Gonetsky hurried the building work, quarrelling with Freidenberg, who deplored his haste, his ignorance of architecture and the eclectic vulgarity of his tastes. Gonetsky demanded a chaotic temple of colliding influences, composed without restraint: rococo and Gothic, mosaic panneaux, murals of the Neapolitan coast and marquises in French parks, Byzantine icons, nude sculptures in the Roman style holding up lamps, Louis XIV mirrors, halls decorated in the styles of Turkey and Arabia, and a Renaissance reading corner. In February 1896, the boilers were heated for the first time, hot water ran through the pipes and the generator was switched on, flooding the surrounding streets with an unfamiliar new radiance.
The Gonetskys moved from Prechistenka to an eleven-room apartment in the new building, looking out over Zvonarsky, a narrow lane on the hill where black jeeps now ride the pavements while their owners steam in the Sanduny. The building was blessed in a grand service with a monastery choir. A priest doused the steam rooms with holy water. A shop selling the best musical instruments and its own editions of sheet music opened on the ground floor of the building on the Neglinnaya side. Soon Chekhov, who had always loved to visit the original Sanduny with his artist brother Nikolai, moved into a large apartment on an upper floor with Olga Knipper. He was a sick man by then, and rarely came out into the streets.
The new Sanduny was frequented by actors, musicians, writers and journalists, as well as Moscow’s merchant nouveaux riches. The attendants wore pink and purple silk and satin. Water that had rinsed the bodies of the rich sluiced down through the plumbing system to the five-kopeck baths on the ground floor where poorer people washed. The composer Sergei Rachmaninov and the opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin came to make music in Vera’s apartment and steam in the baths, where Chaliapin, big and handsome as a bogatyr, a medieval Russian knight, said his voice sounded better than in any theatre. Meanwhile, Gonetsky, enterprising as ever with his wife’s fortune, had developed a passion for glass-roofed trading arcades, and engaged Freidenberg, who had returned to Russia for the coronation of Nicholas II, to design a grand passage to link Neglinnaya and Petrovka Streets.
Like the marriage of the Sandunovs, the partnership between Vera and Alexei Gonetsky fell apart amid recriminations over money and fidelity. Vera borrowed one of Chaliapin’s bodyguards to protect her from her husband, whom she had barred from all her homes, and changed her name back to Firsanova. She took charge of the Sanduny. Whether their owner knew it or not, the numbered banyas soon became notorious again as places of indecency, frequented by prostitutes and their clients. In 1918, the Sanduny was expropriated and stayed open throughout the Soviet period as Gosbani No. 1. Vera Firsanova remained in Moscow until 1930, when Chaliapin helped to organise her emigration to Paris.
The pleasures of the banya go deep. I walked out on to Neglinnaya, a street whose name remembers a buried river, in the cold of the March evening. Clear-headed, gentler of spirit, I felt the heat of the steam room still softening inside, my body guarded against the hardness, dirt and chill of the city by the hours passed, out of the light, inside one of the city’s own stone sanctuaries. ‘With light steam,’ Russians say to a person who has just finished at the banya. It is impossible to convey its meaning, but this is a benediction of the utmost precision. The banya has its own complex grammar, caught by Chekhov’s acute ear for speech, a pattern of verbs and prepositions which evoke immediately and untranslatably the dynamic relationship between flesh and hot vapour.
I walked past the Central Bank, a yellow palace of finance already newly in place when Gonetsky asked the city authorities for permission to rebuild the Sanduny. Light snow was falling, twirling slowly in the pink-yellow light of the streetlamps, turning to slush under walking feet and the wheels of the cars. Electricity gives them an aura at this time of day, these buildings of stone, Spengler’s time become rigid space, with their strange languages of ornament. Across the street, the shops in the trading passage that still runs between Neglinnaya and Petrovka glowed with furs, lace and jewels, caught in spotlit scenes of frozen mannequin swagger in the windows, to lure the city’s living dolls, through whose bodies and material desires money flows around the city. Beyond Gonetsky’s arcades, cars with black windows were parked three deep outside the Vogue Cafe, chauffeurs sleeping on the reclined leather seats.
At the corner I turned up Kuznetsky Most, walking dreamily up the long rising street of banks and luxury shops which runs from Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street to Bolshaya Lubyanka, crossing Petrovka, Neglinnaya and Rozhdestvenka on its way. There have always been beautiful shops on Kuznetsky Most, whose name means ‘blacksmith bridge’, remembering a bridge that crossed the Neglinnaya River when it still ran above ground. Before 1812, the best French shops in Moscow lined the street; it was part of the city’s French colony, known as a ‘sanctuary of luxury and fashion’. When Napoleon’s troops entered Moscow, they protected the French parfumeries, furriers, couturiers, diamond boutiques and patisseries from the great fire. I crossed Rozhdestvenka Street, where the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences now occupies the pillared mansion that was once the Anglia-Paris Hotel. I thought about the orientalist S. F. Oldenburg, the internationally renowned scholar of Buddhism who wrote the introduction to the Bolshevik book on the countryside that I had found, to my surprise, in Molotov’s library. Oldenburg was a Constitional Democrat who served in Kerensky’s short-lived Provisional Government as Minister of Public Education, and, after October 1917, co-operated with the Bolshevik regime in its task of public enlightenment, working for the Institute of Oriental Studies from 1930 until his death in 1934. His introduction expressed the hope that the primitive Russian countryside (which he compared to rural India) would, under the new political order, at last awaken from its primordial sleep and come to share in the historical life of civilisation.
At No. 24 Kuznetsky Most, on the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, every kind of art and business flourished in centuries past. When No. 24 was called the ‘Golitsyn House’ (after the prince who owned the land), biscuits, sweets and medicinal vinegars were on sale here. After 1812, a Moscow University professor named Reiss opened a pharmacy specialising in curative mineral waters. I. P. Vitali, sculptor of the fountain outside the Bolshoi, lived in the house in the early nineteenth century, and received Pushkin as his guest. In the 1850s, plants and seeds and English metal goods were sold in shops on the ground floor and, later in the century, the firm Shwabier, Russia’s largest retailer of optical, geodesic and medical instruments, set up for business alongside a photographer’s studio, a rose shop, an underwear boutique called ‘The Jockey Club’ and the sweet counters of Landrin, the ‘caramel king’.
In 1918, No. 24 was taken over by the new government. Until the giant Stalin ‘wedding cake’ was built for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Smolenskaya in 1952, the four-storey building was the premises of Narkomindel, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. As Commissar (renamed ‘Foreign Minister’ after 1946), Molotov worked sixteen-hour days at his enormous mahogany desk. Visitors to his office in No. 24 remember the neat arrangement of pens, pencils, rulers and notepads on the desk, and his battery of telephones. On the wall were portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and three great generals of Russian imperial history, Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nakhimov.
In the 1920s, the building was shared with the Berlitz language courses and an official organisation called the ‘Political Red Cross’, which gave assistance to the families of prisoners. Later, during the purges of the 1930s, relatives of political prisoners would come to the ‘reception’ of the NKVD in No. 24 to ask about the fates of their arrested loved ones. From the night of his father’s arrest until 1948, V. S. Zhukovsky would come here regularly from Granovsky Street to ask his whereabouts. ‘He’s with us,’ he was always told, which meant that his father was in the Lubyanka. But after a few years, the young lieutenant at the desk would just smile and say, ‘We can’t tell you anything.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘That’s just the way it is.’ It was only after Stalin’s death that Zhukovsky learned that his father had been shot in 1940, convicted for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ under Article 58 of the Criminal Code.