Day 10: Off and Onegin

Signing off, the Pole truth

Goodbye, Moscow. I'm going to miss your angry-looking Cyrillic signs.

Metallo Remont! Soomok Zontov!

I get my last Moscow metro to Paveletskaya station. Tears are shed.

I've said it once, I'll say it again: I am Andreas Gursky

Train, flight, Zurich, flight, tube. As I arrive at Stockwell, I almost expect to see the bleeding Polish man and middle-aged woman wandering around in a daze. But alas, they, like my holiday, are gone.

Day 9: "MosSoviet is the master!"

By Georgia, Gorky blimey, culture potato, Arcade fuck off

Jamie has now departed, so I’m left picking up the pieces of stuff we didn’t have time to do. Me and Tadich visit the Starlite Diner. Tadich tells me that round the corner some highly unpleasant guy he knows is having lunch with the ousted President of Georgia's granddaughter. "One time, I saw her open her handbag, and it was full of hundred-dollar bills," says Tadich.

***

We go to Maxim Gorky's house, the Ryabushinsky Mansion, given to the writer by the state in 1931. The Gorkster, as he was known to friends, was a bit reluctant to accept the honour, thinking that living in a whopping great mansion might tarnish his "proletarian" image a bit. When one guest toasted "the master of the house", Gorky went mental and shouted, "Do not call me master! I am not the master of this house! MosSoviet is the master!"

***

A trip to Moscow's premier pirate DVD market follows, then we go to a classical music concert, which features a piano trio playing works by Schumann, Schubert and Brahms. Then we get baked potatoes from a kiosk and eat them on the street.

***

I get home and realise that the Arcade Fire gig that I had a ticket for is, at this exact moment, about to start back in London. In tribute, Tadich puts on their first album. He makes sure the tracks are randomly shuffled too, so it's exactly like being there.

Day 8, Moscow: Feeling Rough

Coincidences, dead souls, bloody Ellingham, tat, Sauna Blues

Wake at 9.30 and, as the boys are still asleep, decide to get some serious holiday reading done, as I’d only got through one book so far – Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. Manage to get through 125 pages of Haruki Murukami’s A Wild Sheep Chase before Jamie had got out of bed. I WIN. This is my seventh Murukami, which is weird, as The Counterlife was also the seventh book I’ve read by Roth. Also weird: when I was on holiday in Morocco last year, I read novels by Murukami and Roth as well. Also also weird: these novels seem about as non-Russian as you can get, and yet the former namechecks Dostoevsky on several occasions, while the latter liberally quotes Tolstoy. Spooky.

***

We head over to the south-west of the city to see the Novodevichiy cemetery. There are famous people buried here, though they’re a bit tricky to spot, as the graveyard is pretty packed with, like, graves and stuff. We missed Stanislavsky, Kropotkin, Eisenstein, Scriabin and Prokofiev, but caught Gogol, Chekhov, Yuri Nikulin (a famous Russian entertainer) Nadezhda Allileuva (Stalin’s wife), Shostakovich and Kruschev.

Yuri've got to be kidding

The President's death
was a Kruschev blow

Gogol, Gogol, Gogol. Oi oi oi!

Apparently when historians checked out Gogol’s grave later on, they found claw marks on the inside of the coffin – he’d been inadvertently buried alive. Oops!

***

After a rather extravagant lunch involving seafood and caviar, we pop back to Izmaylovo market for some souvenir buying. Except we don’t, getting out at the wrong stop, thanks to a Metro station mislabelling by the Rough Guide. Jamie suggests that “Rough Guide” signifies “Not entirely precise guide”. My confidence in the venerable Mark Ellingham (RG founder) is briefly shaken. But it turns out well, as I end up taking a few rather nice pictures of Izmaylovo Park with my still-image capturing equipment:

We head to the market and buy things that will probably look tacky when we get home. The afternoon ends with another strange coincidence. Only the day before, while watching Stanley Kubrick’s directorial debut The Killing, I’d started talking about a John Malkovich film I’d vaguely heard about about five years ago, a true story detailing the life of a man who went round impersonating the famous director, despite the fact that the imposter looked nothing like him. But I’d never heard it mentioned, or seen a copy of it since. Inevitably, we stumble across a pirate DVD copy of it in the market.

***

Back home, after a beery evening at Krisis Xhanra, we watch the second part of The Irony of Fate, or Sauna Blues, a popular Russian film from the seventies which tells the story of a man who gets so incredibly drunk in a Moscow bathhouse on New Year’s Eve that he accidentally ends up on a plane and finds himself in an apartment with exactly the same address as his, but in Leningrad. Hilarious consequences naturally ensue. The beautiful woman who owns the Leningrad flat has to explain to her lover why a strange man with no trousers has appeared in her bed. “It’s all an amazing coincidence!” she says.

