Russia’s evening sky

Moscow is known as a party city, one where discos flourished faster than the market economy after perestroika. Known for having the best views in town, I visited the City Space whose wall-to-ceiling windows are the only thing that separate customers from the Russian evening sky. I admired Moscow River making its way to the Kremlin like a snake and the city’s bright lights illuminating the cathedral domes which pop out from among Moscow’s skyscrapers like much-needed reminders of the city’s history among the epidemic construction sweeping the city.

Moscow’s City Centre

I spent most of my time exploring Moscow’s City Centre where the Red Square, Kremlin, the Alexandrovsky Garden and St. Basil’s Cathedral are located. My favorite building in Moscow is the cathedral, the church which inspired St. Petersburg’s The Church on Spilled Blood. I caught a glimpse of the church from a distance through the Resurrection Gate and was immediately struck by the colorful domes against the pink-streaked evening sky. There are some iconic buildings that symbolize a city: the Mezquita in Cordoba, the Duomo in Florence, and now St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. What makes these buildings so powerful is how the combination of color, design and scale surpass the average reaches of imagination and instead express a place in an almost inaccessibly ideal way.

“Back in the U.S.S.R.”

I shared the same disbelief as Paul M. in his song “Back in the U.S.S.R.”; almost a year after visiting St. Petersburg I found myself in Moscow. After all the shenanigans we experienced getting our visas last summer, I doubted I would ever find myself traveling to Russia again. Well, a year later, feeling like a fresh amputee groping for a missing appendage, I was separated from my passport for nine days after paying for 24-hour turn around for my Russian visa. Ever since the Litvinenko incident, relations between Russia and England have chilled and as a UK visa holder the visa-application process was exponentially more rigorous this year than it was last year. Even upon arriving in Moscow I did not escape unscathed from airport security. As I waited to get my visa stamped before I could exit the airport, a bilingual British diplomat translated for me that airport security thought my passport was a fake. When they confiscated it to run through a different machine in another part of the airport I decided that repeat foreign visitors to Russia are glutton for punishment.

Moscow immediately felt different from St. Petersburg. The former capital of Russia, St. P. has a very European feel to it; the city’s sweeping boulevards remind me of Paris, the canals of Venice, and the green parks of London. Moscow, on the other hand, teems with commuters (ten million people live in Moscow and five million more commute into the city during the work week), and it seems like every block has buildings in various stages of construction.

I was not disappointed by the Moscow subway system which my guidebook promised is the most efficient way to travel in Moscow and provides the opportunity to admire the works of some of the city’s best 20^th-century socialist-realist artists. The first subways were built in the mid 1930s and sponsored by Stalin. Much of the art celebrates the Allies’ victory against the Axis powers during WWII. In fact, WWII history plays a prominent role in much of the sightseeing in Moscow, from the subway art to the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Kremlin. Colorful frescoes on the subway’s ceilings depict the rebuilding of Moscow after the war, and bronze statues celebrate daily Russian life.