Between the Clock and the Bed.

Since the contested election in Belarus, I've been riveted, as perpetually fascinated by these European locales. In watching coverage of the protests, as well as a few older documentaries, it finally occurred to me that Minsk (where I passed through during USSR times but didn't stop) retains so very much of that old Soviet feel that it's uncanny.

In short, always be suspicious of perfectly clean urban areas. They're more Disney-fied than real, and usually for all the wrong reasons (and I'm no fan of Uncle Walt, mind you).

Imagine my delight in this ...

Minsk: Owen Hatherley on the world's most complete, and most surprising Soviet city (The Calvert Journal)

Whether hostile or complimentary, all accounts of Belarus will mention the extreme Sovietness of its capital, the equally extreme cleanliness and lack of commercial pollution and/or vibrancy. This leads to some interesting errors. Historian Andrew Wilson, in his otherwise convincing critique of the Lukashenko regime, The Last European Dictatorship, describes its dominant style erroneously as Brutalist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Minsk is arguably the greatest neoclassical European city of the 20th century, with most buildings in the city centre resplendent with colonnades, baroque archways and romantic skylines of spires, obelisks and heroic sculptures, all on an axial plan integrated with landscaped parklands around the river Svisloch. This is the direct result of one of the least known episodes of the Second World War — the intensity of resistance in Soviet Belarus to the Third Reich. It deserves to be as well known as that of Poland or Yugoslavia, but isn’t, largely because it isn’t useful to anybody much, save perhaps Lukashenko’s unpleasant government.

... and by extension, this.

Melancholy of obsolete futures at (The Critic)

Alexander Adams on Soviet Brutalism and where to read about it

Brutalism has seen a surge in interest among young people keen on bold uncompromising Modernist design. Whole books of moody photographic studies of concrete buildings are snapped up by fans of urban life and retro design. A crop of new books explores the Brutalism of socialist states.

While Constructivism and avant-gardism in fine art came to prominence during the October Revolution, it was suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. In architecture more adventurous forms and materials persisted, although in the minority. Under Stalin there was a degree of stylistic conformity and austerity, yet adventurous architecture was not seen as “bourgeois formalism” as it was in art. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historicism receded and a greater variety of art, design and architecture (including Modernist architecture) became possible.

While supposedly for the masses, many of the showpiece constructions were moribund from the start: inverted ziggurat hotels that were barely occupied and shopping centres with few consumer goods to offer. Much of this architecture was completed less than a decade before the economic and political collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

In postcards, gargantuan apartment buildings — veritable terrestrial ocean liners — tower over public spaces, making farm-near-me/">miniatures of two-tone buses and Trabants. Third-Worldism (also called the Non-Aligned Movement) was a political position of the mid-century decades that apparently offered advantages of alliance to states that pledged to remain equidistant between socialism and democratic capitalism. In practice, most post-colonial states in Africa, South America and South Asia following Third-Worldism did turn to the two superpowers, which provided strategic assistance in return for favourable trading status or military co-operation, thus forming indirect and unstated alliances rather than outright ones.

These are the books described in the article. I can't afford to buy them all, but I wish it were possible. Come to think of it, I just might, anyway.

Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia – Lidija Butković Mićin, Nataša Bodrožić, Saša Šimpraga
East German Modern – Hans Engels
Imagine Moscow – Deyan Sudjic, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Richard Anderson
Soviet Metro Stations – Christopher Herwig
Architecture in Global Socialism – Łukasz Stanek

HISTORY: Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government and the making of the Soviet ruling class.

It's been a year and a half since I read The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine, described by its publisher as "the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction.” I found it interesting, indeed, and it inspired an educational digression about various palaces (see below).

Yesterday out of nowhere came a lengthy essay at Jacobin about Slezkine's book ("The Making of the Soviet Ruling Class"), written by Kevin Murphy: "(He) teaches Russian history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory won the 2005 Deutscher Memorial Prize."

This essay isn't for everyone, but if you're interested in early Soviet history, it's informative.

A Flawed Masterwork

The House of Government is the most contradictory, eclectic study of the Russian Revolution ever published. Brilliant, captivating, and often heart-wrenching, in many ways it is social history at its very best. Some of Yuri Slezkine’s harshest academic critics, who have only published obscure dust-collecting volumes, should realize that nothing comparable has been published in half a century. Slezkine should be commended for dedicating so many years of his life to producing an indispensable read for every serious student of the Russian Revolution.

But we also need to be honest about its flaws. The House of Government is a conceptual dumpster fire, framing what could easily have been an epic masterpiece into a predictable story that we’ve heard so many times before by putting forward a “continuity” thesis that relies upon a plethora of factual errors and omissions. Readers who can tune out the often exasperating analysis and treat it as unfortunate background noise will enjoy the ride.

Murphy uses a word we don't see every day.

As a prosopographical study of how an important part of the party apparatus converted itself into a new ruling class, The House of Government fills a huge gap in the history of Stalinism, even if the author himself doesn’t view it in such terms.

Prosopography defined: "A description of a person's social and family connections, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions."

Slezkine's book and Murphy's essay both make for heavy reading, but I'm glad I did. There'll never be a time like that again ... will there?