Day 7, Moscow: When Pushkin comes to shove

Babel: big in the city, beard ban, Gogh medicine

Getting off at Kropotkinskaya Metro, me and Jamie inadvertently find ourselves visiting the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Stalin destroyed the original 19th century version in 1933 to build a massive Empire State-beating skybusting palace which was going to be topped with a hundred-metre statue of Lenin whose eyes would emit an evil bright red beam. It never happened – instead, they built a swimming pool. That was a bit crap, so in the mid-1990s, they rebuilt the old church, to exactly the same design.

"And what did you do in the mid-90s?"
"I built this, what did you do?"

"So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine"

Just across the river is the statue of Peter the Great. My potted Russian history tells me that PtG banned beards in Russian society (later imposing a beard tax), worked incognito in the dockyards of England and Holland to learn a few shipbuilding skills, and had a disproportionately small head. I think he was “great” thanks to the combination of progressive reforms and only torturing and massacring a small proportion of the population, unusual for Russian leaders, it seems. Anyway, here he is, on his boat:

Happy Peter

Then onto the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Private Collections. Both were amazingly empty – at one stage I found myself completely alone in a room of five Van Goghs and three Sisleys. They had three Henri Rousseaus too – I LOVE HIM - and this miniature by Rodin (Eternal Spring) which was so amazing I almost cried. Contents clearly not very Russian, but NONETHELESS TOTALLY SWEET.

***

In the evening, we have a late dinner at a Georgian restaurant which features the grumpiest waitress in the world. A few people are dancing too, with a certain degree of skilll. The waitress is annoyed by this, particularly after one couple nearly knock her over as she tries to show us to our table.

Day 6, Moscow: Shitewatch

Tourist attack, Wahey the Vlads, Stalin for time

Day 6 features a number of valuable lessons from Russia in how to make life difficult for tourists.

Lenin’s Mausoleum
a) get tourists to pay 60Roubles to place bags in cloakroom (compulsory)
b) inform tourists that small bags cannot be placed inside larger bags
b) seal off the whole of Red Square so after visiting tomb, tourists must do an entire circuit of the square to reclaim bags

Visas
a) make tourists hand over migration cards for half a day for Visa registration (compulsory), ignoring fact that police will attempt to arrest those without migration cards
b) once registration has been completed, insist that registration forms must be returned before tourist leaves the country

Tretyakov (new) Gallery
Seal off rooms 20-40. Allow tourists to buy full-price ticket without informing them that half the gallery has been closed.

***

It was a good day though. With the help of a heady combination of chemicals, Lenin’s 137-year-old body has been preserved since his death in 1924, and so, at appointed times, you can actually go into his mausoleum, and see his corpse. Because of terrifyingly blank-faced soldiers standing guard throughout, you don’t linger, filing slowly past the glass case which the deceased revolutionary now inhabits.

It’s just occurred to me that before now, I’d never seen a dead body in real life. How strange to think that my first is Lenin’s!

***

Behind Lenin’s mausoleum are the graves of other prestigious dead Russians; most I don’t recognise, but Gagarin, Brezhnev and Chernenko are there. Most graves have a single flower lying on them. Stalin’s, unsettlingly, has two enormous bouquets.

Your Rough Guide quote-hit:

Khrushchev, [who]… in 1956, was by no means unassailable, gave a “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, in which Stalin’s name was for the first time officially linked to [Leningrad Party boss Sergei] Kirov’s murder and the suffering of millions during the Great Terror. So traumatic was the revelation that many delegates had heart attacks on the spot.

That evening, after a meal in the excellently-named Ludi Kakludi (“people for people”), we ask our young Russian barman about Stalin. He tells us that, yes, many do still revere Uncle Joe, but it’s mainly the older generation. Life was comfortable back then, and it’s thanks to him they collect decent pensions. It must be hard not to be grateful when you were spared.

Day 5, Moscow: Gawky Parkhouse

Red taped, Arbatrary, McHangingabout, Moo hoo

Hangover. The best cure, of course, is to attempt to get your Visa registered (required within three days of arrival). During a drawn-out visit to our agency, we end up traipsing through an enormous building of corridors and offices. I’ve never seen anything that looks so damn 1984.

***

We visit the Arbat, and are slightly disappointed. However, the bohemian smoke drifting across the far end of the street and ominous cracked sky does give the area a certain something.

