Moscow: Parts of this city are a work of art

MOSCOW -- Czarists autocrats? They're pussycats. Communist gulagists? Wimps. Galloping Cossacks with swords? Cowboys and dandies. The real authority figures in Russia are the sales clerks in the shops and kiosks -- and they are not amused at the New Russia.

Legendarily, the shop clerks are the tyrants of the community, dismissing customers as donkeys and dolts. Arrive in their world with rubles, and if they don't like your looks, they will ignore you entirely, turn their backs on you, save the goods you want to buy for their friends. What are you going to do about it, foolish one?

Some things never change.

Change? They hate to make change. I went to buy entrance tickets to the Kremlin and gave the woman in the cage 500 rubles for the 300 ruble fee. She snarled and flung the money back to me. I didn't even know what was going on, until some of the other cowed customers helped me out with smaller bills.

Ah, well. It's their country.

And what a place it is.

The Kremlin is a wonderwork of beauty, history and spirit. On a sunny day, the golden domes of the Kremlin Cathedral pain the eyes. They put on military reviews with tramping soldiers and dancing horses and toot-tooting brass bands.

The whole place is rich in history, old and new. The government is here, and grand churches and religious centers -- just feet from the old cold councils that scorned and belittled them. Now religious people pay their respects in large numbers, varied costumes and unrelenting intensity.

The Kremlin's Cathedral Square is a matryoshka doll of churches, each grander than the next, each so alive with the faithful as to make you wonder how the chalky old atheists that ran the neighborhood for so many generations could have gotten it so wrong.

Over 700 years, cathedral after cathedral was established around the square, which for centuries was also the political center of Russian power and ritual. These include:

-- the Cathedral of the Assumption, the oldest and largest of the Kremlin's churches, rich in frescoes, icons and the Throne of Monomakh;

-- the Church of the Deposition of the Robe, built shortly after the completion of the Cathedral of the Assumption;

-- the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, an Italianate masterpiece commissioned in 1505;

-- the golden-domed Cathedral of the Annunciation, built in the late 1440s, marked by Ivan the Terrible's Grosnenskiy Porch, where he would worship, since he was not allowed inside;

-- the Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles and the Patriarch's Palace, a continuous structure, now used as a museum.

Another high point is the Armory, once a storehouse for the Kremlin's weaponry but later a repository for treasures and now a museum of jewels, Faberge eggs and other glories of local culture and gifts to the royalty, both dynastic and communistic.

Beyond the Kremlin, Red Square stretches east from the walls in its own grandeur -- shadows of marching armies now lost to the sight of young people, arm-in-arm in jeans and western T-shirts.

At one end of Red Square, the onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral glow in exotic stripes and swirls and edges and greens and golds and reds. What the Eiffel Tower is to Paris or the Empire State Building to New York or Big Ben to London, St. Basil's is to Moscow. It stands for a nation and culture in a way that opens the mind to the reality beyond the brick and plaster.

The last time I visited Moscow -- quite a long time ago -- the line to visit Lenin in his tomb stretched for blocks beyond Red Square. Now, only a few people drop by.

Across the square is the gigantic GUM Building, once a city-size department store run by the state for two generations before being privatized in 1993. Dolled up and jazzed up, it is now a great mall distinguishable from its American counterparts merely by the grandeur of the architecture.

Many of the same shops in any western mall are to be found under the Gum's graceful ceilings. They tend to sell more fur than you're likely to find elsewhere, but near the sable coats are the same Sbarros and Calvin Kleins as in San Antonio or St. Paul, Minn.

St. Petersburg may command the headlines for flair and jazz, but Moscow remains the center of this country, for better or worse. Home to the government's power and authority (such as the shop clerks will share) the city is steadier and more restrained and more Russian than the flapper city on the Gulf of Finland to the north.

Here, under the eccentrically uneven pressures of an economy variously exploding or suffocating, dealerships for the world's luxury fleet are everywhere -- Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Masarati. Some of these are just off Lubyanka Square with its ghastly KGB secret police headquarters and prison where tens of thousands were tortured and died. (In horrid irony, the Soviets constructed a large children's goods store next door to Lubyanka.)

As at St. Petersburg, the subway stations are architectural and design centers as well as exquisitely functional transportation centers. Highly vaulted, sculpted and chandeliered with mosaics and heroic throwback art everywhere, the Metro is a medium and destination at the same moment.

Rich in the Soviet expression, Moscow is marked by towering universities, massive statues of people or statues of massive people, street art and some of the more dismal residential architecture in captivity. Defined by the centuries of Czars preceding the long, harsh decades of communist rule, the city is sparked by churches, palaces, mansions, cemeteries, convents and monasteries and social expression of amazing variety.

An old city, Moscow is rattled by new architecture, new abundance and new opportunity -- a newness that troubles so many raised under the harsh but reliable "protection" of a government that commanded all but the shopkeepers. As this is no paradise under the new economy, a nostalgia for more orderly times continues, even as many appreciate that the orderliness was run from the Lubyanka Square as much as from the great heart of Mother Russia.

When we were there a small back-page item in the newspaper reflected a poll taken of the national attitude. The Russians were polled on the way things were going and what they worried about most. Terrorism? The economy?

No. They most worried most about "famine." Not terrorism or war. "Famine." I thought that maybe there are not 20 people in America who would list famine as a fear. A people with famine in their fears is a people maybe ready to surrender to a strong government, one which would likely abuse it.

Moscow's suddenly high-silhouette economic and criminal mafia has receded as the government has resorted to long-familiar controls to bring it to heel. Whether this dampens the energy that exploded over this city and parts of the enormous country when the repressive Soviet Union collapsed will play itself out for a long time.

Today, we can walk through the Kremlin and be dazzled by the beauty of the magic there, with only half an eye to the leadership at work within the majestic buildings, a leadership that sometimes speaks openly of the good old days of the Soviet Union. The great cannon are now nearly art, rather than extensions of violence for which they were created. That is progress.

Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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