i saw a dead body today

moscow changes. it has spent a long time changing and it continued to do so overnight. yesterday we arrived, dumped our bags on our beds and went straight out to red square where we found a hive of activity and bustling crowds. we walked ourselves back again this morning to find a silent barricaded graveyard.

on certain days of the week they open lenin's mausoleum to the paying public. this involves recovering the fabled soviet police presence that you expect.
and plenty of queuing.

the cops all look about 17. and they have guns.

understandably, stepping underground into the twilight black marble room where lenin's carcass lays is a sombre affair. i was strictly commanded to take my hands out of my pockets, whether out of respect or for national security purposes i don't know.

lenin doesn't look like a dead body. face and hands are picked out by mini spotlights and give the look of a discoloured madame tussauds wax-work or a rubber death mask. a plastic shard from another time.

elsewhere we continued to hunt the unsung ex-soviet union. with the weather on our side, a cloudless sun beating down a steady 27 degrees and a constant torrent of chilled, free and youthful people; amongst the public enjoyment of a sunny sunday we sought out remnants of a darker time: a statue park of communist busts carved in heavy stone. a museum of space exploration ignoring the disappearance of a russian cosmonaut. a park filled with robust communist pavilions, the architectural equivalent of a tory MP presenting a zany kids tv show.


speaking of architecture, these russians don't do things by halves. the aforementioned park of pavilions sat on a scale that i can barely understand.

picture a pavilion about the size of the bank of england building and dress it in communist regalia. a building designed to look utilitarian and invincible.
now give it it's own courtyard with fountains and flower beds and gold leaf.
it is a big presence.

this park had 72 pavilions like this. all slightly different but all the same size. big.

seventy two.

to help you with the scale, one pavilion decorated its courtyard with 2 commercial passenger jets and a space rocket.

yep.

russian buildings continue this scale everywhere. we walked miles and miles to the university that stalin built. large is an understatement. as though someone had lopped off the top half of the empire state building in new york and decorated it with four canary wharfs. and it rests, sternly overlooking moscow from the top of a hill. it is a serious building. hard to believe that it could be the setting of hundreds of merry japes similar to my experiences of university, but then again moscow has pulled a few surprises from its sleeve already.


the metro (or moscow fast transit system) is a tribute to jaw-dropping architectural feats the world over. unlike the london underground it works properly and doesn't do that weird stopping in the middle of nowhere for no reason thing. apart from that (this is hard for a non-trainspotter to say) .. the subway is stunning. the extravagance of st. basil's cathedral and the solidity of the university combine in the tunnels and simple stops at the stations become glimpses into underground palaces.

there's a statue on the south bank of a man captaining a sailing ship that is bigger than the statue of liberty and more intricate than the eiffel tower. i've never seen or heard of it before. we came round a corner and saw it from a distance and nearly tripped over our own bottom jaws.

if it wasn't for corruption, russia would rule the world.