Recently I visited Moscow after an interval of nearly five years. It was December, a few weeks before Christmas. Sheremetievo airport had not really changed, just become shabbier. After waiting in line for a good hour I finally reached the box of a border guard: the plywood gates to Russia. A mirror was installed on the upper side of the wall of the tiny corridor I had to pass through. When I produced my passport to a stern looking, unsmiling woman in a green uniform, she looked in the mirror to see the reflection of the back of my head-as if it was highly important for the Russian Border Service to establish that I might, have horns. The arrival hall of the airport was already decorated by stunted Christmas trees and the smell of cheap cigarettes, alcohol, as well as that nostalgic winter smell of wet fur, which I have never experienced in other countries. The smells hadn't changed, I thought, not without pleasure. It was snowing and traffic was busy. Spots of lit billboards installed along the highway flashed in the windows of the car -snowflakes were whirling in front of semi-naked divas advertising lingerie. Finally we entered Tverskaia Street; traffic became very slow. A ceiling of electric bulbs hung over the street-the government in Moscow was positively not sparing on Christmas decorations. The city council and many other buildings were illuminated from beneath. Tverskaia looked like a ghostly Las Vegas unexpectedly thrown into the midst of a Russian winter.
The next morning I had to attend a series of official meetings, together with my bosses who had arrived from New York. I woke up early and decided to walk to their hotel. It was cold, the sun had only just emerged, and the city reminded me of the paintings of Kustodiev - the gilded domes of newly reconstructed churches glimmered on the background of a fluorescent yellow-green sky. The streets were empty. It was Constitution Day and people were resting after celebrating on the previous night. I met my colleagues in the hall of Kempinsky Hotel, where limousines were already waiting for us.
Our black Mercedes sped through empty Moscow streets. When our cortège stopped for a red light, legless beggars sitting in small wooden carts approached the cars with impressive speed. They were screaming something and attempted to tuck cheap looking brochures in our car windows. »What is this?« asked my chief, looking not without horror at a dirty hand, which appeared in his window, squeezing in a pamphlet: The beggars were trying to sell us Russian translations of The Kamasutra. The traffic light changed, the powerful cars sped forward, and the beggars disappeared, thrown away by a wave of snow from under the wheels. This medieval scene seemed like a reference not to Walter Benjamin - who tried so hard to find the oriental originality in early Stalinist Moscow - but to the days of the czar Boris Godunov.
I spent my visit in Moscow under the canopy of the double-headed imperial eagle. This Byzantine creature, familiar to me from my childhood as a half-faded golden trademark of the pre-revolutionary Bechschtein piano owned by my grandparents, and as the hated symbol of the czarist past destroyed by the bayonets of revolutionary sailors in Eisenstein's film »October«, appeared now like a magic Phoenix risen from the ashes. In every official building, in every office still equipped with easily recognizable scratched and worn-out Soviet furniture, the imperial eagle, crowned with two little and one big crown united by ribbons, stared at me - unfriendly and goggle-eyed. His two heads turned in different directions. The eagle had replaced the old portraits of Lenin (which looked positively modest in comparison to the heraldic glory in gold and vermilion) and had become the national symbol of post-Soviet? Russia. It was produced in papier-mâché and in carved wood, but no matter what it was made of, it looked completely misplaced on the walls of the former Soviet ministries and turned them into reflections-not of imperial glory, but of the installations of Illia Kabakov.
If my days were spent closely watched by the imperial eagle, the nights were spent with my friends, who tried to show me the best of Moscow nightlife.
On the first free evening I was invited out by an old acquaintance, who in his former life had been a video artist in Odessa and later became an owner of a profitable TV advertisement company in Moscow. Sentimental recollections about our Ukrainian past dictated the choice of restaurant. We went to an establishment called »Shinok« situated not far from the International Hotel. The characteristics of the restaurant corresponded to those of all ethnic restaurants anywhere in the world - different objects of Ukrainian kitsch were richly represented in the interior. The waiters, dressed in embroidered shirts, could even pronounce some Ukrainian phrases.
