Sam Leith
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I was last here two decades ago, when I was studying Russian for A-level and lived for a couple of weeks with a family in the suburbs. My memories are of hulking residential tower-blocks standing isolated in a landscape of brown mud and grey slush, beneath a blank white sky. All around, as if only recently and tentatively invaded, were birch forests. Indoors, we drank a lot of black tea while a babushka circulated from room to room carrying jars of pickle. I was never able to figure out where, or if, she slept. Reading what we do about the encroachments of hypercapitalism, I expected the centre of Moscow to look like midtown Manhattan these days. It doesn’t. Sure, you can buy Gucci in GUM. But the vibe, to the outsider, is the same: buildings and roads on a greater-than-human scale, greyness, cold, nullity overhead. The principal innovation seems to be the traffic jam: eight lanes of gridlock everywhere you look — like Los Angeles with sleet and no ready access to anti-depressants. ‘The city is not user-friendly,’ one lifelong Muscovite, whose commute by car takes two-and-a-half hours, told me. ‘It welcomes nobody.’
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One of the most unsettling things about post-Soviet Russia is the way in which the country’s past is recycled as kitsch. At Ismailovo — the giant tourist-trap flea-market in the shadow of the grotesque hotels erected for the 1980 Olympics — there’s row on row of matryoshka dolls. Lenin nested in Stalin nested in Krushchev nested in Brezhnev nested in Andropov nested in Gorbachev is the old joke. Now, under the thin snow, you can get Osama bin Laden with a succession of other terrorists nesting in him. Or, adding copyright infringement to bad taste, SpongeBob SquarePants. An array of pewter busts — Lenin having been the essential desk ornament for the 1980s student — contains Marx, Trotsky, Stalin and a figure that at first I take for Dobby the house-elf from Harry Potter. Oh. Vladimir Putin. In all this I detect not commentary, but the absence of it.
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We left Moscow on the day of the elections. As we nosed through the traffic, the subject came up with our taxi driver. Was he going to vote? My command of the language is hopelessly decayed but I know the words ‘Sovyetski Soyuz’ — Soviet Union — when I hear them, and the language of the body is universal — he was managing the very Russian-seeming trick of driving and shrugging at the same time. His line: why vote when the outcome is already decided? It was, he said with grim good humour, like old times. B. Mockby lives.
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Sam Leith’s most recent book is You Talkin’ to Me?, a guide to rhetoric.
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