---

I suppose we'll have to settle for ... bottom left.

May 8, 2018

Time does not fly when you're reading cornerstone-sized tomes, but in the middle of Week Seven, there's light at the end of a humongous arched entryway in the building ostensibly being profiled: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine.

Sorry, CM Barksdale: the book's about the people living in the colossal structure, not the bricks and mortar itself. In 1931, at roughly the same time this building was completed, the church down the way was demolished to make way for progress, Stalinist-style.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

 ... The original church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build, and was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky. It was destroyed in 1931 on the order of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets to house the country's legislature, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Construction started in 1937 but was halted in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Its steel frame was disassembled the following year, and the Palace was never built.

It never happened, and it was left to the Genius of the Carpathians, ill-fated Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, to erect the biggest damn Commie building of all -- not cloud-piercing skyscraper, but the Palace of the Parliament (formerly House of the Republic).

Stalin may not have gotten his Soviet palace, but Ceaușescu got his, good and hard after a show trial (template: Koba).

Why Joseph Stalin Never Got His Soviet Palace, by William O'Connor (The Daily Beast)

... The final designs for the palace were terrifying. The structure was a pyramidal skyscraper made up of seven ascending concentric cylinders. Each of those hulking cylinders was to “be decorated with allegorical sculptures of heroes of the Soviet epoch.”

Crowning this monstrosity was no less than a 328-foot statue of the deceased Vladimir Lenin.

Work on the Palace began in 1938, with the government spending roughly $18.9 million to get it started. The Soviets declared that it would open on Nov. 7, 1942, the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, leading even The New York Times to snicker and write, “The building cannot possibly be completed by that date.”

The base of the building was to be 460 feet in diameter. It would be filled with offices, museums, restaurants, and a main hall with a capacity of 20,000.

It was also to have 148 elevators and 62 escalators. According to Time there would also be a library with 500,000 books.

The base was to be made of marble and granite, the rest of the building clad in a purple-red tufa (a type of limestone) from the Caucasus, and the statue would be made of aluminum or chrome steel.

Due to its height up in the clouds, engineers “estimated that on only ninety days out of the year will the head of the Lenin statue be clearly visible from the ground.”

The foundations were completed and the steel frame for the lower levels put in place, but alas, WWII got in the way. In 1942 the steel frame was dismantled to provide steel for the Red Army and more urgent infrastructure projects.

As a point of comparison, note that a 328-foot tall statue of Jeff Gahan would be taller than Riverview Tower, which is merely ≈ 190 feet.

Our annual May Daze observance puts the workers back into Hauss Square -- I mean, no labor union donations for Gahan eh?

This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews productive labor and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.

Thanks to the wonders of digitalization, there's now a stand-alone post for photos of the Vienna May Day celebration in 1987.

For more vague linkages, see Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

Three years have passed, and still 2016 remains a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.

For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president that year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.

As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.

Now that Pints&union exists, and we put our first May Day to bed today, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany in 2020. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea, just as long as they can promote tacos.

The Economist offers a short but entertaining briefing: Fire, flowers, fertility: summer’s here.

For many people May 1st is synonymous with Labour Day, but the date also signifies the onset of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Let the Commie festivities begin!

---

ON THE AVENUES: May Daze.

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached.

In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

---

Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had become united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

---

To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.

I suppose we'll have to settle for ... bottom left.

Time does not fly when you're reading cornerstone-sized tomes, but in the middle of Week Seven, there's light at the end of a humongous arched entryway in the building ostensibly being profiled: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine.

Sorry, CM Barksdale: the book's about the people living in the colossal structure, not the bricks and mortar itself. In 1931, at roughly the same time this building was completed, the church down the way was demolished to make way for progress, Stalinist-style.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

 ... The original church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build, and was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky. It was destroyed in 1931 on the order of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets to house the country's legislature, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Construction started in 1937 but was halted in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Its steel frame was disassembled the following year, and the Palace was never built.

It never happened, and it was left to the Genius of the Carpathians, ill-fated Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, to erect the biggest damn Commie building of all -- not cloud-piercing skyscraper, but the Palace of the Parliament (formerly House of the Republic).

Stalin may not have gotten his Soviet palace, but Ceaușescu got his, good and hard after a show trial (template: Koba).

Why Joseph Stalin Never Got His Soviet Palace, by William O'Connor (The Daily Beast)

... The final designs for the palace were terrifying. The structure was a pyramidal skyscraper made up of seven ascending concentric cylinders. Each of those hulking cylinders was to “be decorated with allegorical sculptures of heroes of the Soviet epoch.”

Crowning this monstrosity was no less than a 328-foot statue of the deceased Vladimir Lenin.

Work on the Palace began in 1938, with the government spending roughly $18.9 million to get it started. The Soviets declared that it would open on Nov. 7, 1942, the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, leading even The New York Times to snicker and write, “The building cannot possibly be completed by that date.”

The base of the building was to be 460 feet in diameter. It would be filled with offices, museums, restaurants, and a main hall with a capacity of 20,000.

It was also to have 148 elevators and 62 escalators. According to Time there would also be a library with 500,000 books.

