Moscow’s Makeover Swaps Soviet Grit for Urban Sparkle

Moscow felt medieval when I first arrived almost 20 years ago, in January 1998, seeking adventure. There were few billboards, advertisements, or shop windows filled with merchandise. The women working at my local producti, or small grocery store, wore shawls, had moles and wens, and weighed out my purchases on an old-fashioned scale. One had an oozing wound on her hand and a stained bandage; I was enough of an American to find this shocking. To buy an apple, I had to stand in three lines. My friend Olga worked at Krisis Genre, one of Moscow’s first bars, and when I walked there at night from Metro Kropotkinskaya, the streets were completely deserted.

What grandeur Moscow had then, what culture, what good bones. In ruin, it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. I took pictures, dazzled by the monumental scale of the city, the massive boulevards and brutalist architecture, the oceans of marble in the metros, the social realist statues of huge, broad-bosomed female factory workers gazing up toward a utopian future. All of it—even Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a black metal giantess outside Metro Chistye Prudy—covered in grit.