Moscow - The Pop Princess of Russia

Wednesday, August 03, 2011 Eva 2 Comments

We’ve put our finger to the pulse of one of the most expensive cities in the world and it’s alive and kicking with its own kind of pop culture.  OMG…… for those who can afford it, Moscow surely must be about fashions, labels and its women who dress and parade like pop divas.  Who has the highest heels, the best tan, the longest legs, the shortest skirt, the tightest pants, the deepest cleavage.  It’s all about trophy girls, flashy cars, Russian rap music, champagne and caviar and strutting your stuff.  As in Mongolia, Lady Gaga's music is popular here.  These are the latest symbols of the new generation of Muscovites who have moved away from Communism and turned its sights to Capitalism with a capital C.  

GUM in all its springtime glory
GUM (pronounced ‘Goom’), formerly a Communist government department store located alongside the Red Square, is now a very elegant and enormous arcaded shopping mall filled with 3 levels of luxury brand shops where we were too fearful to even glance at the price tags. Old Soviet factories are being given a new lease of life as trendy expensive apartments, and buildings along Moscow’s river are being turned into elite areas.  Where were the grandmotherly head-scarved babushkas pushing old metal prams filled with homemade pierogi and those other stereotypical drab reminders of old Soviet times?  Perhaps further out in the suburbs if we were to dig hard enough.  The Soviet ‘7 Sisters’ buildings that dot Moscow’s skyline seem to be the most visible reminder.  We had seen this style of architecture before when visiting Warsaw in Poland and had given it our own label – “Stalinist neo-Gothic”.   Yes, this is what we were looking for.

Red Square from St Basil's
On our first full day in this vibrant city we soaked up everything in sight and spent the next 8 or 9 hours walking from one side of the Moscow River where the Kremlin and Red Square are located to the other before exhaustion set in.  After our legs had been temporarily put out of service in the confines of the train, it felt wonderful to pound the pavements and stretch them to their limits again.  Swirling through the air throughout the city were “spring snowflakes”, my name for the masses of feathery white poplar seeds carried by the breeze.
A national public holiday, Russia's Independence Day, marked one of the days of our stay which meant Red Square was barricaded and a large stage and masses of scaffolding set up for an outdoor concert.  The parking lots were filled with luxury brand black unmarked cars with their drivers waiting upon Russian officials visiting the Kremlin in Red Square for the occasion.  There was the usual military display of armoured vans and tanks parading through the city centre, lots of uniforms about and many families enjoying icecreams, balloons and the warmth of the sunshine.

Within the ringed walls of the Kremlin fortress lies a complex of regal official and state buildings, museums and churches.  The Armoury was the most interesting of all.  Obscene amounts of gold, glittering diamonds, pearls and precious and semi-precious stones were on display in the form of church relics and artefacts, sacred art, royal crowns and jewellery, empresses’ and tsars’ jewel-studded clothing, archbishops’ robes and lavish gifts to the royal family – little wonder, then, that the under-fed peasants revolted.  The most elaborately woodcarved and golden royal carriages over the ages filled another entire floor.  I figured that the amount of art and clothing heavily-encrusted with just seed pearls alone would have filled a ship hull and made me wonder where all this bounty came from.  Were seamstresses with excellent eyesight sat by sacksful of these pearls and given the command to stitch every one of them on? 

St Basil's
Gold-domed churches abound within the Kremlin, one which houses the bodies of royalty down through the centuries.  As church bells rang out noontime, a flutter amongst the tourist crowds had me rushing, too, with camera in hand not knowing what the commotion was about.  I caught sight of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox faith…..well, just the back of his blue-shrouded head, really, briskly walking toward one of the private churches surrounded by his security men and a handful of priests.  His quarters inside the Kremlin, the Archbishop’s Palace, are within walking distance.  Max and I went to have a look but the small section of rooms and displays open to the public were of minimal interest. 