The base was to be made of marble and granite, the rest of the building clad in a purple-red tufa (a type of limestone) from the Caucasus, and the statue would be made of aluminum or chrome steel.

Due to its height up in the clouds, engineers “estimated that on only ninety days out of the year will the head of the Lenin statue be clearly visible from the ground.”

The foundations were completed and the steel frame for the lower levels put in place, but alas, WWII got in the way. In 1942 the steel frame was dismantled to provide steel for the Red Army and more urgent infrastructure projects.

As a point of comparison, note that a 328-foot tall statue of Jeff Gahan would be taller than Riverview Tower, which is merely ≈ 190 feet.

Our annual May Daze observance puts the workers back into Walpurgis.

This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews work and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.

Thanks to the wonders of digitalization, there's now a stand-alone post for photos of the Vienna May Day celebration in 1987.

For more vague linkages, see Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

The year 2016 is a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.

For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president last year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.

As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.

If Ainslie's Tavern comes into being by May 1, 2018, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea.

The Economist offers a short but entertaining briefing: Fire, flowers, fertility: summer’s here.

For many people May 1st is synonymous with Labour Day, but the date also signifies the onset of summer in the northern hemisphere.

Let the Commie festivities begin!

---

ON THE AVENUES: May Daze.

By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.

Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.

For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?

At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.

The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.

These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached. In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.

---

Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.

The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.

As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).

During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.

For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).

It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.

---

To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.

The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.

It’s too bad.

For us.

30 years ago today: Queuing for kvass (an aside).

A glass of water at Leningrad's airport, bound for Riga.

Previously: 30 years ago today: Can someone please explain how the stars and stripes got up THERE?

On several occasions while in Moscow and Leningrad in 1987, we'd join the line for квас (kvass or kvas). In 2016, I wrote about kvass after returning from Estonia.

I was delighted to see both mead and kvass on the drinks menu, even if they’re commercially produced and not rigorously farmhouse-sourced. They paired nicely with my meal of sauerkraut soup and salted herring.

Kvass is a lightly fermented, traditionally homebrewed “soft” drink made from dark bread and yeast, with a myriad of other additional ingredients varying from kitchen to kitchen. We tend to think of kvass as Russian, though many Baltic and Eastern European countries have their own versions. In the Estonian language, it's called kali.

To create that tangy fermented flavor, kvas makers start with Russian brown bread. You soak it in water, and then add some yeast (other additions — raisins, honey, mint — vary from recipe to recipe). The whole mixture ferments for a few days, a process that creates a natural carbonation, as well as a distinctive sour flavor.

According to Russian writer Alexander Genis, that sourness is beloved in the region. "The sour is the taste of Russia — everything is supposed to be sour for Russian taste. Like sour cream, for example, or pickled cucumber. Cabbage, mushroom."

Given that one of the glories of Estonian cuisine is its dense, moist black bread, kvass/kali is a natural product line extension. It tastes like its principle ingredients, bread and water.

The commercial version of kvass available at the Golden Piglet Inn actually lacked the tang of what I remembered at a street stand in Moscow, circa 1999. It was sweeter but no less delicious, and would be an apt thirst quencher in summertime, so keep the lemonade and iced tea. Let’s cook some kvass instead.

No photographic evidence attests to the consumption of kvass in 1987, so you'll be compelled to accept my testimony. However, the scene was little changed from this view in 1999, when Barrie and I returned to Russia for a Moscow encore.

Looks like I was hungover in 1999, too. One big difference would be the plastic glasses, which weren't a part of the Soviet street scene 12 years earlier.

Next: Riga and Vilnius, as the Soviet portion of the tour comes to a close.

30 years ago today: A fine meal at the Hotel Moskva.

Hotel Moskva, 1930s.

(Previously: 30 years ago today: A taste of Moscow, with occasional beers for sustenance. Portions of the following have been adapted from my 1985 Leningrad tale)

The price of our SSTS tour of the USSR and Poland in 1987 included meals. Given that we were "youth and students" on a budget outing, I expected little, and wasn't once disappointed.

One sack lunch sticks in my mind. There was a hard-boiled egg a la Dr. Seuss (it was green), a heel of bread and a hunk of congealed sausage.

I wolfed them down. We drinkers understand the value of a proper foundation.

As for the needs of others, in the sense of dietary restrictions? This simply wasn't a concept, and vegetarians surely would have starved unless they ate cheese.

As for food and dining on the part of the citizenry, there seemed to be a noticeable absence of restaurants. Of course, with almost all economic activity controlled by the state, there'd have been no way to be entrepreneurial.

In a country where famine had occurred within living memory, food supply definitely was an obsession. In a country with a centralized economy, food supply was something undertaken very differently than at home in the States.

It isn’t that Moscow's inhabitants didn’t dine outside their homes. Many received their main meal at lunchtime, as served at their workplaces, and they also took quick bites at any number of “people’s” or “worker’s” cafeterias, many serving soup, potatoes and dumplings.

As a guidebook colorfully stated, these eateries were “dirt cheap and dirty,” and while they didn't stand out at first, they definitely were there, seemingly allocated by population. Having arrived in Moscow via Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Hungary, I'd already become enamored of these sorts of places.