But the interior decoration had one unique element - an artificial wall with windows separated a part of the restaurant hall. Behind the wall was a stage set of a village yard populated by a real cow, chickens and geese. At some moment during the evening, an old woman in traditional dress appeared in the »yard« and started to feed the animals. Visitors enjoying borsch and pirogis observed her efforts with satisfaction. »She works for the restaurant«, my acquaintance explained, »feeds the animals and sits in the yard to create a rustic ambiance«.
»Shinok« was just an introduction to the new vogue of Moscow restaurant culture. A few days later, I spent an evening at »The White Sun of the Desert«, another ethnic hangout. In contrast to »Shinok« it had already existed in old Soviet days, however during the ancien regime (regime is masculine in French) the restaurant had a different name. It was called »Uzbekistan« and was nothing more than an obvious demonstration of the unbreakable union of fifteen brotherly republics in the field of the culinary arts. Uzbeks, like representatives of other Soviet folks, had a right to have their own restaurant in the capital of the USSR. Those days had passed. The only reminder of the old »Uzbekistan« was the façade, decorated in the manner of a Central Asian mosque. The interior of the restaurant was completely changed, even while the source of the decoration remained the same. Today the establishment is named after a popular Soviet borsch-Western (or, if you prefer, »Eastern«) filmed in 1969, which described events of the civil war in post -revolutionary Central Asia. The hall of »The White Sun« was decorated not only by oriental carpets but also by life-size figures of the movie's heroes, piercing each other with machine gun bullets, or sitting on crates of dynamite. The atmosphere of Soviet Orientalism was reinforced by nice waitresses dressed in sexy Oriental garments-more inspired by the Arabian Nights than by Central Asian reality.
Ethnic motifs are not the only elements infusing the new designs of Moscow restaurants. The main motif is the Soviet past. The club-restaurant »Major Pronin« is conveniently located in the vicinity of the KGB-FSB headquarters. It is named after the famous hero of bad official Soviet spy novels and witty unofficial jokes. The interior of the club is decorated with a selection of spy »equipment«. A bookcase contains an impressive collection of Soviet spy novels from the glory days of the Cold War. Yet, the main attraction of the club is a shooting gallery where patrons of the establishment can try their sharp-shooting skills between courses. Targets depicting serial killers and drug dealers have labels like »Save the woman« or »Save the boy«. A well-used target of the Twin Towers being approached by an aircraft graces the center of the wall. Under it is an inscription: »Save America«.
The majority of restaurants I visited during my stay in Moscow were, in true American fashion, theme parks. A restaurant called »Expedition« was created to evoke nostalgic recollections about northern geological explorations. Here, Siberian food was served in a hall decorated by real helicopters and staffed with white bears as well as other paraphernalia of the Russian North. The ownership encouraged guests encouraged to use the sauna located in the interior, before, during or after their feast.
A club called »Dacha«, the preferred spot for Moscow artists and intellectuals, was designed to evoke the Soviet country houses. Old dilapidated furniture, glass cans with pickles, a sideboard which according to legend once stood in the country house of Valerii Chkalov, the famous Stalin pilot, were all installed as props for the diners' environmental enjoyment.
A new club called »Zone« (Russian slang for 'concentration camp'), ironically situated on Lenin's Village Street, was designed to produce for its patrons the naturalistic feeling of prison life. Barking Alsatians, stern guards and waiters dressed in inmates' uniforms work hard to recreate the cordial atmosphere of the GULAG.
