|
| |
|
MOSCOW |
| |
|
|
| |
MOSCOW is all things to all people. For Westerners, the city may
look European, but its unruly spirit seems closer to Central Asia. To
Muscovites, however, Moscow is both a "Mother City" and a "big village",
a tumultuous community which possesses an underlying collective instinct
that shows itself in times of trouble. Home of one in fifteen Russians,
it is huge, surreal and apocalyptic. Its beauty and ugliness are
inseparable, its sentimentality the obverse of a brutality rooted in
centuries of despotism, while private and cultural life in the city are
as passionate as business and politics are cynical.
Moscow has been imbued with a sense of its own destiny since the
fourteenth century, when the principality of Muscovy took the lead in
the struggle against the Mongol-Tatars who had reduced the Kievan state
to ruins. Under Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible - the "Gatherers of
the Russian Lands" - its realm came to encompass everything from the
White Sea to the Caspian, while after the fall of Constantinople to the
Turks, Moscow assumed Byzantium's suzerainty over the Orthodox world.
Despite the changes wrought by Peter the Great - not least the transfer
of the capital to St Petersburg - Moscow kept its mystique and bided its
time until the Bolsheviks made it the fountainhead of a new creed.
Since the fall of Communism, Muscovites have given themselves over
largely to the "Wild Capitalism" that intoxicates the city, as Mayor
Luzhkov puts into effect major building programmes which are changing
the face of the city more radically than at any time since the Stalin
era. The construction boom seemed to reach its height with the
celebrations of the city's 850th anniversary in 1997, but intensive
building activity continues throughout the centre
The City
Discounting a couple of satellite towns beyond the outer ring road,
Moscow covers an area of about 900 square kilometres. Yet, despite its
size and the inhuman scale of many of its buildings and avenues, the
general layout is easily grasped - a series of concentric circles and
radial lines, emanating from the Kremlin - and the centre is compact
enough to explore on foot.
Red Square and the Kremlin are the historic nucleus of the city, a
magnificent stage for political drama, signifying a great sweep of
history that encompasses Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and
Gorbachev. Here you'll find Lenin's Mausoleum and St Basil's Cathedral,
the famous GUM department store, and the Kremlin itself, whose splendid
cathedrals and Armoury museum head the list of attractions. The Kremlin
is ringed by two quarters defined by boulevards built over the original
ramparts of medieval times, when Moscow's residential areas were divided
into the inner Beliy Gorod and the humbler outer Zemlyanoy Gorod - both
quarters housing a number of museums and art galleries.
Beyond this historic core Moscow is too sprawling to explore on foot:
you'll need to rely on the metro. To the southwest of the Kremlin,
Krasnaya Presnya describes a swathe which includes the White House (the
Russian Parliament building); the Novodevichiy Convent further south
across the Moskva River; Victory Park, to the southwest; and Moscow
State University, in the Sparrow Hills. South across the river from the
Kremlin, Zamoskvoreche is home of the Tretyakov Gallery of Russian art
and Gorky Park, while further south are the Donskoy and Danilov
monasteries that once stood guard against the Tatars, as well as the
romantic ex-royal estate of Kolomenskoe . Fewer attractions are to be
found to the north and east of the centre, but you should venture out to
visit VDNKh , a huge Stalinist exhibition park with amazing statues and
pavilions, in the vicinity of Moscow's Botanical Gardens and TV Tower,
and to the Andrei Rublev Museum of Old Russian Art and Culture .
|
| |
|