And what of St Basil’s, Moscow’s iconic church-turned-museum standing in glory at one end of Red Square overlooked by Kremlin walls and towers?  Its onion-domed roof looks like a kaleidoscope of riotous multi-coloured sultan’s turbans.   We went back to it time and again over our 4 day stay, in sunshine and in overcast dull weather - it was so irresistible for photographing.  After numerous photos from all angles, it was time to rein it in.  Inside each of the 3 levels, the cathedral’s walls are painted with the most beautifully-patterned and colourful frescoes, and filled with religious artefacts and icons.  Passing through from one chamber to another with audio-guide planted firmly in ears, we were drawn to a quartet of men singing monastic melodies to promote their CD.  Their rich voices filled the towering height inside one of the chapels, lending it an air of sacred medieval ambience.  It was quite a goose-bumpy feeling surrounded by the beauty of the moment and sharing it with other tourists suddenly gone reverent.
Soviet retro

Sitting unobtrusively on the cobblestones of Red Square by the walls of the Kremlin is Lenin’s red and black marble and granite mausoleum almost camouflaged.  Over several days we continually missed, wandered past and overlooked it as we pondered where it was located. There was a very small inconspicuous sign pointing the way. It would have been a no-brainer had we paid closer attention to our guidebook or questioned why the long queues along the walls. 

Ignoring his wish to be buried next to his mother, the government has his embalmed body on display to the public.  Under heavy guard, tourists file through metal detectors and careful screening procedures - hence the long queue.  Only a small group of gawkers are allowed through at a time in the dimly lit tomb where you are requested to be silent. No loitering allowed, no photos, no backpacks.  Wanting to see the father of communism up close and personal, Max and I went through the long waiting process.  Once inside, you are not given long for your eyes to adjust to the low light and to circumnavigate around his glass coffin before being ushered out.  Lenin, dressed in white shirt, tie and suit, lays stretched out with his beard and moustache carefully trimmed and his delicate eyelashes resting shut as though asleep - until you look very closely around his fingernails and then you see the stitches.  To preserve him, his body is regularly bathed in a cocktail of chemicals. He looked so calm and soooo........tiny.   Such a large name in history and yet so small in stature.  I felt sorry for him lying there exposed in death.  Who would want to be showcased like that to the proletarian masses, regardless of political persuasion?

Back at our hotel, the group of Aussie backpackers and their young Russian guide that we’d met on the Trans-Siberian train from Mongolia to Siberia arrived on our final day in Moscow.  We blamed them for bringing heavy rain showers with them.  Stories and traveller’s tales were exchanged amongst us and Anastasia, the young guide, kindly extended us her contact details for her hometown of St Petersburg, our next Russian stopover, should we require any help.  

When the weather fined up, one last stroll in the early evening light down Old Arbat Street, Moscow’s central pedestrian shopping street, gave us a final glimpse of Moscow city life before our departure on the midnight train. Trendy young things promenading, loads of cafes and themed-restaurants, teenagers in the latest cool jeans kissing and cuddling, glitzy souvenir shops overflowing with retro Lenin T-shirts and matrioshka dolls that are still in vogue with tourists, streetside artists and buskers, live bands thrashing out heavy metal or pumping out jazz music to onlookers, even an old railway carriage revamped into a Subway sandwich outlet – these were the closing scenes of our stay.  Like so many other places in the world, the usual fast food chains - Macdonalds has a particularly pretty setting near one of the Kremlin’s entrances - have taken over the predictably best real estate to deliver us our daily bread in the form of trashy food.


So there we have it, Soviet plebeian city shrugging off its Soviet mantle and gone madly modern the way of the rest of the world and more, with vodka, Lady Gaga, Dolce & Gabbana, Ferraris and French champagne mixed into this contemporary Russian cocktail.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8/08/2011

    Hi Max and Eva

    Enjoying reading your blog

    Max, hope you've got lots of photos of the "women who dress and parade like pop divas. ....the highest heels, the best tan, the longest legs, the shortest skirt, the tightest pants, the deepest cleavage"

    Speak soon
    Con ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Terry8/12/2011

    Yeh Max, we're waiting for the photos of the women with the shortest skirts and tightest pants

    :-)

    ReplyDelete

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