What Moscow Wants

Soundtrack – Iron and Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days

Metro Statistics: First stop – Park Kulturi – completed in 1935, May. 1985, November, 2.5 billion passengers carried annually. 1987, December, 2.6 billion passengers annually. From 1935-1995 more than 86 billion passengers carried. The Moscow metro has been using smart cards since 1998. Calculation for last 13.5 years – 2008=3.3bil/year… so… let’s say 5 years at 3 bil, 4 years at 3.1, 2 years at 3.2, 3 years at 3.3, then 2 bil for last .5 year (little more than half a year at this point.) Ok then, so if you add this all up you get 45.7 bil for the last 13.5 years + 86 bil for the preceding 60 years – 131.7 bil… hmm, well it’s an ok guess anyway.

Today I saw a man texting on two cell phones at once.

Everyday I ride the Moscow metro, red line, line number one, aptly named – the first line completed in 1935. In 1935, the metro carried 2.5 billion passengers annually. Today the Metro carries a maximum of 9.5 million passengers a day. Between then and now, somewhere around 131.7 billion passengers have ridden the metro, not counting the skinny legged, stubborn, and slightly drunken teenagers who jump the turnstiles everyday while the middle-aged matronly uniformed attendants yell after them, maladoy chelovek! Come back here! All the while never moving one inch off their seats and barely turning their heads from the monitors displaying every possible move from every angle of the metro station. (Oh to see the barrage of hairstyles that have jumped those turnstiles over the years…) Like most public transportation systems, the Moscow metro is a perfect microcosm of the place it transports.

Needless to say, that besides being hot, stuffy, and unnervingly close to the core of the globe, the Moscow Metro is one of my most favorite places on earth.

What has fascinated me from the day I got here is figuring out just what it is, exactly, that Moscow wants. Just why it is going so fast and pushing you always through the doors and cramming 1000 people or more up one escalator at one time, only to ride back down again on a matching escalator at the other end of a long corridor in order to get to the correct part of the station to go through the flurry all over.

Moscow does not want to wait for you while you count out exact change, read directional signs, or cross the street. Moscow walks by 15 of those old babushkas everyday and never once stops to think of what they were like when they were young, back when they had money to live on and hope and if nothing else the charm and beauty of youth. Moscow will let a drunken man, well-dressed even, stumble out into oncoming traffic, cross the street (barely) and then try to hail a cab by pointing to a dog on the sidewalk. In this fair city you can feel the weight of history all around you in the never-ending layers of grime and dirt and you cannot separate the pollution from the politics as it fills your lungs and squeezes you from within.

The City of Self Will. Beautiful women. Maybe the most beautiful women on earth. Flawless appearances. Lips, hair, legs, nails, fashion… even the imperfections are deliberate. It isn’t judging you, although at first it appears to be studying your every move, stance, stare, and seat choice on the metro. This City is not staring at you, it is just staring blankly and thinking only of itself. It does not want to hear your story or learn what you can do for it - it can do for itself. Moscow just wants you to get out of its way. It does not care about what it promised you last night, even if it does remember what it said, that is irrelevant now. The important thing is what it wants at this little teeny tiny eternally important and then immediately forgotten instant in time.

There is not only a huge separation between everyday life and politics, but a huge, vast separation between every single individual life and every other, walking the streets, riding the line, or holing up in the thousands of hive-like apartment complexes and waiting for the endless day to just end already. And it’s like grabbing water – most of the time the strategy to get what you want seems to be about forcing those infamous pegs into their non-fitting holes.

I’m pretty convinced at this point it would take a lifetime of sitting in coffee shops, parks, and on that metro to figure out exactly the answers to my questions. Every time I look at someone with deepening lines on their foreheads and skin rapidly losing elasticity I have to stop and think about what they have seen in their lifetimes. This country, this city, has seen an incredible and deeply influential amount of history, and whether these people recognize the significance and encompassing daily impact of the their past as it radiates up from their grime is a question that sits on the front part of my brain nearly constantly. Does this even cross Moscow’s mind? Or is it numb even to gravity after years and years of drinking and forgetting to cope?

It is my favorite question to ask myself. And yes I understand that asking myself questions about other people is not nearly as effective as asking them these questions.

People rush everywhere all over the world in metro systems just like this one. Cities all over the world are dirty and grimy and have beautiful women living in them. I asked a Russian once if they thought Moscow and Russia were European places or not. This is kind of a big question, a bit of a sensitive question, and certainly a very philosophical question. I was told that it is not European, and it is not definitively anything else, say, anything perhaps more likened to Eastern culture. Not East, not West. It is Russian. I was told that, “Yes, it is dirty and lots of places are dirty, but this is our dirt, it is dirty in our way. The buildings are beautiful in our way.” Likewise the women are beautiful in their way. The men are staggering in their way. The babushkas are selling flowers and fruit and begging in their way. And the metro reflects this accurately as it spins round and round in a particular way. The darkness rolls over this place with just as much particularity as the day, which lights it once again. And it feels like the dynamic of a large family. The people within it may hate each other and find their actions in the context of one another deplorable. They may argue about what they are and what they want and who gets what amongst themselves, but when you talk to someone else, someone on the outside, you defend your family fiercely and completely. Even down to the dirt and grime.