A One-Hour Tour of Moscow

Radisson Royal (Ukraina) Hotel

[A guest post from Matt....]

It was 10:30 on a beautiful late-June evening in Moscow. We had just finished a Moskva River dinner cruise that passed some of the most famous sites of the city, but our host Maxim was not satisfied. “In the summer, the sun sets so late that you don’t get to see the buildings lit up,” he complained.

And sure enough, it was only as we stepped off the boat that the imposing Radisson Royal Hotel (called the Hotel Ukraina in Soviet times) lit up like a Stalinist Gothic cathedral. It’s one of a set of monumental buildings called the “seven sisters” – including Moscow State University, and the Ministry of Foreign affairs – that loom above Moscow’s skyline and give it a “Gotham City” feel.  

“I’m going to take you on a quick tour of the night lights of Moscow,” Maxim declared. “You really must see them while you’re here.” We protested that he should go home, since he’d already spent 14 hours each day of the week attending to every detail of our business conference. But he’d have none of it. “My kids are already asleep,” he insisted. So we all piled into his BMW and launched into the urban dusk, with Russia’s “White House” (the Russian parliament building shelled by Yeltsin in 1993) glowering at us across the river.

Maxim displayed the Russian drivers’ habit of flooring the accelerator when the light turned green, continuing to gain speed until an obstacle or traffic light appeared. “What is the speed limit?” I asked. “It’s 60 kph (37 mph) in the city, but the important number is 120 kph (75 mph), because that’s when they take your license away. I try to stay under 120.”

Christ the Savior Cathedral

We first spotted Christ the Savior Cathedral, the tallest Orthodox Church in the world. Stalin dynamited the building in 1931, and Khrushchev eventually converted the site into the world’s largest open-air public swimming pool, but was rebuilt from scratch in the 1990s.

We flew past the Olympic Village and Gorky Park, where hundreds of people had gathered near the river to dance Salsa. “It happens every night. Even five years ago, this would not have been possible!” Maxim exclaimed, “Everyone was only worried about making money. Now people can enjoy themselves, and the dance instructors don’t even bother to get paid – they’re all volunteers.”

Peter the Great Monument

He deftly cut off the driver of an old Lada to turn onto a bridge, which passed a bizarre monument to Peter the Great.  Maxim told us that this black nautical monstrosity was originally intended to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America in 1992, but was rejected by the US as being too ugly. The artist changed the head to Peter’s, got rid of the Catholic crosses, and donated it to Moscow. Muscovites have apparently been trying to get it torn down or moved ever since.

Maxim was more enthusiastic about the Sculpture Park next door, a small area where hundreds of statues from the Communist era were dumped in the 1990’s but have subsequently been arranged in a kind of post-modern display alongside more contemporary ones of the victims of the fallen regime.

Wasting no time, we raced to the northern end of the city. Even this late at night, we were frequently impeded by knots of traffic, so Maxim dodged and weaved across the multitude of lanes that form Mir Avenue. Meanwhile, he continued his tour guide patter.

“’Mir’ means two things in Russian: ‘peace’ and ‘world.’ No one’s sure which meaning was originally intended,” he explained. But the road leads to the Space Monument, which is a rocket-shaped sculpture on top of a very cool “swoosh” pedestal. Maxim claimed that the rocket was modeled after the WWII German V2, but it looked more sci-fi than sinister to me.

Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

Our ultimate destination in this part of the city was the “All Russia Exhibition Center,” where a massive statue of a Factory Worker and Peasant Woman has recently been restored. It’s the ultimate symbol of Soviet ideals created for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder atop a 10-story tall platform, a 25-meter tall stainless steel man and woman hoist their hammer and sickle into the air.

We headed back into the center, passing the 540 meter tall Ostankino TV Tower. It was once the world’s tallest free-standing structure, surpassed these days only by the Burj Kahlifa in Dubai and a couple of other towers. Moscow’s TV studios are clustered around it in a kind of “Media City.”

In a brief lull in the action, Maxim told us about the vacation he once took in the US. “I started in Atlanta, and then visited Washington DC, New York, Niagara Falls, Cleveland, Chicago, Las Vegas, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon. How long do you think it took?” He paused for effect. “Nine days!”

I’d usually associate such breakneck If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium travel with Americans, but after a few days in Moscow, I’m not surprised – Russians and Americans share a lot of things, from the way we number the floors in our buildings (starting at 1 rather than 0) to a love for big cars, general inability to speak other languages and a frank, assertive way manner in business meetings. Of course, there is also all that common but oppositional history of the arms race, space race, proxy wars and spy-vs-spy hijinx as well, which has left us strangely more similar than different.

Maxim announced, “Now for the Kremlin. We have about 10 minutes to go.” But first we detoured a block to the Bolshoi Theater, glistening under bright lights after its recent $750 million renovation, and then veered around Revolution Square so we were aimed at the Kremlin’s walls.

St. Basil's Cathedral with the Kremlin

Red Square is not accessible to cars, but Maxim ensured that we got to see the oldest section of town in the vicinity, and get as close as possible to the Kremlin turrets and the kaleidoscopic spectacle of St. Basil’s Cathedral. He asked us to hurry as we rolled down the windows to snap pictures of what’s perhaps the most extravagant building in the world, because we were in a highly patrolled “no stopping” zone. He nonetheless took the chance to recount the (probably apocryphal) story that Ivan the Terrible had St. Basil’s architects blinded so they couldn’t produce such a beautiful structure for anyone else.

Fellow travelers: Synco, James, Evgenia and Maxim

We finally re-crossed the river, and Maxim dropped us at our hotel. Our tour had taken just under an hour. “It would take two days for any normal tourist to see all those sights,” said Synco, one of the others who had come along on our journey. It was no exaggeration, especially if someone tried doing it during the day. Moscow is one giant traffic jam from 7 AM to 10 PM. But no one other than a Formula 1 driver could have gotten us to such an array of Moscow attractions in an hour regardless of the time of day or night – and the driver never would have been able to entertain us with so many anecdotes about the city as he went.

Maxim beamed. “I like to make a big plan, so that even if I only get 80% of it done, it’s still a success.” Then he said good night and roared off into the night.