Tsvetaeva loved the statue of Pushkin for its iron blackness. She called the monument to the Russian national poet with the African great-grandfather a monument against racism, a monument to the mingling of bloods. There was once a rambling monastery on the square, where now there is a cinema and the Shangri-La casino, faced in swirling multi-coloured plastic. ‘The Strastnoi Monastery pinkens, rising over the grey square’, Tsvetaeva wrote in her early poem ‘Tverskaya’, in which she imagines walking along Tverskaya Street with her teenage sister on a spring day. Tverskaya is the ‘cradle of their youth, the cradle of their half-adult hearts’. They take everything in: the shining shop windows full of diamonds, sunset, traffic lights, the voices of the passers-by.
Molotov came to Moscow for the first time in the same year, after his exile in Vologda. He remembers Tverskaya banked with snow. And Varlam Shalamov remembered his impressions of Tverskaya when he was new to Moscow in 1924, and watched the Revolution Day parade, led by Trotsky in his Red Army uniform, short with a wide forehead, walking alongside Bukharin, Yaroslavsky and Kamenev. Tverskaya is wider now than it was then. Its tall apartment buildings were rolled back on subterranean castors in the 1930s to make it better suited for parades. But the diamonds – Tiffany, Chaumet, Bulgari – are back in the windows of shops that used to be labelled ‘Fish’ or ‘Cheese’ or ‘Milk’ or ‘Bread’. This year was the first time in decades that ICBMs were driven on to Red Square for the Victory Day parade on 9 May. From Romanov, we could hear them rumbling down Tverskaya in night-time rehearsals.
There is a new hotel where the Intourist used to be, the Ritz Carlton, with a wide space into which large cars can sweep and a roof terrace with white leather sofas that looks down over Red Square and the Kremlin. The bar serves a Martini cocktail called ‘Casino Royale’. ‘Tower upon tower, wall upon wall, palace upon palace! A strange blend of ancient and new architecture, poverty and wealth, European manners and the manners and customs of the East,’ Konstantin Batyushkov wrote in his ‘Walk around Moscow’, ‘a divine inscrutable flowing together of the emptiness of vanity and true glory and greatness, boorishness and enlightenment, humanity and barbarism.’
I turn down Gazetny, ‘Newspaper Lane’, past the Telegraph Building and McDonald’s, past the small pale blue church, in front of which almost every passer-by stops to bow and make the sign of the cross, past the House of Composers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Outside the Conservatoire, on the summer verandah of Coffeemania, beautiful people are drinking cappuccinos and smoking. Music comes from the rooms above: an opera singer practising La Traviata, her cadences mingling with Beethoven on a piano from further back in the courtyard. Marshal Budyonny’s second wife, the lovely contralto Olga Mikhailova, daughter of a railway worker from Kursk, studied here in the late 1920s, before joining the Bolshoi Opera as a soloist. She was arrested in August 1937 for attending receptions at foreign embassies. After nineteen years in prison and the Gulag, she returned to Moscow, her physical and mental health broken, with stories that no one wanted to hear of her repeated gang rapes in the camps.
The latest fashion in chic Moscow eating places is to order numerous elegant dishes and leave them on the table hardly touched. Almost everything on the menu costs a week’s pension. Three of the luxury cars parked outside Coffeemania have FSB plates in their front windows. I pass the hair and beauty salon where last week I was kept waiting because my stylist Natasha said one of her male clients had come for a cut and a manicure without an appointment, and as he is a general in the FSB she felt obliged to give him mine. It is just as Nikolai Bestuzhev said nearly two centuries ago: the ‘outward brilliance of the court has been taken for the true happiness of the state, the extent of trade, the wealth of the merchant class and the banks for the well-being of the whole people’. Putin’s courtiers are more interested in their jackets, their watches and their coiffures than in any God-bearing mission of the Russian people, whatever they may say to ‘the people’ each night on the TV. Outside the Ministry of Internal Affairs building, militiamen are waiting in the sun with their car doors open, their radios on. The doors of the Zoological Museum on the corner lie open to the darkness within, where a whale’s jawbone rests on the tiles under the staircase with yellow-eyed Siberian wolves and bryozoans from the Barents Sea, and Mandelstam once walked the wrought-iron galleries with poetry flowing in his head. Outside the office building at No. 4 Romanov the guards move back the traffic cones for a hovering Mercedes. How many people in this city spend their working lives standing in the street to guard some favoured piece of the pavement for the comfort of the powerful?
I came home late last night after an evening with friends in No. 5. On the way downstairs from the top floor, I looked in at the progress of the renovation of the last communal apartment in the building. The Tajik workers invited me in as though they were the owners and I was an honoured guest, showing me the new gold gesso-work on the cornice mouldings. Outside in the street the wind was high. I went into No. 3 through the ‘black entrance’. Behind me, the torn green wrappings on the new Voentorg flapped like the sails on a storm-lashed ship, light from within coming through the tears in the fabric.
There is never a right time to leave a city. ‘Everything was very ordered and dignified,’ Akhmatova wrote in 1939, ‘Moscow, the beginning of spring. Friends and books and sunset in the window.’ That is how it is. Order, friends, books. ‘In Moscow without me’ is now my favourite chapter title in Herzen’s Past and Thoughts. Very soon I will no longer live above a luxe travel agency in which I can buy a train ticket to the end of Siberia. I gave back the key to the Molotov apartment a while ago. The banker forgot to ask me for it when he left, and I kept it in my desk drawer for many months, listening to the footfalls in the corridor above of the shy couple from Dresden who had moved in after the banker and who, the concierge told me, represented the Adenauer Foundation, which supports the development of civil society in Russia. The German couple never came to say hello and I never met them on the stairs, but once in a while they would hold a formal reception, and from the open door of the apartment would come the music of a string quartet. The morning after one of their soirées the concierge told me that Mikhail Gorbachev had been among the guests, but she was not particularly stirred by his visit, as, like most of her generation, she has nothing good to say about the man who brought democracy to Russia and gave away the empire.
I went up one day to give back the key and the German woman, who was very gentle and polite, gave me tea and let me look around. The magic lantern was gone – she did not remember seeing it – and so was the Shah of Iran’s carpet, which Molotov’s granddaughter (who calls herself ‘Skryabina’) had told her was worth sixteen thousand euros. The books were still there when I opened the lower bookcase, but the bookstands in the corridor had gone, with Winston Churchill and Dante. After the Germans left, the concierge was sad. The German woman used to go down to sit in her basement room and listen to the concierge’s tape recordings of herself singing patriotic songs. Her love for the woman from Dresden was historically momentous for the concierge, for her greatest living year had been 1941. She reminisced every day about how, as an eighteen-year-old girl, she and her comrades – ‘all young and strong and patriotic’ – made barricades against German tanks in the Moscow streets.