This photo was completely Arbatrary

Outside Macdonald’s is the area’s meeting point hotspot. We hang around outside for Tadich.

A visit to this place reportedly makes your day

The Canadian takes us to a buffet restaurant called Moo Moo. Or in Cyrillic: My My. A nice-looking woman tries to chat me up in the queue. My Russian still isn’t good enough to respond, so I shrug and say “Anglisky”. She looks downcast and turns away. I start to worry that maybe this was a big moment for her – perhaps she’d been in an abusive relationship that had destroyed her confidence, and, as the mental and physical scars had slowly healed, she’d finally plucked up the courage to try and get back in the game. But there is nothing I can do, except pay for my chicken.

Day 4, Moscow: Krem and punishment

Kremlin-snapping, GUM see, more vodka, the greatest kebab of all time

Darren’s last day. We go to the Kremlin, and find that Russians don’t make it easy for tourists. In fact, they seem to be actively discouraging tourists from visiting stuff, writing everything in Cyrillic (not a problem for me, fnar fnar), placing scary armed guards everywhere, and – in the case of the armoury museum – labeling the main entrance with the English words “Staff Entrance”. Finally make it in, and press the large button on my camera many times over.

Always believe in your soul

Are you the gatekeeper?

Definitely a canonical work

After Darren leaves, me and Jamie head over to Red Square.

Crack horse

We pop in to GUM (stands for State Department Store, pronounced goom), a huge and highly impressive shopping mall. Rough Guide fact alert:

In 1932 [GUM] was used for the lying-in-state of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda, after her suicide; Stalin stayed there for days, silently noting who came to pay their respects.

The temple of GUM

In the evening, beginning to fall into a not unpleasant pattern, we go to meet Tadich. There are predictably vodka-soaked results.

An ap-Paul-ing vision

As the night draws to a close, Tadich takes us to sample “the greatest Kebab of all time”. I’m not so impressed, until someone points out that I’m eating the paper as well. I throw the paper away, but find that the pastry underneath tastes like paper too.

Day 3, Moscow: Barley-vous Anglais?

Ghostbusters, fire, Nathan Barley

Hard to beat the high of Day 2, but in the morning we visit Izmaylovo Market. By this stage, I know how to ask how much stuff costs in Russian (“Stolka stoit?”). But I rarely understand the answer.

Tadich then surprises us with a ride on a ski lift up a snowy hill to see the dramatic Moscow University building. Like a number of Moscow’s daunting towering buildings, it’s totally Ghostbusters:

Clearly built by Gozer the Sumerian

The evening ends in a restaurant which has a bar shaped like a fire engine, waitresses dressed as firewomen and miniature fire extinguishers on the tables that dispense beer. We take full advantage.

More beer for table 5 please!

Then we go back to the flat and watch Nathan Barley on DVD.

Morris + Brooker = genius
Genius + off day = Nathan Barley

Day 2, Moscow: War and Pivas

Vodka, beer, VVTs, cognac, beer, Mojito, beer, lesbian horseriders

I am awoken from my sofa-slumber at around 10am by the sound of Tadich clomping through the lounge, singing “Vodka in the morning, vodka in the mor-ning!” over and over again. I hear a bottle being slammed down on the table, open my bleary eyes and see a bottle of vodka. An hour later, as Russian tradition dictates, we start drinking the vodka.

After lunch at a US-style diner where no one speaks English, Tadich introduces us to the fact that it is socially acceptable to walk along the road drinking beer (piva) – regarded as something of a soft drink over here – by buying us four from a street kiosk then telling us to drink as we walk. Bottles in hand, we head to VVTs via the space obelisk, a 1964 Soviet monument honouring Russia’s space achievements. Its shape is highly pleasing, and shown below.

If this shape was a noise, that noise
would probably be "Schwooooooo"

Then onto VVTs, previously known as the Exhibition of Economic Achievements. It’s a big Stalinist theme park with lots of huge pavilions, a goldie lookin’ fountain, the obligatory fearsome Lenin statue, a couple of passenger planes, and a rocket monument.

Lenin – rad

Clowns foiled by snow

Our walk wasn't all plane sailing

Pretty fly, eh?

Transliterated, this is pronounced "Paliozlektronika".
I'm guessing that means "pavilion of electronic
equipment", or "pirate DVD market"

Rocket on

VVTs also features an Armenian building; we go inside and drink some cognac. Then, when we’ve done our wandering, we go to a café and order some vodka. Unfortunately, they’ve run out of vodka. Tadich can hardly believe it, cross-questioning the waitress like his life depends on it. But it’s true. We get beers instead.

