Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

Moscow’s wide boulevards were already choked with traffic by the late eighties, though the vehicles were almost exclusively Russian—Zhigulis, Ladas, Volgas, Zils. Red Square was the heart of the city, and the heart of Red Square was the blocky marble mausoleum of Lenin’s Tomb, where people still lined up for hours to see the Soviet leader’s waxy, embalmed corpse. Across the square was the Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin, better known as GUM—a vast shopping mall that in 1988 contained rows of stores such as “Shoes,” “Linens,” and “Clothing.” With its glass roof and dramatic archways, the building was a gorgeous specimen of pre-Revolutionary architecture. But as a shopping experience, it was as dull as a box of dirt. In the few snapshots I took there in 1988, crowds of women in overcoats and knit hats swarmed around the entrance of one shoe store, which had happened to get a shipment of boots from somewhere in Eastern Europe that day.

Soviet Moscow was a stately, sprawling, serious place. I loved the history and grandness of it, but four years into Gorbachev’s perestroika, the economy was in shambles, and people were frustrated. Upon seeing a line forming on a sidewalk, Russians would automatically join it; even if they didn’t want whatever was being sold, they could use it as barter. A popular joke relayed how one Muscovite, standing in yet another queue, announced to his comrades, “Enough! I’m going to murder Gorbachev!” Twenty minutes later he returned, complaining, “The line there was even longer.”

I left Moscow in April 1989. Nine months later, in January 1990, Russia’s first McDonald’s opened on Pushkin Square, and 30,000 people showed up for what became the largest restaurant opening in history. Less than two years later, in August 1991, Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank at Russia’s White House, thwarting a coup attempt by Soviet hard-liners. And in December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

So, by the time Gary and I arrived in Moscow in November 1995, Russia was nearly four years into its new, capitalist phase. The transition had been rough. The ruble had plummeted in value, wiping out people’s life savings. Inflation was in triple digits, and while there was a slim layer of extremely wealthy people at the top of the economic food chain, most everyone else was struggling to make ends meet. People were freaking out about the new uncertainty afflicting their jobs, pensions, housing, education, and health care. For all the agonies they had suffered under the Soviet system, many now found themselves missing the security of it.

One of the most maddening developments for Muscovites in the nineties was the fact that although imported goods now abounded, nobody could afford to buy them. In GUM, those drab Soviet-style stores were being replaced with sparkling brand-name Western boutiques, where one pair of jeans might sell for the equivalent of a month’s salary. Expensive restaurants were popping up all over the city, but few Russians could afford to eat in them. The streets, once austere and ad-free, teemed with billboards and neon, and newly wealthy Russians were tooling around in their Mercedes sedans and BMWs, while thousands of others trudged to the subway in old boots they couldn’t afford to replace.

Yet for all the angst it engendered, this transitional period also brought an exciting new energy to Moscow. Artists, writers, and musicians could express themselves more freely than under Soviet rule, and there was a real sense—both refreshing and terrifying—that anything could happen. MC Pavlov rode that wave in 1995, exploring the wild new world of artistic possibilities that post-Soviet Russia had to offer.

Returning in 2005, I was struck by how much more stable Russia felt. With very few exceptions, everyone I interviewed on the trip was better off financially than they’d been ten years earlier. Most cities we visited had been spruced up—old buildings renovated, new bridges and highways built. People seemed, if not contented, then at least not as fatalistic as usual. Russia had placed a bet on an oil-based economy, and it was paying off like a slot machine spewing out silver.

Yet as improved as those other Russian cities were in 2005, nothing prepared me for what Moscow had become.

Led by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a bald, compact fireplug of a man, Moscow was in the midst of a construction frenzy. Manezh Square, just north of Red Square, housed a new, massive underground shopping mall, topped by a row of above-ground fast-food restaurants and a gleaming glass cupola. Cranes towered over the city, building dozens of new apartment and office buildings. The gigantic Cathedral of Christ the Savior, dynamited into oblivion by Joseph Stalin in 1931, had been rebuilt in the exact same spot, brick by brick, at a reported cost of $360 million. And a little farther down the Moscow River, artist Zurab Tsereteli had constructed a gargantuan, 320-foot-tall statue of Peter the Great.

The statue is a monstrosity. It’s a life-sized sailing ship, perched atop a column of stylized waves and ship prows that resembles nothing so much as the stem of a giant mushroom cloud. Bestriding the ship’s deck is a colossal Peter the Great, inexplicably dressed in Roman garb and clutching a golden scroll. As a monument to the tsar, the statue is, shall we say, of questionable artistic merit. As a monument to kitsch, it is picture-perfect, especially considering the fact that it often has a “Karaoke Party Boat” moored right in front of it.

Moscow in 2005 was like the guy who’d finally made enough money to buy the Corvette he’d wanted since high school. You’re happy for him, but the Corvette smacks of overcompensation, and although it’s good-looking, it’s got a whiff of un-hip braggadocio to it. As David and I strolled down the New Arbat—formerly Kalininsky Prospekt, where I’d walked 17 years earlier with my alien can of Coke—I stared in amazement at all the nightclubs and garishly lit casinos, evidence of a wave of gambling that was sweeping Russia. Luxury vehicles jammed the streets in the city center, and two blocks from Red Square, Bentley and Ferrari dealerships abutted the ultrarich shopping street Tretyakovsky Pereulok. Thanks to the oil boom, Moscow had real money now—and it wanted the world to know.

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.