Travel - Location, Location, Location

By Shelly-Maree Cassidy

If there was a Russian version of Monopoly, the prime real estate on the board would surely be Red Square – the historic and political heart of Moscow. The huge pedestrian-only square is a magnet for Russian and foreign visitors alike, with every side flanked by some of the city’s most famous and fabulous tourist attractions.

Red Square’s centrepiece is Saint Basil’s Cathedral, a fantastic conglomeration of domes, cupolas, arches, towers and spires – an architectural masterpiece unmatched for its sheer visual exuberance. Brightly multi coloured, it dominates the vast grey cobbled expanse before and around it.

Tsar Ivan the Terrible commissioned the cathedral to commemorate a battle victory. Legend has it that on its completion in 1556, the aptly-named Tsar ordered that the architect be blinded so that he could not match or outdo its splendour in the future. Napoleon was apparently so impressed with Saint Basil’s, he wanted to take it back to Paris. Fortunately, that was impossible then, so it stands here still, long after he tried to burn it down and Bolshevik and Stalinist-era plots to demolish it were thwarted.

Most of Moscow’s key sights are within five minutes’ walk of Red Square, as is the imposing National Hotel. Although now part of an international hotel group, the National is managed and staffed by Russians, so has retained much of its local flavour. Moscow is a place where you can quite easily spend a week or so, and the National is an ideally located base. Standing at the crossroads of Tverskaya and Mokhovaya Streets, looking across the Alexandrovsky Gardens to the Kremlin and Red Square, the National has been a silent witness to many of the tumultuous events in Russian history. Prosperity, devastation, war and revolution have all visited here at one time or another.

Lenin’s mausoleum is just minutes from here. The embalmed body of the founder of the communist state is entombed in full view of where he once lived – room 107 of the National Hotel. The bedroom he stayed in for a week in March 1918 was ‘decorated in tender pink shades’. When Lenin moved into the Kremlin as head of the Bolshevik government, the National was renamed the First House of the Soviets. It became a convenient residence for party officials for more than a decade, reopening under its original name in 1932.

It is part of a very different Moscow now; more outward looking and increasingly cosmopolitan as it experiences rapid social change. Key figures in past and present Russian politics, comrades Lenin and Brezhnev, together with the current prime minister Vladimir Putin, loiter near the National Historical Museum at the edge of Red Square, posing for paid photographs with tourists. They are actor look-alikes, but a rather eerie reminder of sterner times and now an indication of an apparently more tolerant mood.

Moscow is loaded with architecture, museums and galleries. Now it has plenty of that other major attraction… shopping. Most of the famous brands and several of the global retail chains are here, from clothes to restaurants. Capitalism, rather than military, might is on display, from the enterprising elderly strawberry sellers perched on the side of the motorway as we drove in from the airport to the number of luxury cars seen on city roads and the myriad of souvenir stalls doing a brisk business in Soviet-era memorabilia. Many buildings are being renovated or are under construction. Cafés, clubs, casinos and cinemas all beckon to the newly prosperous.

Over the long weekend we visited, the inner city was crowded with people enjoying time off and out in the balmy summer weather. Contemporary life (Western-style) is quite evident: teenagers texting and talking on their mobile phones and fashionably-dressed shoppers browsing the elegant arcades of GUM – the huge department store next to Saint Basil’s.

In the gardens, families picnicked and gathered at the ice-cream stands, children played in the fountains and people chatted in cafés. Brides were everywhere, blossoming like giant white flowers in the green garden and against the grey cobbled expanse of Red Square. Tipsy wedding parties hovered nearby as cameras recorded the happy day.

As we watched, a group of armed soldiers marched past and then reappeared, this time toting musical instruments. They began to play a catchy American tune and dancing broke out at the ramparts of the Kremlin; couples waltzing and fox trotting in the sun. Muscovites and visitors alike were relaxing and enjoying the sights, set against the memory of a recent communist era perhaps epitomised in Western minds by the Kremlin.

In Russian, ‘kremlin’ means fortification or citadel, and it certainly presents itself as that. Centuries old, the Kremlin was the residence of the Tsars, Bolshevik and Soviet rulers, and now President Medvedev. A looming presence in the area, its red towers and yellow walls make a more cheerful colour scheme than one might imagine for a place with rather grim Cold War era associations. Above its high walls are tantalising glimpses of gold domes; a hint of the stunning buildings only visible by going inside this bastion of power.

Once inside, an architecturally diverse collection of buildings is testimony to an intriguing history. A tour of the Kremlin – while much of it is off limits – reveals an ornate collection of ancient churches and palaces grouped amongst plainer government offices.

Your entry ticket includes admittance to the superb Archangel’s Cathedral, once the private church of the Russian Grand Dukes and Tsars. Members of the ruling family were married here, their infant heirs baptised; aristocratic confessions heard and its burial vaults their final resting place. Inside the chapels are precious frescoes and icons. Our visit coincided with a choir recital. The unaccompanied voices of the four singers were hauntingly beautiful, almost otherworldly; surely blessed sounds even if you are not religious. Next door, the staggering wealth of the Tsars is displayed in the Armoury, the oldest museum in Russia.

While the city above ground is fascinating, so is the underground. The Moscow metro is surely the most decorative of the world’s subways. Built to Stalin’s orders and opened in 1935, the stations have been called ‘the people’s palaces’ because of their remarkable architecture and interior design. The lavish use of marble, mosaics, sculptures and chandeliers make the crowded stations almost sumptuous, and certainly dramatic. Larger-than-life bronze statues portray a veritable cast of comrades (soldiers, farmers, factory workers and students); artful propaganda that illustrates and embellishes key events in Russia’s communist past.