Remembering the Metropol

I’ve always loved anything retro. That’s why I was delighted to find the old Hotel Metropol alive and well and living near Red Square. Unlike the completely rebuilt Hotel Moskva, the Metropol is still the real McCoy inside and out. Management claims there are no two rooms exactly alike. This may be a bit of hype, but there are certainly enough elegant appointments, enough antiques and art, to satisfy the fussiest classicist. Tolstoy and Rachmaninov once frequented the hotel in its prime. Today its renovated presence attracts celebrity guests like Pierre Cardin and Francis Ford Coppola.

But in the late Soviet sixties, when it was in precarious decline, my parents stayed there and fondly remember its shabby elegance (my mother dubbed it “haute bordello”). Along with chipped marble balustrades and frayed silk drapes, the hotel once flaunted a cavernous restaurant rife with gilded cupids and a Baroque mirrored wall reflecting more than a few party bosses tossing back shots of chilled vodka with their blinis and caviar.

My parents dined here one winter’s night, fascinated by a red-faced commissar at the next table, in the company of a pretty female comrade, both dressed to the nines in the latest European fashion, proof positive that there really was a floor in GUM just for the Communist elite. The same consumer privilege extended to expensive imported cars for the bosses while the common people – if they drove anything at all – tooled around in cheap Soviet-made Zaporozhets, nicknamed gorbatyi or “hunchback” because of their bug-like shape.

With his stubbly jowls and coarse manners, the commissar reminded my father of Sharik, the homeless mutt turned loutish human proletarian (via a surgical experiment) in Bulgakov’s black comedy, The Heart of a Dog, banned in 60's USSR. Before his ill-fated metamorphosis, Sharik wryly comments that there are forty thousand dogs in Moscow and bets there isn’t one of them so stupid he can’t spell the word “sausage.”

On the streets, the scruffy Sharik has survived by his wits and is a self-taught reader able to identify butcher and grocery shops by their letters and the particular colors of their storefronts. This makes me think of what I just read about Moscow’s so-called wild dogs. The strays (curiously, about the same number as in Bulgakov’s time) have evolved into distinct genres, one of which is beggar dogs, a canine intelligentsia whose Darwinian evolution is based on smarts, not strength.

Living on the outskirts of Moscow, these beggar dogs have learned to ride the metro, commuting downtown to where pickings are better and customers plentiful. They wait politely on the platforms, then board the trains, finding the quieter spots in the front and last cars, doing a little panhandling -- a paw on a child’s knee, a plaintive look to a young woman that says “Feed me” – while they count the city stops.

Then it’s off to the streets where they expertly choose their marks among crowds of Muscovites. They’ve learned to cross busy roads by watching pedestrians and differentiating signal colors. At the end of a hard day’s work, they hop on the metro and go home to their suburban refuges, sans briefcases and caffeine headaches.

Remind me to pack a couple of sausages in my pockets just in case a few beggar dogs corral me (clearly I spell "tourist") as I exit the Metropol on my way to visit the Bolshoi Theater. Or in case I’m riding the metro and a Sharik look-alike sits down next to me and starts to tell me his sad story.

Planning for Russia

What’s to be done? From his prison in St. Petersburg, philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky asked his famous political question in the mid-nineteenth century. His interest was in reforming Russian radicalism and enlightening his backward country.

Mine is less weighty, but big for me, since I’m organizing a new group trip to Russia for this summer. White nights? Luckily the summer months will provide an abundance of them. But how do I translate modern Russia from its complex welter of history, art, and literature into a manageable language? Can centuries be compressed into eight or nine days? And will my group ever glimpse – if she still exists -- iconic Mother Russia?

I do what I’ve always done when I’m working things out in my head: I run. I plan to make a long loop down to the beach, up past the marshes of the coastal waterway, then back across town where the malls, fast food eateries, and car washes take me light years away from the Russia that my parents traveled to in the late 1960s, the formidable USSR.

They rode the Trans Siberian all the way from Irkutsk to what was then Leningrad. They dealt with the vagaries of Intourist (part national tourist bureau, part Kremlin-style watchdog), putting up with indoctrinated “Soviet” guides, bugged hotel rooms, and paper vouchers like Monopoly money because rubles were scarce.

“Go to the Caucasus,” my father tells me. The Black Sea he knew was a hot spot for Soviet factory workers on state-sponsored vacations. My mother still remembers the mountain crossing by train. The engine stopped unexpectedly one moonlit night to let an assembly of wolves pass while drunken soldiers on the train sang “Kalenka” and played their balalaikas – a scene straight out of Dr. Zhivago.

In Greek myth, the Caucasus were one of the pillars supporting the world, and it was here that Zeus bound and tortured Prometheus for eternity. Jason sailed the nearby Black Sea coast searching for the golden fleece; instead he found Medea. And the Caucasus happen to be one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions on earth. Done. I think I’ll take my travelers to Gobustan in Azerbaijan to see 10,000-year-old petrogplyhs. Then we'll go next door to tiny Armenia to see the beautiful Etchmiadzin Cathedral. We’ll see the Caspian and the Black Sea and cross back into Russia through Georgia, once a kingdom under the rule of Queen Tamar, a brilliant military strategist who repelled the Turks and made Georgia into a thirteenth-century Christian stronghold.

Then we’ll go ... A bell startles me, and a cyclist impatiently shoots around me, glaring like I'm some kind of annoying bug. All this thinking about Russia has slowed my pace to a crawl. But maybe that’s a good thing. I walk out to the end of an empty boat slip and look across the marshes, imagining the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where Chernyshevsky sat staring out his prison window at the Neva River below, thinking and then writing, “What’s to be done?”

Matty and I at the NCARS 26.2 hour Adventure Race 8/28 near Table Rock mountain in North Carolina!