No, not some kind of disease, but the All-Russian Exhibition Center, aka Exhibition of National Economic Achievments, aka VDNKh…Spring has finally come to Russia – like a spell breaking – and on Saturday I enjoyed it by going walkabout in Moscow. Such a fine day, everybody out in their good clothes, the furry overcoats and galoshes stowed away for another year. I stepped out in my new black jacket, skinny jeans, and sunglasses, feeling very Russian. Something about the air here in spring – everybody looks happier, or walks with their backs straighter, or something. Stray dogs sunning on the sidewalk and kids flashing by on Rollerblades.
It was the first time I'd been to town since the bombings last week. The Russians that I knew in Zelenograd had taken the news with a kind of sad, disgusted resignation – and superficially, in Moscow seemed the same – except that the crowds in the Metro looked a little closer at each other, and there were many police officers with dogs patrolling. Nobody bothered me for papers or otherwise – except a man who asked if I was foreign and tried to hit on me – but that's normal.
But I got off the train at Lubyanka, and then I felt it for certain, Lubyanka being the station where the North Caucasian girl blew herself up, taking twenty people with her…All of the Metro stations are like museum galleries: spotlessly clean, with elaborate friezes, stained glass, and chandeliers, and somehow the sheer shininess of Lubyanka made the idea of it exploding in blood and glass all the more viscerally horrifying.
Along one wall there was a roped-off section with heaps and roses, and a whole crowd standing silently in front of it. A few were crying, but most were just standing, staring numbly at the candles that guttered in the breeze as the train roared through.
What you can say? There are so many things to say – but in the end maybe only this: I wish we human people didn't have to hurt each other so much.
Then I went up into the street, to Biblio Globus, the big foreign language bookstore, because it was my plan to find a book to read and a park to read it in, out in the air, far away from grief and trouble. Biblio Globus is next door to the former Lubyanka prison, which struck me as ironic - eighty years ago the kind of books sold there would have gotten you sent to Lubyanka and/or shot...
Half an hour later, now armed with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and a dual-language book of poems by the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, I went in search of VDNKh.
There are few things as surreal as totalitarian art when the driving totalitarian element has ebbed away. The warped Orwellian rhetoric, the labyrinth of logic, that forced it into context is gone, and you're left staring at, let's say, a 30-story Space Obelisk, or a fountain crusted with fake mineral chunks and duck sculptures. This was the All-Russian Exhibition Pavilion, all 500 acres of it. It was constructed in the late 1930's, at the very fever pitch of Stalinist paranoia, and the whole point was pan-Soviet unity, the glorification of the collective. And what better way to glorify the collective than to build an immense park, crowded with golden fountains and buildings like the birthday cakes of a mad baker?
I wandered, dumbstruck. There was the famous 'Worker and Kolkhoz Woman' statue – there was (once upon a time) the world's highest Ferris wheel - and a cattle pavilion, and a triumphal arch. Many of the buildings were designed to represent some particular corner of the Soviet empire – Karelia was the most interesting, with its carved wooden friezes, but there was also Armenia, where you could eat at a restaurant called Ararat, and Georgia, where you could buy gold and luxury goods. As for goods, they were everywhere, a barrage of capitalism to make Lenin weep.
I wandered into one building, which felt as though it might have been a museum at one point, or some other large dusty hall, but it had been subdivided into an indoor market, a perfect maze of stalls selling all kinds of things – scarves, fur coats, guitars, handbags, candy. One stall was playing some kind of American 90's boy band music, and the woman in the next stall had manipulated her battery-powered puppets so that they appeared to be dancing to it. A few teenagers had paused to watch. I followed the corridors round and round in circles, never quite sure if I was passing the same place twice. Then I went upstairs, where there was a bliny restaurant, a wax figurine museum, and an exhibition of cats from around the world, hidden from the non-paying public by a series of room dividers and black curtains. Trying to escape the market, I found that all the heavy double doors marked 'exit' were padlocked. The only exit was from a landing above the toilet in the basement. I staggered out into the hazy evening sunlight, and the door banged shut behind me. From the outside, you would never guess that all that was in there…
As I continued to stroll, I heard loud music issuing from the steps of another building. It was some kind of rousing Soviet song, the kind backed up by about 200 baritones and a brass band. Then abruptly the music switched to maniacal children's laughter, some babbling, and then – BLAM BLAM BLAM, like an AK-47. A patter of hysterical laughter. A segue into a selection of light accordion tunes, followed by the chorus, with the whole series playing again…
I stopped dead. There was nothing going on to provide context for this soundtrack. The teenagers on the stone steps, smoking and skateboarding, paid no attention. The young women strolling with their boyfriends – oblivious. So this was normal? I went on.
A ways down, there was a camel, a stolid Bactrian camel, with its spongy feet planted on the pavement, accompanied by a burro in a blaze-orange blanket. In the distance there was a building like a white stone mosque with a rounded dome – except that there was a full-sized rocket ship rising out of its central pavilion. In front of me the sun was setting on a massive, empty fountain that featured ten or twelve frolicking proletariats, all painted brassy gold. The air smelled of charcoal and meat from the shashlik stand close by. Very faintly in the distance I could still hear the gunfire and the accordions, overlaid by the tinkle of carnival music from the amusement park.
Я должен жить, хотя дважды умер
А город от воды ополоумел:
Как он хорош, как весел, как скуласт,
Как на лемех приятен жирный пласт,
Как степь лежит в апрельском провороте
А небо небо – твой Буонаротти…
I've got to live – though twice dead already,The town punch-drunk from water:
How pretty, high-cheek-boned, so alive,
And that oily loam on the plow's blade, how fine –
how the steppe churns in April's turning,
but the sky, that sky – there's your Michelangelo…
-Osip Mandelstam
