11.12.2005: the deliberate tourist

One thing that's hard not to notice as soon as you hit the tourist trail here is that Moscow prefers its public spaces to be open-plan and Theme Parkesque in their dimensions. All over town you come across these tremendously large areas designed for and devoted to one particular leisure activity. Massive 'display parks' are a particular speciality.

Probably the epitome of these is the rather amusingly named V.D.N.Kh., which I visited in October. As well as being the sound of someone falling out of their bunk bed in a railway sleeper carriage, V.D.N.Kh. is an acronym which roughly stands for “The All-Russia Exhibition Centre”. Stalin had it built in the 1930s as a kind of Soviet World’s Fair, where people could go (or maybe were obliged to go) and marvel at all the amazing stuff brought to them by the wondrous Soviet State. After the U.S.S.R. collapsed, V.D.N.Kh. sort of degenerated into a sleazy retail-a-palooza. It's still like that now to an extent (though thankfully no-one has thought of introducing sprukers yet), but it's part-way through being restored to its former "glory" – if that's the right word. So what you've got is basically a soviet/post-soviet Disneyworld.

I spent a fairly enjoyable afternoon wandering the pavilions at V.D.N.Kh., but it felt a bit too much like Sydney's Royal Easter Show to have any great novelty value. Easily the highlight of the day was the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, which is adjacent to V.D.N.Kh.. This is the place to go if you want to learn about the Soviet (and later Russian) Space Program from a Soviet (and later Russian) point of view.

The collection is much smaller than I'd expected, but it contains some truly wonderful - and sometimes hilarious - Space Age paraphernalia. There's a wide selection of Russian space food (space black bread, space sardines, space caviar etc); the suits worn by Belka and Strelka, the first dogs in space (and as a bonus, the actual dogs themselves, stuffed and mounted – that was creepy!); bits and pieces related to the Mir space station, which has fascinated me since I read years ago about the three Mir cosmonauts who were living in orbit when the Soviet Union collapsed; the suit worn by ‘space tourist’ Mark Shuttleworth on his voyage; and of course some actual probes and things that the Russians have hurled up into the sky over the past 50 years or so.

As well as loving the subject matter in this place, I was rather taken with the quirky presentation. For example, the curators have mounted old satellites and lunar buggies on weird stages with glittering silver curtains behind them, and spotlighted them in a sort of 70s discotheque colour scheme. This probably appeared quite slick and futuristic when the displays were first designed, but now they look like the setting for some horrible dinner-cabaret act that concludes with a number from Saturday Night Fever. And the museum's centrepiece is even more off-beat; a huge statue of Yuri Gagarin mimicking da Vinci's Vitruvian Man pose is encircled by a tizzy gold sculpture, and both are set against a gaudy floor-to-ceiling stained glass window. The museum's programme describes this masterpiece of tack as "a graceful sphere with the signs of the Zodiac and a mighty figure of the cosmonaut ... symbolize mysticism and reality, inevitable establishment of relations between the Space and the Man." I just hope it reads better in Russian.

To be fair, though, whether or not you take the cheese factor into account, the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics is quite phantastisch. It also gets points for having one of the coolest rooftops of any building I've ever seen. An enormous sculptural monument covers the entire roof, recreating in polished titanium the launch of Vostok 1 on April 12th 1961, which carried humans into space for the first time. Or at least, it carried one human into space – that being our man Yuri G., of course. Anyway ... protruding about 200 metres upwards, the monument is an unbelievably impressive piece of architecture which would've been worth the Metro trip by itself.

Interestingly, what I'm finding out here is that you actually have to make a deliberate effort to go and see these kinds of touristy things when you live in another city. You're just not in the tourist headspace most of the time, but in the back of your mind you know that, if you don't make the effort, your time in the city will pass and you won't have 'seen the sights'.

It was partly in this spirit that, on another weekend, I made the trek over to Izmailovsky Markets - reputedly the largest markets in a city that specialises in the very large. The sheer quantity of stuff here is overwhelming; I spent a whole afternoon at Izmailovsky and still didn't see all of it. And this was on a day when (as I was told later) the markets were a lot less busy than usual. When I asked why it had been such a slow day, I wished I hadn't. Apparently I'd chosen to visit Izmailovsky on Putin's birthday, and according to 'tradition' Muscovites celebrate the anniversary of their leader's birth by gathering up their firearms and heading out of town for a spot of hunting. Hmmm.

This being Russia, the slight Disneyland feel of V.D.N.Kh. is present at Izmailovsky too. In the front section of the market, most merchants are housed in low wooden buildings that are meant to be somehow 'traditional' (again that word in inverted commas). Their stalls ooze kitsch at a rate that made me wonder – not for the first time – whether people here actually make a distinction in their minds between their genuine cultural heritage and the kitsch that inevitably arises from it. Sometimes it seems as though, en masse, they simply can't tell the difference.

