This one? Or maybe this one?! No, not this one, this one looks like a decent man. So you think that a spy has horns on his head? A spy can look normal; he can even have a good-natured smile! Of course they don’t guess correctly, for there wasn’t a single spy among the hundred choices. There are no more spies now. There aren’t? Can one imagine a world without spies? The soldier’s mind works, searches, penetrates. One thing is certain — the spy wants to get in here at all costs, to slip through, break in. The only question is, Which one is he from among the dozens of people, each of them patiently waiting for the moment when the vigilant pair of pale eyes will come to rest upon his face? Some say that there is no more cold war. But it exists there, it is in this back-and-forth gaze between the photograph and the face, in this insistent and piercing stare, in this scrutiny and suspicious glance, in this pensiveness, hesitation, and uncertainty about what, finally, to do with us.
THE SIGHT of Moscow enraptured Chateaubriand. The author of Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb accompanied Bonaparte on the expedition to Moscow. On September 6, 1812, the French army reached the great city:
Napoleon appeared on horseback near the advance guard. One more rise had to be crossed; it bordered Moscow the way Montmartre borders Paris and was called the Hill of Homage, for Russians prayed here at the sight of the holy city like pilgrims at the sight of Jerusalem. Moscow of the golden domes, as Slavic poets say, blazed in the sun: two hundred and ninety-five churches, one thousand five hundred palaces, houses out of decoratively sculpted wood, yellow, green, pink, all that was lacking was cypresses and the Bosphorus. The Kremlin, covered in burnished or painted sheets of iron, was a part of this ensemble. Among the exquisite villas made of brick and marble flowed the River Moscow, surrounded by parks of pines — the palms of this sky. Venice in the days of its glory on the waters of the Adriatic was not more splendid.… Moscow! Moscow! our soldiers shouted and started to applaud.
“… FOR RUSSIANS prayed here at the sight of the holy city like pilgrims at the sight of Jerusalem.”
Yes, because Moscow was for them a holy city, the capital of the world — a Third Rome. This last notion was put forth in the sixteenth century by the Pskov sage and visionary, the monk Philotheus. “Two Romes have already fallen (Peter’s and Byzantium),” he writes in a letter to the contemporary Muscovite prince Vasily III. “The Third Rome (Moscow) stands. There will not be a fourth,” he categorically assures the prince. Moscow: it is the end of history, the end of mankind’s earthly wanderings, the open gateway to the heavens.
Russians were capable of believing in such things profoundly, with conviction, fanatically.
The Moscow Napoleon saw on that sunny September afternoon of 1812 no longer exists. The Russians burned it down the next day so as to force the French to turn around. Later, Moscow burned several more times. “Our cities,” Turgenev writes somewhere, “burn every five years.” It is understandable: Russia’s building material was timber. Timber was cheap; there were forests everywhere. One could raise a building out of timber quickly, and, moreover, a wooden wall retains heat well. But then if a fire breaks out, everything burns, the whole city. Thousands upon thousands of Russian townspeople went to their deaths in flames.
• • •
ONLY THOSE CHURCHES and palaces of the aristocracy that were built out of bricks and stone had a chance of surviving. But that kind of construction was a rarity in Russia, a luxury. Therefore, the demolishing of Orthodox churches by the Bolsheviks was not only a battle with religion, but also the destruction of the only remaining vestiges of the past, of all of history. A desert remained, a black hole.
IT WAS STALIN who tried once and for all to destroy the old Moscow, the one that today can be seen only in the illustrations of Mikhail Pilayev.
All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything. The thoughts of Qadaffi and Ceauşescu, Idi Amin and Alfredo Stroessner — there is no end to the profundities and wisdom. Stalin was expert on history, economics, poetry, and linguistics. As it turned out, he was also expert on architecture. In 1934—which means between one ghastly purge and the next, even more horrifying, one — he commissioned a plan for the rebuilding of Moscow. He devoted to it, as was piously written, much time and attention. The new Moscow was to manifest in its appearance the following traits of the epoch: triumph, power, monumentality, might, seriousness, massiveness, invincibility (according to E. V. Sidorin, Voprosy Filosofii, 12/1988). They set energetically to work. Explosives, pickaxes, and bulldozers went into motion. Entire neighborhoods were razed, churches and palaces blown up. Tens of thousands of people were expelled from beautiful, bourgeois apartments — into tents, into slums. Old Moscow vanished from the face of the earth, and in its place arose heavy and monotonous, although powerful, edifices — symbols of the new authority. Fortunately, as was often the case under real socialism, disorder, laziness, and a lack of tools saved a part of the city from final destruction.
AS I SAID, a few old streets, houses, and small apartment buildings were preserved; neglected, yes, shabby and lichen covered, yes, but there they are, they are still standing. With some effort it is possible to imagine that this was once a moderately cozy city. One could sit down on a little porch, catch one’s breath on a bench under a tree, walk into an inn, a tavern, or a bar, to relax, warm oneself, drink some tea or cognac. There is nothing like it in today’s Moscow! I have been walking around the city for several hours now, and we have no place to go. The few restaurants are either closed, or old KGB types are standing around in front of them, just waiting to grab you by the collar and throw you into the middle of the street, under the speeding traffic. Moreover, the socks in my boots have gotten twisted in such a fashion that I cannot walk any farther; I must fix them, but where is there to sit down, where is there to sit down in Moscow in the late autumn in the rain and the snow, when one is out on the street, when one has neither a home nor a hotel (the home or the hotel are far away) and the only place left is a frozen puddle of mud?
AS I WALKED this way through the streets of old Moscow, it suddenly struck me that I was beginning to understand the meaning of the October Revolution — the great event of the twentieth century, which (as we all know) changed the course of human history. I noticed that the ground floors of these houses and small apartment buildings were built — long, long ago — as accommodations for stores, for artisans’ workshops, for little restaurants and cafés. This is evident from the display windows, the type of stairs, doors, and spacious interiors. Here beats the heart of the old, commercial, bustling, and enterprising Moscow. Throngs of people passed through these streets. It was colorful and noisy, crowded, exotic. Today, walking through these same, although now-empty and lifeless, streets, I instinctively look into the display windows. Desks stand in all of them. There are no counters or shelves here, no grocery items or textiles. Only more or less shabby desks. Desks, moreover, tightly jammed together, crammed, stuffed in as if by force, arranged practically in layers, like bunk beds in military barracks. How much discussion must go on about this, how many conferences, how much deliberation on such a vital subject as — where is there room to fit in one more desk? On those desks (visible through the display windows), piles of inquiries, forms, and questionnaires. And — this too is everywhere — tea glasses.
Cunning often reveals itself in the simplest things. The streets through which I now walk confirm this truth. The maneuver that brought victory to the Bolsheviks consisted of expelling and expropriating the merchants (independent people who guided themselves by the laws of the marketplace) and placing clerks in their stores — meek and obedient instruments of the authorities. The man behind the counter was replaced by the man behind the desk: the Revolution triumphed.