From the Depths of Moscow

[rm]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-metro8jan08,1,3830210.story

Since moving to Moscow seven months ago, I've been schooled in the stark realities of Russian society by daily rides to language classes and the office on the Metro. The vast sprawl of tracks and tunnels seems to offer a direct line into Moscow's soul -- a place of faded elegance and hopeless cynicism, debauchery and destitution, barely contained brutality and touches of kindness.

... there is something in these halls that tells a story about Russia itself, a monument to communist days, when underground palaces, glittering in chandeliers, decked in mosaics and frescoes and Stalin-era sculpture, were built for the common commuters.

Now they are shabby and cramped, the bulbs burning out in the chandeliers, the halls a miserable jam of too many frazzled bodies. Up above, wild Moscow rages along, lawless and mad, cold and rich.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Passengers wind past an old Soviet monument inside a subway station in Moscow. In communist days, the tunnels were decorated with glittering chandeliers, mosaics and frescoes.

well, yes. and they still are.

this is all true, what she's written in this article. but it's not complete.

argh, i am devolving into handwaving here. i've been to moscow. i loved it. there is a lot of good there.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Oh Moscow, lawless and mad, cold and rich. I think that's the most beautiful thing I've read to describe what it is now.

The part about the dog made me hurt.

[miep.livejournal.com]

I can't let that go. damn it.

how could no one stop for the dog? people, I guess part of me can shut that out, but a dog....

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

I couldn't read the whole of it. I had to stop. I love Russia, I always wanted to go film there, but... yeah. Sometimes it's just overwhelming.

[bluejinn.livejournal.com]

Heya. What did impress you most of all in this article?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I used to teach English as a second language to a Russian girl who was here working as a prostitute and she would tell me craaaaaaaaaazy stories about Moscow, and this is the first thing I've ever read that clicked with the tonal quality of what she would tell me.