Parts is parts, and sausage never scared me. Especially in Hungary, cafeterias punched far above their weight for the price.

On my first day in Moscow, with time to kill, I grabbed a bowl of pelmeni in grayish-brown sauce from an inconspicuous cafeteria-style eatery. Pelmeni are classic Russian ear-shaped dumplings roughly the size of small won tons, made of unleavened dough with a meaty filling.

It's best not to ask any more questions.

There didn't seem to be a kitchen, strongly implying that the day's pelmeni were delivered each morning from the Central Moscow Pelmeni Factory, and when depleted of dumplings, the door would be locked.

Relative anonymity was the norm. A sign out front identified the establishment with just a name and a number: Pelmeni No. 34. After all, when the government owns everything, everything is a chain by definition, and marketing isn't really necessary when choice is intentionally limited.

Soviet “sit-down” restaurants comparable to the sort Americans were accustomed to seeing by the half-dozen at every interstate interchange were regarded by ordinary Russians as places for special occasions, like weddings and anniversaries.

Above a certain classification, formal restaurants had the reputation and appearance of being inaccessible to normal human beings. In essence, all their seats were reserved, all of the time.

There’d be a sign stating the restaurant was entirely booked, even though a glance through the window showed most (sometimes all) seats empty. A doorman would guard the door as though he were defending the vaults at Ft. Knox.

Only later did I learn the key to breaking the code, because in fact, anyone could phone the restaurant or visit earlier in the day and make a reservation, so long as a wedding wasn't taking place. It really was that simple. However, in the beginning this wasn’t evident. The game for westerners was all about bribing one’s way inside.

Hence the value of western cigarettes and toothpaste. So it was that four of us (myself, Barrie, Nick and Nat) decided to squander a half-inch of Barr's black market ruble windfall on an evening's merriment.

Our choice was the cavernous restaurant at the Hotel Moskva, a monstrous 1,000-room structure dating from 1935, situated near Red Square and the Kremlin, squatting massively astride what seemed to be a dozen lanes of wide highway that never had more than a handful of Ladas chugging through them, but apparently came in handy as a May Day parade ground.

The sheer size and scale of hotels like Moskva, Ukraina, Intourist and Rossiya bear witness to two fundamentally important points. First, that the Soviets constantly invoked sheer size and scale to prove they could create a man-made world on a par with capitalists.

Perhaps more importantly, in a gated society with the number of outside visitors strictly rationed, it was imperative to monitor them, and easier to do so in a 500-room hotel than scattered hostelries.

Of the four hotels I've mentioned here, three have been demolished since the fall of communism: Intourist, Rossiya and Moskva, although the Moskva recently was rebuilt with the same 1935 facade, preserving the contours of the streetscape leviathan with modern interior amenities.

Curiously, I remember nothing at all about how we gained access to the restaurant. It surely involved a small gift to the doorman, as we hadn't made reservations, and of course every chair had an empty seat suit sitting on it.

Once inside, the guesswork would have commenced. Soviet restaurants certainly had menus, though they tended to be approximations, particularly in the case of foreigners who spoke no Russian. Even if the restaurant was able to serve a dozen main courses, the selection likely would be narrowed to simpler options, like either beef or fish.

Probably everyone involved understood the nature of the exercise, and you'd take what you were served, beginning with drinks and zakuski. In Russia, zakuski are appetizers both hot and cold, though often featuring pickled and smoked vegetables, cheese and fish.

The practice of zakuski apparently originated among the landowning classes as a reflection of Russia's vastness and a mutually beneficial obligation to provide hospitality to travelers. In short, snacks and vodka were kept at the ready. These would sustain tired visitors until the kitchen could be animated to produce a full meal.

As meant to be taken with vodka, zakuski often proved to be the high point of restaurant meals in the Soviet Union.

Diners were given ample time to graze the zakuski and empty their bottles before the indifferent entree would appear, usually only after diners were sufficiently well lubricated to be grateful for belly mortar irrespective of quality. There'd usually be dessert, often ice cream.

My globetrotting cousin used to tell a wonderful story about his Moscow dining experience, which unfolded adjacent to a table occupied by two heavily drinking Russian men who obviously were Communist Party officials, judging by their imperious attitudes and outdated 1950s-era suits.

When their huge bowls of ice cream appeared following enough vodka to stun an elephant, one of the men promptly passed out -- face down, straight into his ice cream.

The other one shrugged, reaching across the table to save his friend from drowning by grabbing a patch of thinning hair and removing the hair's head from the bowl, depositing the head and dripping ice cream onto the table, then continuing to eat his own ice cream between gulps of the bottle's last dregs.    

Indeed, the drinks list at Soviet restaurants tended to be slim; perhaps juice, mineral water and sparkling wine to complement the ubiquitous vodka, though oddly, seldom beer. Vodka was the choice, and it is vitally important to remember that one should never try to keep pace with Russians drinking vodka.

They’ve been doing it since they were babies, via tubes inserted through their swaddling.

