on Stalin's culture machinery. That is why I see my return to Moscow as feasible. Understanding is a form of reconciliation; neither meeting nor parting is possible without reconciliation.

Having become an advertising professional in the States, I now survey with interest the lush growth of Moscow's fledgling commercials that, like a creeper, covers every inch of free space thrusting its tendrils into the smallest crevice. The American advertising theory has gone a long way from the primitive hammering in of slogans, be it "the people and the party are one" or "drink Coca-Cola"; it has abandoned the pickax and the sledgehammer in favor of more sophisticated methods. Commercials in Moscow, whether on television, in magazines, or in the streets, appear to me to be made in high spirits, with energy, relish and talent, but still with a pickax and a sledgehammer. This adds a deal of peculiar charm to the Moscow of today, with its gripping atmosphere of the "great construction site of capitalism".

In Los Angeles I once encountered a curious phenomenon. I came across a Vietnamese restaurant with uncommonly good food. The only snag was that the waiters were an exceedingly surly lot. One day, inviting a Californian professor to lunch there, I warned him that the food would be excellent, but the service was far from courteous. "Fine," said the professor. "This means that the place is genuine. The Asian tradition," he explained further, "requires one to eat at home, particularly if there are guests to entertain. Anyone eating out is a good-for-nothing. They are not to be respected. So the waiters are unobliging. But so long as they stick to this stereotype of Asian culture, they will be sure to serve proper Asian food, not a standardized Californian version of Vietnamese food."

This applies to the Moscow mentality to the degree to which it remains Asian. The Moscow idea of hospitality and service does not extend beyond one's home. A guest was to be stuffed with food until walking became impossible so that his servants had to carry his unconscious frame. Historian Kostomarov writes that in the 15th-17th centuries it was the done thing in Moscow to follow up a party by dispatching a domestic to the guest's house the next morning to enquire after the person. The polite answer was "I feel awful, can't get up at all, my head is splitting, I am barely alive". That meant that the host had done a good job wining and dining his guest. But if the guest said that he felt fine, it was a downright insult for the host that was not to be forgiven.

If Asian contempt for a visitor who, for some reason best known to himself, turns up at a restaurant in preference to eating at home, is taken to constitute one pole, the American cheerful readiness to serve customers (far exceeding the readiness to entertain guests at home), the idea that the customer is "always right", will make the other pole. Europe will be somewhere between Moscow and America on this scale. Americans in Europe suddenly realize with a shock that one is far from being "always right" there. A London bank clerk will go on discussing with a friend the delights of angling on the phone, while you wait by his window. If you cut in with a polite "excuse me, could you help me", he will scowl at you: "don't you see I am busy?"

Moscow in this respect is roughly halfway between London and Asia. In many a home you can still be certain, as in the fifteenth century, of being filled with food and drink until you can hardly move. In contrast to that, your visit to most offices will be taken as an importunate attempt at ruining the cozy atmosphere they have taken such pains to create. That inimitable expression on the Moscow salesman's face, "it was lovely until you came", has largely survived to this day. Admittedly, in new commercial companies it has been modified somewhat by the studied Americanized smile: "what can I do for you?"

In Los Angeles the idea of the "customer always being right" covers a lot of spheres. The relations between university professors and students, for instance, where the students, regardless of their paid or unpaid status, are customers; or the relations between the speaker and the audience. From this point of view, I found it most interesting to watch the "Good Evening" television show. The show was a near-replica of David Letterman's program. Every single feature was diligently reproduced, the anchorman's dialogs with the audience, entrances of guests, the scenery in the window, the casual manner. But there was one instant when I felt like yelling "I don't believe it!", after the fashion of good old Stanislavsky's. The guests of Igor Ugolnikov were a singing duo, Lolita and Sasha. As it turned out, they were to be married the next day. "Let's get them to kiss," Igor appealed to the audience. The hall clapped, delighted. "No, no," Igor waved his arms in vexation, "you should be crying 'kisses', not clapping." The audience stopped clapping obediently and clamored for kisses.

It was this peremptory shouting and unprotesting meekness of the audience that could never, under any circumstances, appear in David Letterman's show. At that moment I felt an Olearius, a Herberstein and a Paulus Jovius rolled into one, noting the totalitarian bias of the Moscow state of mind, its excessive veneration for all power. The second bit of the program that gave me a similar feeling occurred when Igor asked Lolita why, having lived and worked together for years, they had not gotten married before. Lolita tried to laugh it off, saying something about Sasha not wanting to marry her, because... This is another unconscious stereotype of the archaic state of mind; it is assumed that when there is a man-woman relationship, the woman certainly wants the relationship to take the form of marriage, while the man resists this as much as he can. A presumption so utterly groundless in an industrialized country at the end of the twentieth century that it won't do even as joke material. It still does with a Moscow audience.

Moscow television has acquired so much freedom and openness of late that it affords a unique opportunity of peeping into all the secret innermost corners of the Moscow mind. The word that could adequately describe the dominant category of this state of mind is "nostalgia". This peculiar nostalgia is not a yearning for any one period in history, but rather for the past in general, for the idea of the past. It is a blend of longings: for the monarchy, for the White Guard, for Red Army commissars, for Stalinism, for World War II romanticism, for dissidence, for the "stagnation period". This poignant feeling welds together reminiscences of the 1960s uncritical enthusiasm for all things foreign and pictures of a sweater-clad Hemingway with reminiscences of Stalin's hatred of America and democracy, and of the spy mania of the 1940s-1950s.