Russian literature is not forgotten. If the restaurant »Pushkin«, situated on Tverskoy Boulevard not far from the monument to the great Russian poet, is designed to recreate the »aristocratic atmosphere« of the beginning of the 19th century, »Gogol« - the strange mixture of a bar and diner located at Stoleshnikov Lane - is an attempt to recreate the now obsolete Soviet institution known as the »riumochnaia« (»riumka«=means »vodka glass«) where tired proletarians could reanimate themselves with a help of a couple of shots and a cheap sandwich. Of course the »riumochnaia« as a phenomenon has nothing in common with Nicholai Gogol, but the new establishment named after the famous writer has a free skating ring where a man made up as Gogol skates once a day for the edification of the clientele.
How to explain the new Russia's strange passion for living life on a theatre set?
Traditionally, it was America that was treated as the country of hyper-reality. European intellectuals like Umberto Ecco traveled to California to see life-size wax models recreating Leonardo's »Last Super« and tried to explain this strange anomaly. But Russia is not America. It is a country with no developed tradition of roadside shows or wax museums. The only analogue in recent Soviet culture to the design of the new wave of Moscow restaurants can be found in the museum expositions in the period of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1930s. During that period, every museum situated in a czar's palace had to exhibit a display showing »class exploitation«. Usually situated in the stables, life-size figures of flagellated serfs were installed for public viewing. At that time, hyper-reality was necessary for ideological indoctrination; today it is used for entertainment purposes.
Another reason why Russians choose to spend their free time in theme parks called restaurants and clubs may be the lack of reality in contemporary Russian life. For the last ten years, many people in Moscow have been living strange and dangerous lives. While yesterday's komsomol (communist youth organization) officials have turned overnight into billionaires; billionaires have turned overnight into prisoners. A line from the philosophical ode of 18th century poet Gavriil Derzhavin - »I am the czar, I am a slave, I am a worm, I am the God« - has become the actual CV of an average Russian businessmen or politician. Spending a night in the club »Zone«, people accustomed to living on the edge are finding themselves in familiar settings - today in a club, tomorrow in reality, or vice versa - yesterday in reality, tomorrow in the club.
Upon my return to America, I saw the highly prized film of Alexander Sokurov, »Russian Ark«. The film astounded me with its badly hidden nationalistic overtones and cheap nostalgia for the imperial. For the duration of two hours, the protagonist of the film, tries to convince the poor Marquise de Custine, (the author of the famous »La Russie en 1839«) that his negative vision of Russia is not correct. The last scene of the film shows an imperial ball in the Hermitage that is directly reminiscent of the new St. Petersburg fashion to organize fancy-dress balls for local dignitaries in different city museums. A few days after seeing the film, I had dinner with an American politician who had just returned from St. Petersburg. As a special honor the Russian hosts organized for him an excursion to Strelnia (the »Russian Versailles« which was recently was restored from ruins to become the St. Petersburg residence of president Putin). The palace didn't impress the American visitor. According to his observations, the quantity of marble used for renovation was excessive and his hosts' understanding of luxury corresponded more closely to the standards of an average Holiday Inn than to a palace fit for a czar-or president. The excited Russian hosts asked him constantly if he liked what he saw-to which he could only answer with short, polite exclamations like »gorgeous«, or »striking«. At the end of the visit they wound their way to the attic. The Russians proudly explained that all the windows in the attic were bulletproof and couldn't be shot through-even with a heavy machine-gun. At last, in this attic, the American was exited. He was not impressed by the bulletproof windows, but was rather amused by the interior decoration. The attic of the presidential residence was designed to replicate, in its entirety, the belly of a 17th century ship. »The last time I saw something like this was in a Hamburg beer hall at the start of the 60s«, the politician told me.
What perfect stage design, I thought, picturing the president of Russia climbing up to his palatial attic, imagining himself as Peter the Great, preparing for a voyage. Given more thought however, this interpretation may already be outdated: Perhaps the presence of this illusionary ark gives reassurance to yesterday's lieutenant-colonel of the KGB, who by the whim of fate has become the leader of a huge country. Perhaps he imagines the future and is comforted by the idea that if his palace is ever washed out by the rising tide of reality-his escape from the deluge is assured.