We spent several hours at the Hotel Moskva. I doubt the check totaled more than the equivalent of $50. I think we paid in dollars for a cab ride to the hotel. Nothing else about it is coming back to me these many years later, although I'm quite sure my face didn't scream for ice cream.

We were rock stars in the worker's paradise.

Next: The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, a renowned monastery in what was then Zagorsk.

30 years ago today: A taste of Moscow, with occasional beers for sustenance.

Previously: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

30 June 1987 (Tuesday).

Monday had been Black Market Ruble Transaction Day, and we started plotting a decadent restaurant excursion for Tuesday evening, which would be our final overnight hotel stay in Moscow.

On Wednesday, there'd be a bus excursion to Zagorsk, since renamed Sergiev-Posad, home of Russia's most famous monastery. Then, instead of a hotel bed, we were scheduled to take an overnight sleeper train to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), arriving early on the morning of Thursday, July 1.

Sleep? Just a euphemism. Not a chance.

Following is an illustrated account of sightseeing on Monday and Tuesday. In the next installment, I'll try to remember what happened at the Hotel Moskva at dinner on Tuesday night, and recap Zagorsk.

---

After World War II, Stalin recommenced a project to build skyscrapers throughout Moscow. Eventually there were seven of them, with plans for two others landing on the cutting room floor after Stalin's death.

In 1987, In the absence of other tall buildings, these "Stalinist Empire" structures couldn't be missed. I'm thinking this is the Hotel Ukraina, today a 500-room unit of Radisson -- but I might be wrong.

But I know this one is Moscow State University, situated atop the Lenin Hills.

The view from Moscow State University is sweeping. The former 1980 Olympic stadium, originally known as the Central Lenin Stadium (built in 1956), now is called Luzhniki Stadium and has been extensively remodeled.

Looking toward central Moscow, Red Square and the Kremlin.

Whether experienced during official tour business or later on our own time via the Metro, we found ourselves drawn to Red Square. Here workers demonstrate the superiority of cobblestones; no repaving is ever necessary. Merely fit them back into place, and move on.

From left to right, the 1,000-room Hotel Rossiya (demolished in 2007), St. Basil's and the Kremlin, with two usual touristic suspects in front. The Hotel Rossiya was built in the late 1960s atop the foundation intended for one of the cancelled skyscraper projects. It was a monstrosity, and a park is planned for the site.

On the opposite side of Red Square from the Kremlin and Lenin's Mausoleum is GUM, longtime Soviet state-owned department store -- in effect, a huge indoor shopping arcade, today completely privatized and brimming with boutiques and the like. GUM was buzzing on the day we looked in.

The next photo shows a row of Soviet vending machines. I explained this in my previous 1985 travel narrative.

"Hesitantly, I walked toward the sooty gray box until I could make out a word stenciled in Cyrillic: Вода́.

"Water … apparently drinking water.

"There was a coin slot, and a posted price of one or two kopecks, at 100 kopecks to a ruble. Our tour escort Ari later explained that the two choices were still (uncarbonated) or sparkling water. Three public drinking glasses were available for use – merely select the cleanest, place it in the recess, deposit coins, push button, drink liquid and set the glass back on the ledge for the next user.

"My water wasn’t fizzy. The glass was returned to its place. Now the remarkable absence of litter made sense."

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in the Alexander Garden by the Kremlin wall.

A favorite trick of the Soviet atheist state was to destroy churches outright, but often when the church was left standing, a rabbit hutch housing triumph of the worker's state would be erected close by, or sometimes completely surrounding the aged onion domes.

"Old" Arbat Street would not have looked out of place in dozens of other European cities, but for Moscow, it was the first pedestrianized street where the historic appearance was to be consciously incorporated into a pleasing state approximating ambiance, with shops, cafes and street life.

It doesn't seem like much, but it was epochal in its own way, and quickly became lightly subversive and mildly counter-cultural, insofar as such concepts existed in Moscow.

Nick, Roger, Barrie and Nat; back at the hotel with a case of beer. The bottles are Soviet Zhigulevskoye and the cans Danish-brewed Carlsberg Export from the Beriozka (hard currency shop).

It seems that Zhigulevskoye has an interesting back story, after all, as told here.

A brief Kremlin visit was part of the tour package on Tuesday.

In Russian, a "kremlin" is a citadel, or fortress within a city. In 1987, not much of it was open to tourists, but at least we got inside the walls. Peter the Great moved the Russian capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg, then the Bolshevisk moved it back, but through all the changes, the Moscow Kremlin symbolized the seat of Russian power, whether Tsarist or Communist -- or Putin, even.

The Tsar Bell is missing a chunk.

And, the Tsar Cannon.

Needless to say, there was much of interest occurring inside the Kremlin during the Gorbachev era, as well as more foreign correspondents than ever before on hand to cover the news. We encountered one of them and spent a few minutes gawking.

Each of us with a beer in hand, day drinking at the hotel. It was good to be young.

Next: A hazy meal at the Hotel Moskva.

ON THE AVENUES: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

ON THE AVENUES: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Today's column is one in a linked series of narratives describing my 1987 summer in Europe. Previously, Good morning, Moscow. Next: A taste of Moscow, with occasional beers for sustenance.


