A return to Moscow

On a visit to Moscow last week I went to a concert in the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire on Great Nikitskaya Street, not far from the Kremlin. Based on Verdi’s "Otello" it had opera singers performing the solos in Italian, and actors reading the prose lines in Russian. I almost didn’t make it in time because of a traffic jam in the roadway outside, where Mercedes and Lexus cars were jostling for parking spaces.

What a difference this was from the last time I came to an event in the Conservatoire, in February 1990, as the Soviet Union was opening up to the world. That evening hundreds of excited Muscovites slipped and stumbled in the darkness over icy footpaths to crowd inside and hear Mstislav Rostropovich give his first performance after returning from exile. Every seat and aisle was crammed.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife Raisa appeared in a box beside the stage, accompanied by Rostropovich’s wife, the celebrated Bolshoi opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. The atmosphere was electric. The great musician’s performance of Dvorak’s cello concerto was one of the most memorable moments in the struggle of freedom over totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

There is less of that freedom in Russia now, and less of the chaos that accompanied it. I wonder what Rostropovich, who died two years ago, would make of Moscow today. The once mighty Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been consigned to history but in its place the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin has adopted some Soviet characteristics, such as a virtual monopoly of power.

During my visit, the main evening television news program, Vremya, in true Soviet style, featured as its lead item one evening a long and obsequious interview with President Dmitry Medvedev. I was also struck by the absence of any foreign language publications, such as the International Herald Tribune, in city newspaper kiosks. It seems to be policy to make few concessions to English.

However, compared to the impoverished metropolis I knew 20 years ago when I was Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times, the city is booming. Moscow is full of delightful cafes (blini with red caviar for the masses), good restaurants, well-stocked supermarkets and high-end stores. And people in shops and restaurants are polite to customers. Only someone who experienced daily the institutional rudeness of Soviet Russia knows what a real revolution this is.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/russia-and-its-neighbors/091020/return-moscow