"St Petersburg is a city of the past," says my son when I admit to feeling the charm of that seductive place. "But Moscow is the city of the future."
He is not the only young Irish resident of Moscow with an attachment to the place, an affection unshaken by the turmoil of the past couple of months. His optimism seems justified by the elegance of the young women, the variety and excitements of Moscow itself, the colour of its complex, intriguing character. Yet to be a visitor to Russia during these past weeks is to discover that the city of Moscow is so monolothic as to be no longer expressive of the country it is supposed to represent. Another discovery is how easily one can be tempted to speculate. The rouble-dollar rate on the evening of Friday, September 4th was 16 at the hotel exchange; the previous Wednesday it was 12. By Monday night in St Petersburg it is 20. Queues, instead of being a hindrance, become a temptation. Suddenly the way so many Russians live makes sense: stand in line for whatever is going and buy it; it may be worth more in a few days' time. The shop selling prestigious glass and China is almost sold out of its best lines. "People are just buying everything they can," we are told.
A university professor tells us that the bank in which she has deposited her savings has closed. All her money is gone. While imported goods abound, their prices are now inflated. In the markets and food-shops there is no butter, no cooking oil, and soap and sugar are disappearing. Restaurants have signs on the door to announce the rouble exchange rate used: the prices are in dollars, the bill must be paid in roubles. By Thursday the roubles are running out, the exchanges are closing early, the black marketeers with their briefcases and calculators are, thank goodness, scrutinising every rouble outlet. Only once, in the Sheraton-run Nevski Palace hotel in St Petersburg, is a credit card accepted.
Interminable procedures
Moscow is a city in which no concession is made to the individual foreign tourist, and the sheer difficulty of getting around it obscures for a while the hardships accepted by its own people. The ease with which the entry visa was processed at the consulate in Dublin is no preparation for the interminable procedures at the airport, railway station or hotels. The Russian-owned places insist on a three-stage registration routine on three separate floors - one for signing in, another for paying, another for police registration - requiring passport and visa at each stage. Ditto, later on, at the left-luggage department, plus a special permit demanded (passport and visa again) each time my son tries to visit my hotel room. Long-term foreign residents in Moscow, who include many Irish, have their passports specially bound as a protection against such incessant use. Tackling administrative obduracy is made no easier by a local attitude which ranges from indifference to rudeness. Without a Russian-speaking guide this would have been so daunting as to cancel all sympathy for what the Russian people are enduring now.
Dead and living
But I am lucky: my interpreter appreciates Moscow and walks me through its boulevards, its exotic locations, its hidden parks and alleys. His comprehension of the city has been mediated through literature as well as experience; we pay homage to Pushkin and Gogol - could he really have been buried alive? - Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Akhmatova and many names unfamiliar to me. In the Novodevichy cemetery I hear about Mayakovsky. I sit on a crumbling bench near the tomb of Scriabin; to my left are the generals with monumental tanks on their gravestones, to my right the architects, the dam-builders with torrents of granite around their names, the aviators, the engineers of the mighty Soviet world. Here among the dead it is the living who come to mind: the few timber benches are cracked and broken. Plastic bottles do duty for flower-pots even in the finest plots. The paths are swept but uneven. Despite the woodland breaks and glades which soften the distances, everywhere in Moscow the inescapable impression is of expanse, of size, of the reduction of the individual in the scale of the universal.
That deliberate reduction is at its most chilling in the shadow of the omnipotent Stalinist skyscrapers which dominate the vistas. It becomes surreal in the half-closed hotels where the wrong door or the wrong elevator will open on a disused corridor, dark, limitless and eerie. Few establishments rival the Rossiya Hotel near the Kremlin, but many reveal a dereliction which at the end of just a week is so much a feature of the place that it no longer merits comment. Can this place with half its windows boarded up really be a hospital? Wherever the money has been going for the past few years, it has not gone into maintenance. Even famous sites like the Novodevichy Convent look run-down, the external walls peeling, the paths littered with the rubble of whatever building work may be going on there. Inside its public buildings the story is different, for time and again it is obvious that great efforts have been made to retain or restore the historic properties. Yet here too there is a sense of desperation: a group visiting the convent's amazing iconostasis (actually amazing only at first because there are many such wonders) are told that they can use their flash cameras inside the cathedral for a fee of 20 roubles. The tourists jump onto the tomb of Sofia, sister of Peter the Great, and an lightning storm of photography breaks out.
In the metro station at St Petersburg a trio of old women are singing religious verses, the oldest buskers I've ever seen. But not the oldest beggars, of whom there are so many in Moscow now that there is a sense of penurious hopelessness underneath the bustle of the shopping halls which line the entrances to the metro. This is no city for the lame, the halt or the blind, who stay at home, invisible; only at the Tretyakov Gallery do I notice a wheelchair-lift. Everywhere the pavements erupt, the manhole covers tilt at angles which indicate a complete ignorance of the compensation culture. If there is a speed limit within the Moscow road system it is ignored; pollution is heavy and inescapable.
Outward dourness
Walking distances are longer than the Western visitor is used to, and the people are burdened in a way which explains their outward dourness as endurance. In private they are warm and hospitable. Life is hard. In a country with compulsory military service the presence of the military everywhere is understandable; it is the level of security (three men always at the gate to my hotel lift, another at the door of the hotel, another at the door of the restaurant, and so on throughout the city), often by uniformed guards, which becomes disturbing. It is appropriate that one of Moscow's best-known public buildings is the Lubyanka, incongruously sited opposite one of the biggest children's toy-shops in the world. At a newspaper kiosk an old woman bends down and beats her fists against a newspaper photograph of President Yeltsin, shouting at the impassive stall-holder.
At the airport for my flight home, I over-tip the taxi-driver in acknowledgement of his cheerfulness. I give my spare dollars to my son, having noticed four banks where he can change them for roubles. Off he goes; but there are no roubles.