Russia may not offer that insane Soviet existence for the visitor, but it
is still tourism through a glass darkly
By Jeremy Atiyah
Published: 21 May 2000
I'm just back from
Moscow, where
the citizens of
Russia
were wrapping themselves up last weekend against one more blast of winter.
What? Snow and arctic winds with 18-hour daylight and the trees already in full
leaf? Luckily I remembered that the haunting of foreigners was always a
speciality of this city.
Sombre music, the threat of mutual annihilation, blonde chess geniuses and
the frozen face of Leonid Brezhnev: the
Soviet Union
struck me as an excellent place for tourism, even when I was a child.
Tourism has always been possible in Russia, even at the height of the Cold
War, but a holiday in Moscow as long ago as the 1970s was never too likely
where my own family was concerned. They were insufficiently left- wing, they
did not have beards, they were not chess boffins; they preferred the
Dordogne
to the Don and
bordeaux to borshch.
But what a drag not to have been allowed to see (for example) the Lubyanka,
the massive granite home of the KGB, while it still inspired fear! Had I made
it to
Moscow back then, I would
gladly have trodden through snow in search of spy-issue shoe-prints, and made
secret assignations beneath the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later I might have
stalked Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. I would surely have hidden in palatial
underground train stations, squatting in niches while booted men in long coats
walked past carrying pistols. I would possibly even have dropped secret notes
at the feet of blonde women with furry collars and cuffs, impersonated the
soldiers guarding Lenin's mausoleum, obtained entry to the Kremlin using false
papers, formed a liaison with a ballerina, attended a performance at the
Bolshoi Theatre and spotted a dead man, through my eye-glasses, sitting upright
in a polo-neck sweater with a plutonium pellet in his leg.
Had we known that the
Soviet Union would cease to
exist in 1991, would we not have made more effort to get there while it still
existed in all its insane magnificence? I managed to sneak in a couple of
visits - as a grown-up - shortly before the end, but by then Gorbachev had
already started his thaw and the sinister monolith was no more.
As for today's
Moscow, it is of
course located in a different country altogether. There are posh shopping malls
next to the Kremlin. Dzerzhinsky's statue has gone; the KGB has changed its
name and now offers group visits to tourists to raise money. Only at night, on
the wet cobbles of an empty Red Square, with a Siberian wind whipping your
face, and an old man trying to sell you his stamp collection, do you get a
half-glimpse of the ghost of a country that died long ago.
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