MOSCOW, even old Moscow, is so vast that no end of houses, streets, even entire settlements could be built in it, and it would still remain spacious and uncluttered. It is this spaciousness that is one of the city’s striking features, and as in each of the world’s urban giants, one must walk endlessly to get anywhere, or ride for hours on the metro, the bus, in a taxi. This is especially troublesome for those who live in the huge new neighborhoods that now surround the center of the metropolis. But these problems do not discourage anyone. Everyone wants to live in Moscow. The city numbers around ten million people, and another ten million arrive here daily to work and shop. The Moscow writer Vladimir Sorokin calls his neighbors (and actually the inhabitants of Russian cities in general) the urban peasantry. These people are a sociological phenomenon. Once upon a time they left the village, and now they cannot return: the village no longer exists, destroyed and replaced as it was by kolkhozes. But a kind of memory has endured among these people, certain habits and reflexes. Paradoxically, the spirit of the Russian village survived, not in the vast fields of the Volga Valley, but in the skyscrapers, each dozens of stories high, of Moscow’s new neighborhoods: Bielayev, Miedviedkov, Golianov. It is difficult to find one’s way to any of them, and at night, if someone doesn’t know the place well, it is impossible to find one’s way at all. One of the humorous ditties of Moscow taxi drivers addresses this:
I will take you to the tundra
Even to Ivonov
I will take you wherever you desire
Only not to Golianov [Miedviedkov, Boberov, et cetera].
TO FLY INTO Moscow at the end of 1989 is to enter a world dominated by the proliferating, unbridled word. After years of the gag, of silence, and of censorship, the dams are bursting, and stormy, powerful, ubiquitous torrents of words are flooding over everything. The Russian intelligentsia is once again (or, rather, for the first time) in its element — endless, indefatigable, fierce, frantic discussion. How they love this, how good this makes them feel! Wherever someone announces some discussion, immeasurable crowds immediately gather. The subject of the discussion can be anything, but of course the preferred theme is the past. So, what about Lenin, what about Trotsky, what about Bucharin? And the poets are as important as the politicians. Did Mandelshtam die in the camps of hunger or as a result of an epidemic? Who is responsible for the suicide of Tsvetayeva? These matters are debated for hours on end, till dawn.
But even more time is spent in front of television sets, watching broadcasts of the sessions of the Supreme Soviet that go on night and day. Several factors contributed simultaneously to this explosion of political passions. First, politics at the highest rungs of power was surrounded here for centuries by an airtight, almost mystical secrecy. The rulers decided about the life or death of people, and yet these people were never able to see the rulers with their own eyes. And then, suddenly, here they are, the rulers, getting angry, their ties askew waving their arms around, picking their ears. Second, as they follow the deliberations of their highest popular assembly, Russians for the first time have the sense of participating in something important.
And finally — perestroika coincided with the explosion of television in this country. Television gave to perestroika a dimension that no other event in the history of the Imperium had ever had.
THE TEMPLE AND THE PALACE
NO MATTER how many times I pass that way, I cannot tear my eyes away from the place. I stare intently, as if I’m looking for something, through the mist, through time, although of course there is nothing to see.
To get there, driving along Leninski Prospekt (where I’m staying) toward the center of town, one must pass Kammenyj Most (“Stone Bridge” in Russian) and immediately turn downhill to the right, then right again, emerging on the boulevard that runs along the river and is called Nabereznaja. The spot is right there, just after the traffic lights, directly beyond the high viaduct, enclosed by a fence.
IN THE WINTER, clouds of white steam rise into the air. The steam comes from a large swimming pool that remains open year-round because the water is heated. When the cold reaches minus thirty degrees Celsius, the swimming pool becomes a paradise for a special category of people, whose greatest satisfaction in life comes from being able to bathe in such a terrible cold in an open-air pool. And nothing happens! They live! We can see that they are truly satisfied with themselves because of the manner in which they get out of the water and strut along the edge of the pooclass="underline" their movements are energetic, their silhouettes firm, chests thrust forward, heads held high.
THE FALL OF 1812. Napoleon, leading his crushed and decimated army, has abandoned Moscow and is fleeing Russia. He has suffered a shattering defeat. The Russians are broadening their offensive, they are triumphing. To express gratitude to Providence for having “rescued Russia from the ruin threatening her,” the czar, Alexander I, decides to construct in Moscow a temple “in the name of the one who saved Russia”—in the name of Christ the Savior.
The temple is to be as large as is the czar’s gratitude to the Son of God — therefore it is to be immense, gigantic.
But because the czar was busy with the conquest of Azerbaijan and Bessarabia, and also because of disorder and, perhaps, ordinary forgetfulness as well, the temple was not erected during his lifetime. It was not until the fifth year of the reign of Alexander I’s successor and brother, Nicholas I, in other words in 1830, that the idea of constructing the temple of gratitude was taken up anew. Two years later Nicholas I approved a design presented to him by the architect Konstantin Ton. And then for six years he deliberated over where to build this temple. He finally made up his mind and chose precisely this place, where today a special category of people, swimming in an open-air pool during severe frosts, offer proof of their courage and grit. This place had two advantages: first, it was near the Kremlin, and, second, nearby flowed the river in which the Orthodox People of God could perform their traditional religious ablutions.
BEFORE LONG the czar formed the Committee for the Construction of the Temple of Christ the Savior, and work began on a grand scale.
Construction went on uninterrupted for forty-five years.
Nicholas I was in charge, but he died, under mysterious circumstances, in 1855. The father’s work was carried on by the son, Czar Alexander II, although he died in a bombing incident in March 1881. Fortunately the next czar, Alexander III, the son of Alexander II, also displayed an abiding and fervent solicitude for the project. Each imperator lavished upon this ambitious (and, it would seem, immortal) effort endless time and money. Not only Moscow, not only Russia, but also the entire world watched the construction with astonishment and speechless admiration. Czars came and went, old generations died off and new ones populated the earth, Russia threw herself into the chaos of consecutive wars and conquests or suffered recurring waves of famine and epidemic, and yet nothing could interrupt, or even delay, the labor on this unique and extraordinary structure.
THE CONSECRATION of the temple takes place in the presence of Czar Alexander III on the twenty-sixth of May 1883. Although the exterior of the building, arising for years before everyone’s eyes, is after all well known, those now entering the interior utter a cry of rapture and admiration. The figures cited by the architects heighten still further this mood of transport and ecstasy.