The "Mitki" group in sailor caps on board the Aurora sing "Our gallant Varangian won't yield to the foe". Stalin films and the "Old Songs about What Really Matters" program are well ahead of American crime movies in the ratings. There is even a sort of nostalgia for nostalgia: Moscow is watching Stalin films about the beautiful Russian past with a lump in its throat.

I rather think the controversial Zurab Tsereteli's sculptures will stay in Moscow for ever, for all the intellectual outcries. And it is not a matter of talent, or absence of talent, in the author. It is that he has a knack of synthesizing a variety of nostalgias. In Tsereteli's case this is a fusion of nostalgia for Soviet monumentality of the 1960s, for Stasov's "national character", for Shishkin's "Bears in the Forest", for the metropolitan aura of St. Petersburg, for the Stalin-Brezhnev passion for hugeness.

The Moscow of today is a singularly vibrant, growing, rapidly changing city. A city where things keep happening all the time, good, bad or neither. A city where entangled are Europe and Asia, the archaic and the ultra-modern, where the trilling of cellular phones blends with the chimes of church bells. Once I tried to explain the difference between New York and Los Angeles to my Moscow friends. In New York, I was saying, the density of events per space is such that within an hour on some show opening day in Soho I can meet more people I know than I'll see in Los Angeles in twelve months. Well then, Moscow is catching up with New York in this respect.

A characteristic example in point was my visit to the Aidan Gallery. No one so much as vouchsafed a glance to what there was on the walls, and it did not matter anyway. The public flocked to the Gallery to see the high-muck-a-muck who turned out to be Richard Avedon, the famous US photographer. This is one more characteristic feature of present-day Moscow: western celebrities virtually inaccessible at home are easy of access here. Anyone arriving at the Gallery for the opening day could come up to the famous photographer without much ado and tell him any blessed piece of tripe in the most atrocious English. Naturally, I could not resist the temptation either and asked him for a few lines of his Moscow impressions for this book. Richard Avedon gave me a haunted look and said that he could not, that he was bombarded with similar requests from morning till night, while he had just a few days in Moscow.

What followed was sheer phantasmagoria. Masha Tsigal, a fashion designer, in painted knitted elbow gloves, which made her look like the heroine of "The Kiss Of The Spider Woman", told me that as a little girl she had been read my book "Culture Two" instead of "The Tale of the Goldfish", by way of a bed-time story. I reciprocated by telling Masha how back in 1968 her mother had given me live lobsters as a wedding present and how they crawled about the floor scaring the guests - such a curious hodgepodge of spiders, fish and lobsters. Nicole Wisniak, publisher of the famous yearly magazine in France, questioned me about ethnic conflicts among the Moscow intellectuals in the sixties. Apprised of her friend Avedon's refusal to write a few lines for our book, Nicole promised her assistance if I showed her a point in Moscow where a single photograph could register the deposits of many epochs. Obviously, any randomly picked point in Moscow city could serve the purpose as well as any other. Director of the Moscow Photography Center Olga Sviblova told me about her ex-husband, poet Alexei Parshchikov, while I told her how Alex Parshchikov had drunkenly recited his poetry in Russian in my Los Angeles home, taking turns with his Swiss wife, who recited her poetry in German, and my ten-year-old daughter who recited hers in English. I even had a video of this unusual poetic soiree.

And there was another soiree, in the Vermel night club, next door to the Balchug restaurant, where my nephew Alexei Paperny sang his old and new songs.

The sentimentally defiant atmosphere of Moscow in the 1950s-1960s found expression in songs by Bulat Okujava:

Oh Arbat, my Arbat,
You are my religious cult.
I shall never walk your length
Fully to the end...

...Oh, how similar we are,
This city and myself.
It may be cheerful or sad,
But it is ever soaring...

Who is that girl who has a piece
Of daylight in her hand,
As though a lunchbox she has fetched
For me, a humble ant.

(Translated by Margarita Kvartskhava)

Alexei Paperny's songs are in fact a bridge between the romanticism of the sixties, which Alex is painstakingly destroying, and the cold cynicism of the nineties, which he cannot accept either. Hence the constant deflation and debunking of heroic mythology, both Stalinite and intellectual. The Stalin nest box from the myth about "our feathered friends" is let to the resident of an alien environment: "and I have a tortoise sleeping in my nest box"; the tortoise then is rolled over to "one side" assuming a fairly precarious position. The bird of passage from a formally patriotic song "has gone to sleep in a soup-plate" and so, while still in its "native parts", is definitely not in a condition to perform heroic exploits. The nearest approximation to physical intimacy ventured by Stalinite lyrics is when "a spark suddenly ran through our touching fingers". In Alexei's anti-romantic world "some girls do it for hard currency, while others have it off for rubles".

The work of Alexei Paperny is lampoonish, ironical, intercontextual and nostalgic, which suits to perfection the current Moscow atmosphere. His group's original name was Tverboule ("Tverskoy Boulevard"), prompted by abbreviations of the 1930s, and prose pieces by Zoshchenko and Kataev. His songs contain references to pre-revolutionary romances ("Shine on, shine on, my lonely star"), and to the revolutionary lyrics of the 1920s ("Plying seas, rough and calm"), and to the Soviet primary school reader ("Do newts sing tunes"), and to the 1970s hits ("It flows a long, long way, the River Volga").

These songs exist in the esoteric world of night clubs where one can run into long-forgotten friends now living on every continent; where one can find and lose one's happiness; where generations and lifestyles are mixed; where deals are concluded; where myths are shattered and legends are created. The Third Rome is increasingly rivalling New Amsterdam.