28 June 1987

Just shy of midnight, my childhood pal Barrie “Barr” Ottersbach stepped off the elevator into the corridor running past the block of rooms reserved at the Hotel Molodjezhny for the use of Scandinavian Travel Service Tour’s SSTS S819, conducted in conjunction with Sputnik, the Soviet youth and student agency.

Three decades of campfire stories were about to break out.

I’d debuted earlier the same day, miraculously allowed to occupy a room without waiting for the group’s late evening arrival. As the Americans, Canadians and Australians who would be my travel companions for the next two weeks came trickling down the corridor, I grilled them.

“Did Barrie make it?”

“Barrie? Is he the crazy guy with the mustache? Don’t worry. He’s coming.”

As I was grinding out the endless miles from Budapest to Moscow to the rhythm of choo-choo wheels and the providential lubrication of Bull’s Blood wine, Barrie had flown from Louisville to Copenhagen, Denmark and spent a hotel night there prior to meeting the group at the pre-arranged location.

On the 28th, the tour group flew from Copenhagen to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), then switched planes for the late flight to Moscow, arriving at 22.30.

Barrie and I long had been keen on visiting the USSR as a team, and my brief weekend experience in Leningrad in 1985 inspired me to plot a return in 1987. He decided to go, too, and when the Soviet tour was over, we’d be continuing our journey into Western Europe. In the end, we spent more than six weeks carousing, with a great deal of learning as an added bonus.

Visiting the USSR meant finding a good tour package. During the Cold War, independent or otherwise unsupervised travel in the Soviet Union was problematic. It could be done, just not easily. Once on the ground with a group, there’d be nothing binding us to the daily schedule, and we could explore on our own, provided we remained within city limits and kept our tour leader informed.

Barrie and I discussed it at length, and took the recommendation of Let’s Go: Europe by opting for SSTS. I’ve never once regretted the decision. SSTS’s itinerary was designed for impoverished youth, and was as affordable as it got. While decidedly non-luxurious, it covered the high points and got us inside, through the gate.

More importantly, the tour led to an enduring friendship with Kim Wiesener, the Danish group leader for SSTS, and by extension, with his friends Allan Gamborg and Kim Andersen.

Kim was our age, but he was an old Soviet hand, with a Russian branch on his family tree. He had attended Moscow State University and spoke Russian. His gig for SSTS was part-time, and offered a working holiday every now and then.

The poor guy. He had no idea.

---

Legend has it that Kim fell under Barrie’s spell (or was it the other way around?) during the apparently bumpy Aeroflot flights. It’s no surprise. Barrie was, and remains, a people person writ large. If you’re not his comrade, it’s only because you haven’t yet met him – as numerous Marxist-Leninists were about to learn.

By midnight we were drinking every beer we could scrounge from a relatively helpful restaurant employee downstairs, and catching up on things. Subconsciously, I began adjusting to the likelihood of vastly reduced sleep for the foreseeable future.

Next morning, the first of many boozy evenings behind us, tour participants met in the lobby for a breakfast the likes of which I can’t remember at all. As befits a budget tour of a Communist country, the food we’d paid to be fed was a bit of a letdown, rather institutional, and sufficient for sustenance but little else.

All the more reason to seek calories in alcohol.

As the group dined, Kim counted heads. On the very first morning of the tour, there already was one conspicuous absence, which was left for me to explain.

No worries, I told Kim.

Barrie’s with Bill.

Bill? What Russian is named “Bill”?

Yes, well … Bill. You know – from the Ukraine, not Russia.

Rather than the regularly scheduled orientation bus ride through Moscow, Barrie had opted to join the friendly neighborhood black market sales representative for an informative glimpse into the Soviet Union’s alternative underground “second” economy.

Bill was hesitant to be photographed. 

As Kim gulped and reached for the Danish version of Rolaids, I apologized. I’d been the one who had met Bill on the street the previous day, discretely changed money with him, and been treated to ice cream and a hot dog.

In fact, I was ready to pay Bill a high compliment; for a Communist all of 18 years old, he was a highly polished entrepreneur. Kim shook his head, perhaps glimpsing the sheer magnitude of the chaperone’s task ahead.

Red Square, SE view toward St. Basil's;
Kremlin and Lenin's Mausoleum to the right.

Changing of the guard at Lenin's Mausoleum.

Red Square, looking NW.

The morning bus orientation concluded, we returned to the hotel for lunch and found Barr waiting, bright and chipper following his appointment … and not coincidentally, brandishing a softball-sized wad of colorful Soviet rubles.

In effect, he’d laundered rubles into dollars so that Bill LLC could buy audio equipment at a Beriozka, or hard currency store where quality foreign items were sold for real money, not rubles.

---

The Soviet Union may have appeared monolithic, though the country’s economy was anything but.

The second economy in the Soviet Union was the informal sector in the economy of the Soviet Union. The term was suggested by Gregory Grossman in his seminal article, "The Second Economy of the USSR" (1977). Economist Gerard Roland noted that as Grossman anticipated, "the logic of the second economy tended over time to undermine the logic of the command system and to lead to expanding black markets" … to a varying degree, second economy influenced all Eastern Bloc economies.

