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The sun shone on Dmitri Manuilsky’s plaque and for a moment cast his name in mirror writing on to the pavement. The cameras had been recording another historic set-piece: the gold cross had just been mounted on the highest dome of the half-restored Church of the Sign, which for so long had been falling into ruin as the kitchens of the hospital. The baroque church was inspected by the new regime in 1920. Its treasures were removed in 1922, a great weight of silver, which was handed to the Kremlin Armoury. The church was closed in 1929, and the proposal to make it into a sports hall for university students was dropped in favour of the plan to make it the kitchens of the Kremlin Hospital. Today the mayor had attended the ceremony with the highest ecclesiastics of the Orthodox Church, who walked out on to Romanov in the sunshine smiling and laughing, with their long beards and heavy gold crosses coming down to the middle of their ample chests.

‘We don’t need churches in the centre of Moscow,’ Molotov said when asked what he thought of the dynamiting of the Church of Christ the Saviour, ‘it’s wrong.’ ‘It is hard to change one’s gods,’ Shatov says to the murderous brainwasher Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s Demons as they discuss the Slavophile idea of Russia as the ‘one and only “God-bearing” nation on earth’. Father Men called the Stalin era the ‘polar night’ of Russian history. He saw Stalinism as a religious phenomenon, which ‘drew all the people’s atavistic and spiritual drives into a common cause, made the figure of the leader the “measure of all things”, gave him the attributes of a divinity, a limitless power’. ‘Do you ever dream of him?’ Felix Chuev asked the elderly Molotov. He did. ‘I’m in some kind of destroyed city, and I can’t find any way out,’ Molotov replied; ‘afterwards I meet with him.’ The dream seems the closest he ever came to a real insight into his part in history. In some deep furrow of his terrible mind, Molotov sensed that what he and Stalin had done together had something to do with destruction. Dream life is part of the life of the city. Yet though life is like a dream, it is not a dream. In the dungeon of the world we are not alone.

In the 1960s, when Molotov and Khrushchev were both living in No. 3, Polina Zhemchuzhina met Khrushchev in the street. (Khrushchev had taken over Molotov’s dacha as soon as Molotov was expelled from the Party and, as Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva remembered, planted corn in the place of the magnificent roses the Molotovs had cultivated in its large grounds.) Zhemchuzhina begged him to have Molotov reinstated in the Party. Instead, Khrushchev took her to see the lists in the archives on which her husband had written the words ‘to be shot’ alongside the names of their old comrades and their wives, including the Ukrainian Party boss Stanislav Kosior and his wife, who had also once lived in No. 3. Chuev remembers Molotov’s body in its coffin, his head shaking on its wrinkled neck as the catafalque was moved. In none of the pictures of Molotov that I have seen does his neck look thin or his head small, as Nadezhda Mandelstam said it was; though I suppose those wide-set features and penetrating, satisfied eyes might possibly remind one of a sleek tomcat.

On the other side of Mokhovaya, at the back entrance of the renovated Manège, crates are being unloaded from a pantechnicon with a foreign licence plate. Later this week, the Moscow Fine Art Fair will open in the Manège, full of Old Masters, Picassos and flawless diamonds brought to Moscow by merchants from Geneva and New York. This grand ‘exhibition house’ close to the Kremlin wall was built to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Russian victory over Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which entered Moscow in 1812 to find the city destroyed by fire. From the Revolution until Stalin’s death, the elegant empire-style building was used as a garage for government cars. A few years ago, on the March night of Putin’s second election to the presidency, the Manège caught fire. (No one thought the catastrophe was accidental. The Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, produced plans for a renovation – complete with three floors of underground parking – the very next morning.) The wind blew pieces of flaming roofbeams from the Manège across Mokhovaya, over the University buildings and the Kremlin Hospital into Romanov, where they dropped, burning, on the asphalt, and smouldered into ash beneath our windows.

I walk past the Corner House on Vozdvizhenka and along a wooden walkway under the scaffolding. The Military Department Store was demolished a couple of years ago, and a new building is going up in its place. Mayor Luzhkov has promised it will be a replica of the Voentorg, which Muscovites had come to love (they come to love all the buildings in their city in the end), but nobody believes him. Luzhkov follows his own taste, which he calls ‘imperial’. The new building is still under its vast green shroud, which is now in tatters. They will face it in polished granite, which the city planners favour because it looks so rich. The faces of Central Asian workers, who squat high on the scaffolding, stare down at the passers-by. The sounds of our heels are amplified; we make way for one another as we pass, without smiling.

Gusts of warm summer wind blow grit from the building site on to my legs. On the corner of Povarskaya Street, just beyond the church where Count Nikolai and Praskovia were married, there is a huge advertisement for an Italian jeweller, which asks, ‘What is the secret of luxury?’ For a few weeks this year the billboard said, ‘Moscow Votes for Vladimir Putin!’ but the regime is business-like about propaganda: business comes first. On the Hotel Moskva before the presidential election, for a few days, there was a gigantic image of Putin and his chosen heir Dmitri Medvedev in matching leather bomber jackets. As soon as the election-show was over, a Rolex advertisement went up, displaying a rugged man’s hand with a beautiful gold watch on its wrist above the slogan, ‘All Power Is in Your Hands’.

On the corner of the Boulevard Ring, old women from the country are selling bouquets of pink peonies from plastic buckets. I walk up Nikitsky and Tverskoi Boulevards towards Pushkin Square, past the house where Herzen was born, in which Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam lived in the early 1920s, and again in the early 1930s, before the poet’s first arrest. At his speech in the Noblemen’s Club for the unveiling of the statue of Pushkin which now stands on Pushkin Square, Dostoevsky told a nation terrified by bomb-throwing terrorists that Russia would save the world. Ivan Turgenev, who (like the historian Granovsky) had been thoroughly satirised in Demons as a self-regarding and pompous Europeanised writer, watched Dostoevsky’s ‘mean little eyes’ and marvelled at his dangerous brilliance. Yet only the imagination of the writer of Demons could take in what would happen in the building of the Noblemen’s Club (floridly remodelled by the architect Meisner) less than sixty years later: the show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, with Vyshinsky screaming for the blood of his blank-eyed tortured comrades, and Karl Radek, the star witness, playing cynical games with the lies written for him by his interrogators in the Lubyanka: ‘For nothing at all, just for the sake of Trotsky’s beautiful eyes – the country was to return to capitalism.’