Still, hidden away behind the profusion of tacky painted eggs, overpriced shapki (fuzzy hats) and garish matryoshka dolls are rows and rows of antique and bric-a-brac stalls, and here you can see some quite wonderful stuff. Interestingly, Bronze Age arrowheads are a common item in this part of the market. They aren't cheap, but then there's no reason why they should be. A lot of them are pretty close to museum quality, and I was really tempted to grab one. Not quite sure if I’d be able to get it past Russian customs, though.

Meanwhile, the good people who brought you Izmailovsky #1 are currently working on an even more over-the-top new section of the market. The new buildings are meant to reproduce the feel of ... well, I don't what they're meant to reproduce, actually. They look like novelty playground versions of Scandinavian stave churches, with ticket booths outside them in the shape of chickens. I s'pose I could've found out their significance if I'd really tried. But after a pretty long day I was having a slight cynic attack, and I decided it probably wouldn't have changed my life. So I didn't ask.

I think my favourite Moscow sightseeing excursions so far have been my day travelling around the 'ring line' (Moscow's much larger equivalent of Sydney's City Circle) and my visit last weekend to the sculpture park outside the famous Tretyakov Gallery. The Metro I'm going to leave for a separate entry; I've been slowly putting together a series of photos taken in and around stations, and I'm hoping to add those to the site at some point with explanations and what-have-you. For now, I'll just say that riding the Metro has been one of my personal Moscow highlights so far (which may seem a slightly bizarre statement, but wait 'till you see the pics). It's a social and engineering marvel like nothing I've ever seen.

The sculpture park is more or less what the name suggests. There are a few additions, though, which add to the general coolness. In between some beautiful work by contemporary artists you find old soviet propaganda signs, statues of Lenin and Stalin, monuments to heroic socialist determination and other CCCP-era stuff. Ever since I saw Goldeneye I've wanted to visit one of those 'statue graveyards' like the one in Bucharest (where I think the Goldeneye shootout scene was filmed), and this is the closest I've come to date. So I was pretty chuffed about that.

Also, the park is right next to the Moscow River. Walking back along the shoreline towards town, you pass an enormous statue of a guy standing on a ship, perched on an islet that was created for this purpose. You can see it from various points around central Moscow, but I'd never actually been up close before. It's just another nasty pimple on an already pock-marked landscape, really, but I love the story of how it came to be here. Mind you, I've only heard this story second- or third-hand, so it could be a load of old dingoes' kidneys. But I'm going to tell you anyway 'cause I think it's rather special.

According to popular anecdote, there was a theme park somewhere in the U.S. that required a large statue of Christopher Columbus, and they put the job out to international tender. The tendering process was won by a company – or possibly a government department – in the U.S.S.R., and so they started working on the job. By the time they'd finished their giganto-Columbus, however, the American theme park had changed its mind and the contract was cancelled. So the problem then became: what the heck do we do with a 200ft high likeness of Chris Columbus in Russia? The answer: change the facial features a bit, claim that it's actually a depiction of Peter the Great and stick it in the middle of the river, right in the centre of town.

I'm not sure whether I find this more admirable than laughable, or if it's the other way around. But anyway, as you can see, the statue is uglier than most car accidents, but at least it's a funny kind of ugly when you consider how it got there.

Last thing I'll mention (in this blog entry that suddenly became a travel brochure): Red Square. A clichéd way to end, I know, but it's hard to deny the magic of this place. I mean, for one thing, growing up during the Cold War and studying modern history at school, you'd periodically see TV footage of tanks rolling along Red Square with crowds and soldiers lining its perimeter, and it seemed like the very heart of an alien world that existed in polar opposition to your own. And then suddenly there you are, 20 years later, actually standing on the damn thing! It's the weirdest feeling.

(To make it even weirder, there are still long, white lines painted on the ground to show the tanks where to drive.)

Aside from that, though, Red Square just a very elegant, atmospheric, unique kind of place. And it's made all the more remarkable by what's around it. What I mean is, it's bordered on one side by GUM department store – roughly the Russian equivalent of Harrod's or Kaufhaus des Westens – and on the other side you have a thoroughly plain, uninteresting wall of the Kremlin. Then outside the square, Russian town planners' ideas about monumental capital city architecture reach their crescendo in a series of mega-huge public buildings that fail to stir any kind of reaction in me other than "Ah-huh, yes okay, so your hall is large. The point being?".

Hidden in amongst all of this architectural and commercial goop, and just a grenade-throw away from the infuriating crassness of Tverskaya Ulitsa, Red Square really is an island of graceful poise and almost ethereal beauty. My first visit to the Square – coming in from the 'back end' and not really knowing what was around the next corner – was something of a misty-eyed experience. It really is that good.

So now you've read the last two entries, you know a lot more about what I've been up to in my spare time over these last few months. There's plenty of other news and assorted palaver that I haven't mentioned here, but I think this ramble has already gone on for too long, so I'll save some for another time. Right now it's off to bed for me. Hope you've enjoyed my little rant; bye!