Grossman defines the concept of second economy with a two-prong test: it is the set of economic activities which satisfy at least one of the two conditions: "(a) being directly for private gain (b) being in some significant respect in knowing contravention of existing law."

The black market feature of this “second economy” existed to suit demand that the official economy couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fill.

As the joke went, Soviet citizens pretended to work, and the government pretended to pay them. In theory, the basics of life – food, shelter, medical care – were provided at little or no charge, meaning that there’d be ample leftover rubles for discretionary spending.

Except there wasn’t very much to buy.

Command economies in the Soviet Bloc were geared to produce heavy industrial articles -- steel, cement, tractors -- and not consumer goods. Consequently, everyday items westerners took for granted were generally scarce.

The common man’s solution was to stick the excess rubles into savings accounts or stuff them under the mattress, then dive headfirst into the “blat” economy of barter and favors in order to keep the household wheels turning.

Almost inevitably, this meant circumventing the law. The object of blat was to accumulate swappable chits, either tangible or intangible. As can be readily imagined, petty thievery and outright corruption quickly ensued.

If scarce shoes arrived at a shop, the employees would divvy them up before they were stocked in view of the public, because their value was higher in the informal bartering market than as a cash transaction – and if you couldn’t get a physical object in return for a pair of pilfered shoes, the favor you were owed could be saved and redeemed when necessary.

Perhaps the dentist given the shoes would fix your teeth off the clock ... "borrowing" workplace materials, of course.

Bill’s entrepreneurial career was little more than a logical progression from Blat 101. He recognized that the Soviet government was complicit in the black market, or else it wouldn’t have established Beriozka shops in the first place, filled with goods unobtainable without dollars, Deutschmarks or pounds sterling.

That’s because the ruble was not attached to the planetary capitalist economic system. Rubles had no value outside the Soviet Union, so the government needed hard currency just as much as Bill wanted audio equipment.

In turn, Barrie now found himself with several hundred rubles in a place where subway tickets were mere kopecks (or shrapnel, as Barrie referred to them) and a lavish restaurant meal with vodka, champagne and caviar might cost 10 – 15 rubles per person, or maybe $22 at the “official” exchange rate, but Barr’s black market rate was closer to seven rubles to the dollar, perhaps even more.

A fur hat of ordinary quality could be found on the shelf in a department store, for just a few of Barrie’s rubles. The better quality fur hats? They were in the Beriozka, and unavailable for purchase with rubles at any price.

So, how would Barrie's ruble windfall be depleted? Rubles couldn't be exchanged back into dollars without a bank receipt, and it was illegal to take them out of the USSR. Even if smuggled out, rubles were worth almost nothing.

But Barrie always has been an observant student of human nature, and he’d already considered the angles before joining Bill for a June morning’s foraging. He’d gleefully spend as many rubles as possible on meals, beers and commonplace (but atmospheric) souvenir trinkets to pack home.

As his chief accomplice, I’d be allowed to run a tab.

Barrie also would take a page out of Bill’s guidebook and accept a temporary position as financial consultant on the Anglophone fringe of the black market, profitably reselling rubles back into hard currency at a reasonable “favored customer” discount for those members of our tour group who were too cautious to trade for them on the street.

In the end, it all worked out just fine. In the coming days, I’ll do my best to describe these memorable times abroad.

Some of the stories might even be true.

---

Recent columns:

June 22: ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

June 15: ON THE AVENUES: Hi there, NAHA wastrels. My name is Peter Principle, and these are my friends Deaf and Dugout.

June 8: ON THE AVENUES: Since 2004, "Two way, better way."

June 1: ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

30 years ago today: Good morning, Moscow.

Mr. Ottersbach, I presume?

Previously: ON THE AVENUES: Train Whistle Reds, or my journey from Budapest to Moscow by rail in June, 1987.

I've been telling the story of my European travels in 1987. Trust me, I know that it's dry reading in places. You had to be there, right?

Still, this is a blog, and I'm allowed to create the equivalent of a lengthy post-it note before it all dissipates from memory.

It was June 28, 1987.

After 36 hours mostly seated on a train, confined to a stuffy compartment and the adjoining minimalist leg-stretcher of a corridor ... having consumed enough Hungarian salami and Soviet hot tea to last through Thanksgiving, this being a holiday unheard of in the nominally atheistic USSR, there was something highly liberating about finally bounding out onto a sparsely populated platform at Moscow's Kiev Station on the morning of June 28, 1987.

That's right, liberating -- at least in a spatial sense, if not politically. A cursory glance at the map I'd purchased in Budapest unhesitatingly revealed the vastness of the capital city of the Soviet Union, home to 8,000,000 or more at the time. It became all too quickly evident that if infamous emperors and dictators (Bonaparte, Hitler) hadn't been able to conquer Moscow, neither would I.

Moreover, as an American, redolent of the Reaganesque polemical taint, I found myself arriving in the belly of the supposed beast. Mikhail Gorbachev's diplomacy notwithstanding, the USSR remained the evil empire, even if individual Russians almost unfailingly proved to be friendly.

