In 2015, as I was making my way across Russia for the third time, I saw plenty more new construction: Vladivostok had its two brand-new suspension bridges, Irkutsk had its newly renovated downtown, and in Novosibirsk, you could hardly see the sky without peering through a thicket of cranes. Yet the ruble krizis had thrown a wrench into the Russian success story. While the people I’d met on the trip had, almost universally, become better off between 1995 and 2005, in 2015 they fell somewhere into the murky middle.
Moscow, however, seemed richer than ever.
My train arrived in Moscow’s Kazan Station at 9:30 in the morning, and as I rode in a taxi to my hotel, I was struck by a wave of nostalgia. We passed by the beautiful baroque Yaroslavl train station, the stylistic twin of the Vladivostok train station more than 5,000 miles away at the other end of the track. We crossed the massive Garden Ring Road, then the smaller Boulevard Ring, with its grassy, tree-lined medians. Then we rode by Pushkin Square, with Russia’s original McDonald’s on one side and the modernist Rossiya Theater on the other, and I remembered walking along the plaza here in 1988, savoring one of my first Moscow snowfalls. With a start, I realized that memory was more than a quarter-century old.
I checked into the Marco Polo Presnja, a historic hotel within walking distance of my old stomping grounds, the U.S. embassy. It was also, according to Google Maps, an easy 20-minute walk from here to Red Square, so after a quick shower, I headed out into the brilliant autumn sunshine to explore.
Strolling through the Patriarch’s Ponds neighborhood, I couldn’t believe how clean, renovated, and, well, cheerful it seemed. Wine stores, restaurants, cake shops, and cafés abounded, but instead of the air of ostentation that permeated Moscow ten years earlier, the city felt more relaxed.
As I walked past the TASS[5] building, with its familiar globe and arched entryway, I gaped at a sight I’d never seen in Russia: bike lanes. A little farther down the block was another shock—a row of gleaming bicycles in a bike-share rack. Freshly painted pedestrian crosswalks allowed people to cross the street at their leisure, a big change from the sprint-for-your-life system of years past. I might as well have been in Amsterdam, or Vienna; this certainly didn’t feel like the Moscow I’d known for decades. It reminded me of how New York’s Times Square felt after then-mayor Rudy Giuliani swept in and “cleaned up”: gleaming, wealthy, but sanitized.
After ten more minutes of strolling, I arrived at Manezh Square. The giant underground shopping mall was still there, of course, with its row of fast-food joints. I walked by a Sbarro, then found myself eyeing, of all places, McDonald’s. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and was starving. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten at a McDonald’s, so in the name of research, and hunger, I headed in.
The place was a madhouse. People swarmed everywhere, crowding the cashiers’ counter, hovering for tables, and waiting their turn at automated kiosks where you could order on a large touch screen and pay with a credit card. I decided to order at the counter, taking my place among a horde of people that resembled a crowd of bees pushing its way into a hive.
Waves of chatting, laughing teenagers came in, families scurried about, and tables were packed with every kind of diner imaginable—young and old, foreigners and Russians. Overall, the age skewed young, and as I hunted for a table after getting my meal, I had the unwelcome thought that most of my fellow diners probably weren’t born yet on my first visit to Moscow.
Suitably (or unsuitably) nourished, I headed back out. I walked up the cobbled passageway by the red-brick State Historical Museum and emerged onto Red Square. Even though I’d been there dozens of times, I was still struck by how beautiful, sprawling, and impressive it was. To my right was a line of people, and like a good Soviet, I immediately got in it, though I had no idea what we were queuing for. This turned out to be the line to see waxy Lenin in his tomb—one of the few elements of Moscow that, even 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, remains unchanged.
In the evening, I ate dinner at the Margarita Café—a restaurant I’d first visited back in 1988. It was a modest little eatery back then, serving flaky pastries and muddy coffee in thin plastic cups, popular primarily because it was near the author Mikhail Bulgakov’s old apartment. In the Soviet days, Bulgakov’s apartment building was a hangout for disaffected youth, who gathered to smoke, drink, and talk in a stairwell covered with graffiti homages to the author’s banned masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. This whole area—Bulgakov’s building, the streets around Patriarch’s Ponds, the Margarita Café—felt like a secret haunt for the literary set, a raw and magical place where devotees could imagine themselves as characters in the novel.
By 2015, the area had officially become a monument to Bulgakov. Now there are not one, but two Bulgakov museums—one in the apartment where he lived, the other in the building next door. The two apparently compete, engaged in a spitting match over which is the “official” museum. And while graffiti still covers the stairwell walls, the scrawlings are relatively new, as the drawings and quotes from earlier generations have been unceremoniously painted over. A few blocks away, by Patriarch’s Ponds, a posted sign declares DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS—a nod to chapter 1 of The Master and Margarita.
I found these changes amusing, though there was something artificial about them too; what once was a spontaneous, unofficial shrine to a beloved author now had a whiff of Disneyland to it. As I sat in the Margarita Café, where the wobbly metal tables and plastic plates had been replaced by polished wood, gothic paintings, and a menu of seasonal “Russo-European” cuisine, I pondered how we all love to pine for the old days, building them up in memory as some kind of golden time. Then I took a few photos with my phone, uploaded them instantly to Facebook, tagged some friends from the embassy days, and enjoyed a real-time cross-global conversation with people in London, New York, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles.
The day I arrived in Moscow, I called MC Pavlov. We’d spoken briefly by phone a week earlier, and now it was time to make a plan to meet. “Oh, there’s a special service happening at the Hare Krishna temple tomorrow. We can go to that,” he said, with enthusiasm. Then he asked, “Are you married?”
This threw me. To the best of my recollection, I hadn’t told him I was gay, and while I was pretty sure he wouldn’t care, it felt weird to tell him over the phone. Besides that, it was one thing to be gay, and quite another to actually be married; even people who were unfazed by the first sometimes balked at the second. So I dodged the question, saying, “It’s complicated.”
“Ah, OK! Sorry!” he blurted, seeming embarrassed. “I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just that the service is for women who want to pray for their husbands. But if you don’t have a husband, you can pray for a family member or a friend or whoever you want.” I told him that sounded perfect, and we made a plan to meet at 10 a.m. at the statue of Pushkin, not far from my hotel.
5
The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, or TASS, was the main newsgathering organ in Soviet times.