The pretty café window, which helpfully
protected us from the cold of the elements

***

In Russia, there is a tradition of citizen taxi-driving. It’s not that hard to flag down drivers and negotiate a price for a lift to wherever you’re going. Our lift, soundtracked by the odd mixture of Missy Elliot, Vanilla Ice, Kanye West and UB40, takes us to Leninskii Prospekt. We buy a few more street beers and sit on a bench by a dirt track in the freezing cold. Then, in total contrast, we head up to Skylounge 22, an ultra-posh bar on the 22nd floor of the Russian Academy of Sciences. When the RAS ran out of money, they decided to add a few floors to the top of their building to house a trendy and very expensive bar-restaurant. They purposefully designed the additional floors to be look like a giant golden brain. Uh, yeah.

[Jamie did a short post from his mobile phone from the Skylounge, which is here.]

The evening ends in the excellently-named Krisis Zhanra, where it seems to be Britpop night. We dance, whipped up into a frenzy by a heady combination of the Spin Doctors and New Order, and all is great, until a real live Russian band come on. They have a song which involves the lead singer crooning, without irony, “I am a very complicated person / So complicated, oh yeah.” It's awful.

***

As the taxi home rounds the corner of Tadich’s street, me and Jamie spot the sad-looking horserider from the previous night. She’s riding along the pavement of the main street, parallel to another girl on a horse. Both girls turn to look at each other, and suddenly, something extraordinary happens. They kiss each other, on the lips.

The two of us spend the next hour trying to convince Darren and Tadich that this actually happened.

Day 1, Moscow: Red Souls

Bleeding Pole, egg confusion, bribing cops, sad equestrian

My Russian odyssey gets off to a surreal start even before I’ve made it to the tube at Stockwell, as I’m stopped outside the station by a middle-aged white-haired lady with a pinched face and a bleeding Polish man.

“Excuse me, do you understand him?” says the lady, who looks quite well-to-do. The man, who has blood encrusted on his eyebrow and smeared over the left side of his face, starts talking to me in Polish. He looks glazed.
“No,” I say.
“Where are you from?” asks the woman.
“England,” I respond.

This is not enough to deter her; she begins firing a series of questions at me. “You wouldn’t have that amount of blood from just falling over, would you?” I say that you probably wouldn’t, no. Then: “I’d call the police, but if you’re Polish in a black area, there’d probably be repercussions, wouldn’t there?” Hmmm. She keeps on: “Or do you think he’s homeless? He’s probably not getting enough benefits.” I am trying to nod and shake my head in the right places, but I’m wearing a heavy rucksack and it’s 5.15am. Meanwhile, the Polish man has given up on both of us and is scrabbling around on the floor for a cigarette.

“If only I could find a Polish person,” she says, looking around with hope and sadness. “They’re everywhere when you don’t want them and never there when you do.” I don’t know how this all started, but the situation is strange and dreamlike, and it doesn’t seem fanciful to imagine this odd couple tied together for the rest of eternity.

“I have to go,” I say, deciding to end my part in the nightmare. I resist adding: “To Russia!”

***

One tube journey, two flights, one train ride and one Metro trip later, I’m at Tadich’s flat in Moscow. Everything has gone remarkably smoothly, except for the fact that the Heathrow Wetherspoons told me that they’d run out of fried eggs and only had scrambled. This thought troubles me for much of the journey: how can you run out of a type of egg?

***

One pizza slice and two beers later, me, Jamie and Darren have been stopped by the police just outside Red Square. Darren’s papers are not in order - he’s forgotten to carry his migration card. The police are threatening to arrest him and make him pay 2500 Roubles (100 pounds). Tadich – who speaks passable Russian – is in St Petersberg. We are powerless and they won’t let us go, so we phone him. After several missed calls, he eventually answers and we hand the phone to one of the policemen. Tadich attempts to sweet-talk him into releasing us. Unfortunately, Tadich is incredibly drunk. Luckily, Tadich is with a Russian colleague, who has both the lingo and bucketloads of charm. After around ten minutes of negotiation, Darren bribes the police with 500 Roubles (20 pounds) and we are allowed to go. A beer is in order. We go to a bar called, appropriately, Help.

***

As we head back to the flat – it’s now around 1.15am – there’s one last unusual moment in store for us, as we hear slow clip-clopping and look up to see a sad-looking girl, riding a horse slowly down the street. Day 1 is over, but this wasn’t the last we were to see of her…