The unexpected Moscow
In Moscow, tears are as useless as an umbrella during a hurricane. Even smiles are almost useless. All that matters is speed. Moscow is a city for people with big dreams. For all others it’s a golden guillotine. Life is a continuous marathon, in which everyone tries to outdo themselves, hoping that one day they will wake up in an apartment on Tverskaya, owner of a fluffy cat and a foreign car.
Nothing in life is free, and that feels damn good when you’re in Moscow. The only thing left free is air.
Moscow today is many things – a political hub, a billionaire’s playground, an oil and gas boom city, a center of art and fashion – but it’s also an unintended memorial to the USSR. Each phase of the Soviet Union’s history is preserved in the city’s architecture: experiments in modernist design in the early years of the Russian Revolution, the imperial monuments of the Stalin years, drab tower blocks from the years of stagnation.
In Moscow everything has been built on a huge scale. Bigger is better. The trains are wider, the roads are not lower either, the sidewalks, the buildings are also big, even the benches are longer and wider.
I stayed in Gorky Park and I watched people. It’s easy to recognize the faces of the Russians. Some kind of candor is read on their faces, they have a mixture of childishness, in the most sympathetic forms and expressions with a rigidity almost impenetrable, unshakable. It seems that nothing moves them. On top of all this, add a melancholy air into their eyes that sometimes translates of a sadness forgotten and a little gentleness. They are full of emotions, they live a tumult that they express grandly.
Russians are used to situations where everything is unpredictable and unstable. They have to adapt to new rules and laws quickly. They had to make the long journey from the total control of Soviet times to the total uncertainty of the current situation.
The unexpected Moscow
In Moscow, tears are as useless as an umbrella during a hurricane. Even smiles are almost useless. All that matters is speed. Moscow is a city for people with big dreams. For all others it’s a golden guillotine. Life is a continuous marathon, in which everyone tries to outdo themselves, hoping that one day they will wake up in an apartment on Tverskaya, owner of a fluffy cat and a foreign car.
Nothing in life is free, and that feels damn good when you’re in Moscow. The only thing left free is air.
Moscow today is many things – a political hub, a billionaire’s playground, an oil and gas boom city, a center of art and fashion – but it’s also an unintended memorial to the USSR. Each phase of the Soviet Union’s history is preserved in the city’s architecture: experiments in modernist design in the early years of the Russian Revolution, the imperial monuments of the Stalin years, drab tower blocks from the years of stagnation.
In Moscow everything has been built on a huge scale. Bigger is better. The trains are wider, the roads are not lower either, the sidewalks, the buildings are also big, even the benches are longer and wider.
I stayed in Gorky Park and I watched people. It’s easy to recognize the faces of the Russians. Some kind of candor is read on their faces, they have a mixture of childishness, in the most sympathetic forms and expressions with a rigidity almost impenetrable, unshakable. It seems that nothing moves them. On top of all this, add a melancholy air into their eyes that sometimes translates of a sadness forgotten and a little gentleness. They are full of emotions, they live a tumult that they express grandly.
Russians are used to situations where everything is unpredictable and unstable. They have to adapt to new rules and laws quickly. They had to make the long journey from the total control of Soviet times to the total uncertainty of the current situation.