Fortunately, my visit to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1985 provided sufficient evidence that citizens of the USSR were not space aliens. I had this knowledge going for me, although Moscow's pulsating sprawl was a decidedly different tempo than the arguably more cosmopolitan though measured Baltic city.

All these preliminary musings aside, the budget traveler's credo remained intact. My first imperative was to establish base camp, and only then extend the perimeter. It meant locating the hotel where I'd be meeting the tour group later that day.

Whether the bureaucracy there would allow me to register ahead of the group was a bridge yet to be crossed.

So, where the hell was I going?

There was an address for the Hotel Molodjezhny, but directions were left to my own calculations, hence the Hungarian tourist map. I might have hailed a taxi, and probably could have paid for it in dollars; by the time of my return in 1989, I knew to pack tubes of toothpaste for such contingencies. As matters stood, public transportation seemed a viable and crazily inexpensive option.

Moscow Metro (subway) tickets cost mere kopecks (cents to the ruble) -- perhaps a nickel each. I stumbled through the act of buying a handful of them, then got to the task of deciphering a system map. I'm not certain if the station names are the same as then, so my route today would be as follows.

Begin at Kievsky Rail Station: Ки́евский вокза́л
Change lines at Arbatskaya: Арбатская
End at Timiryazevsyaka: Тимиря́зевская

There were no English language equivalents, just the Russian. While not as daunting as Mandarin or Arabic, the Cyrillic alphabet was certainly mysterious. I'd already experienced it in Serbia and Bulgaria, though probably it was familiar to Americans of the period (if at all) solely from the letters СССР on Olympic hockey jerseys.

They stood for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. "C" is S; "P" is R. As a side note, recall that in theory, the USSR was composed of nominally autonomous republics (Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, etc). In practice, the USSR was centralized and highly bureaucratic. Moscow was the lynch pin of it all.

I learned that Russian words are far easier to pronounce once you've learned the Cyrillic alphabet. There are Russian letters that require multiple Latin (Roman) letters in transliteration to indicate the same sound. Knowing the Cyrillic letters doesn't imply you'll know what the words mean, but when it comes to deciphering the subway diagrams, it's an invaluable tool.

In the aftermath of my brief Leningrad excursion, I'd resolved to learn the alphabet and a few simple words. I'm proud of myself that I did so, and it came in quite handy in Moscow.

The Cyrillic script is named after Saint Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium who, along with his brother, Saint Methodius, created the Glagolitic script. Modern Cyrillic alphabets developed from the Early Cyrillic script, which was developed during the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire (AD 681-1018) by a decree of Boris I of Bulgaria (Борис I). It is thought that St. Kliment of Ohrid, a disciple of Cyril and Methodius, was responsible for the script. The Early Cyrillic script was based on the Greek uncial script with ligatures and extra letters from the Glagolitic and Old Church Slavonic scripts for sounds not used in Greek.

My initial reaction to Moscow Metro stations was one of utter disbelief. If nothing else about the "worker's paradise" were true, there'd still be these ornate underground transit palaces from the Stalin era, intended to illustrate the superiority of Communism, and without irony, built according to the motto, "Whatever and Whomever It Takes."

Construction on the Moscow Metro began in 1933. The work was done mainly by hand, by miners swinging pickaxes and shovels. Josef Stalin spearheaded the prestigious project to showcase the superiority of socialism. He chose Lazar Kaganovich, the “Iron Commissar,” to oversee construction with utmost ruthlessness.

“The Russian metro system was a truly unique project in the history of urban development when you consider how, when, where, and why it was built. They do, however, have a dark side when you consider much of the labor was forced by a leader who eliminated anyone and everyone who stood in his path or threatened his power.” The system opened in May 15 1935, with some 285,000 people riding it that day. Today, some 9 million people ride on 12 lines that pass through 196 stations.

As of 2017, the Moscow Metro is more than 200 miles long, with more expansion planned. Are the new lines as opulent as the old? Perhaps it's time to go back and find out.

Photo credit: David Burdeny.

The commute took almost an hour, but I successfully located the Hotel Molodjezhny. It was large, ugly and could not be missed. Now came the hardest part, as I'd been warned that interjecting a stray variable into even the simplest task might well result in gridlock.

I'd be asking hotel staff to check me into a room ten or more hours before the group arrived. If my argument fell flat, I might be spending the time guarding my belongings in the hotel bar (surprise -- there wasn't one).

Clutching my sheaf of documentation, I began the search for an English speaker. To this day, I'm not sure what happened, because resistance was very brief, and soon enough I had a key. Although my memory is hazy, the desk may have retained my passport, which was standard operating procedure so they could finish their paperwork in peace.

I had a room and a place to stow my gear. My scant notes suggest I then accompanied "the New Yorkers" to Red Square. I have absolutely no clue what this means. Did we eat and drink? Talk about the Mets?

No idea.

At some point in the afternoon, I changed money with a young man who called himself Bill. Not a common Russian name, Bill. It was a seamless transaction, and he wasn't at all threatening, just on the make -- not sexually, but economically.

Think of Bill as the inadvertent poster boy for Gorbachev's policy of perestroika ... and see ON THE AVENUES on Thursday for the next installment of the tale: Back in the USSR, with my old friend Barr.

Ice cream, to us.