The Pride of Moscow

    May 15, 1935: Metro opens The Coachman’s Song, an enduring hit by the great jazz singer Leonid Utyosov, begins with a little interlude where someone calls out, “Hey, coachman!” and Utyosov replies, “I’m not a coachman. I’m a horse operator.” Having thus made it clear that he is a full-fledged member of the “modern life” of the 1930s, he then launches into a melancholy lament for bygone days. “I put iron horseshoes on you, I put new lacquer on the carriage. But the Metro came along with its oaken handrails. It immediately cast a spell on all the passengers.” And it turns out that the coachman himself is not immune to the latest trends. “Just look how crazy things are turning out. Life is really topsy-turvy when to travel from Sokolniki to harness up, I have to take the Metro to the park.”

This song captures how people saw the first Metro line. The underground train, which took on its first passengers at 7:00 a.m. on May 15, 1935, was seen as an amazing triumph of technology, a display of the power of human reason, and, of course an outstanding achievement of the Soviet government.

The night before it opened, crowds of people assembled to wait outside the entrances to the first 13 stations. Peter Latyshev, a foreman from the Red Proletarian Factory, was ceremoniously issued ticket No. 1, Series A. One can assume that it was no coincidence the first passenger was such an ideological archetype – everything that was associated with the Metropolitan was cloaked in a haze of propaganda. The heroic builders of the Metro were on the march! The Soviet public rode down escalators, were given tickets that were good for 35 minutes, and joyously rode “from Sokolniki to the park” and then were even able to transfer to what would later become the Arbat-Pokrovskaya line, to ride all the way to Smolenskaya Station.

Congratulations came flooding into Moscow from across the country and around the globe. The builders of the Paris Metro sent the following breathless message:

You should not be surprised, dear comrades, that news of the launch of the first stage of your underground was a surprise to us. We knew about this great construction project and followed its progress as best we could, just as we are following the progress of your socialist construction overall with pride and enthusiasm. Just a year ago the bourgeois Paris press, with poorly concealed delight, reported that “despite the Bolsheviks’ every effort,” the construction plan has only been 6 percent completed. Our newspapers did not dispute this figure. But the bourgeois, and especially the fascist newspapers accompanied this figure with acrimonious commentaries: “There is nothing surprising about the fact that the Bolsheviks arrogantly refused foreign assistance. Are they really up to the task of completing such a construction project, especially given the exceptionally difficult subsurface conditions in Moscow? Where are their engineers? Where will they be able to find thousands of qualified workers? Will their factories really be able to supply the track needed for such a complex apparatus?” And a few of these gentlemen did not deny themselves the pleasure of predicting: “They will scurry around there underground like moles for another year or so, but in the end they will give up and call real builders from reputable international companies to help them.” And now we are told that the entire eleven-and-a-half kilometer route is completed, that beneath Moscow run the most comfortable, beautiful, and brightly lit trains!

The jubilation knew no bounds. That evening a procession was organized to end at Mossovet (Moscow’s Soviet of People’s Deputies, the seat of city government). The newspapers provided a solemn description:

Chant after chant resounds over Victory Square (Long live Comrade Stalin! Long live the organizer of Metro construction, Comrade Kaganovich! Long live the Moscow Committee!) like a powerful victory rumble, while the eyes of all the demonstrators gaze  upward, to the balcony of Mossovet, from whence the decorated Moscow Komsomol is greeting Comrades Khrushchev, Starostin, Bulganin, Chervyakov, and others…. There are large portraits of Comrades Stalin, Kaganovich, and Molotov…. Youth marches past… the rail workers of the Moscow-Belorussian-Baltic line… Turning around in front of the Mossovet building, 30 trucks with large portraits of Comrades Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, and with the ZIS [Завод имени Сталина or Stalin Factory] symbol above their radiator grilles, are taking their places in front of the Mossovet building to the accompaniment of a band. The youth of the Stalin Car Factory greet Comrade Khrushchev. He tells them that today the proletariat of Moscow is celebrating a great victory – the launch of the Metro’s first stage…. Comrade Kaganovich’s slogan, “Give us the best Metro in the world,” has been brought to life.

During my childhood in the 1960s, the Metro had dozens more stations than the original 13, and in many places you did not need to descend via escalator (лестница-чудесница or “wonder-staircase”) to get to the wondrous world of the Metropolitan deep underground, since many platforms were by then under the open sky and the Metro had become an everyday means of transportation that was used daily by thousands and thousands of people. Still, even then, every descent underground was an amazing adventure.

You had to throw a round, five-kopek piece into the slot of the turnstile that let you into wonderland. Then the thrill began. The escalator at my home station, Smolenskaya, took you deep, deep beneath the earth. Smolenskaya was one of the first stations and one that was also planned as a bomb shelter. This is why the road to this wonderland was a slow one, and making your way out of it on the trip home also took a long time, standing on a moving stair and looking at the ceiling, waiting for the moment when the huge five-point star atop the upper lobby would come into view.

The stations had huge, heavy doors, and in the underground stations there were stunning images that even today amaze tourists. Of course there is the beloved Revolution Square station, with its mysterious bronze figures – a border guard with his dogs, a revolutionary with a pistol, workers, a milkmaid. You never tire of looking at them. And the yellow train cars were so unlike ordinary busses or trolleys, and their doors did not open outward, but retracted to the side and bore the stern warning, “Do Not Lean,” serving as a reminder of mysterious dangers awaiting passengers in the dark tunnels.

Few knew who Lazar Kaganovich was back then,* or at least nobody thought about it, and the Metropolitan was given Lenin’s name, although he had had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, he was responsible for everything.

Decades passed. When I finally found myself on the other side of the Iron Curtain, I was interested to learn that many cities have subways. I remember the shock I experienced in London at the Baker Street Station, when I learned it had been around since 1863! Sherlock Holmes could have ridden the underground! I also learned that the appearance of subways in many European cities had such an influence on art that the modern style in some countries is called “Metro style.”

We now know that plans to build a Metro in Moscow date back to prerevolutionary times, but the revolution got in the way. Meanwhile, Lenin’s name has now disappeared from the doors of the Metropolitan, while Kaganovich’s name has recently cropped up in newspapers again, no longer as the hero of the Metro, but as one of Stalin’s brutal executioners. Anti-Semites relish saying his name and patronymic – Lazar Moiseyevich – hinting that there was more to his destruction of the Serpukhov Kremlin than just using its stone in the design of the Metro’s Serpukhovskaya Station.* The fact that people from all sorts of ethnic groups were involved in tearing down the ancient buildings and churches was somehow forgotten.

The Metro is increasingly a target for criticism – the crowds, the grime, the age of the train cars – although everyone understands that it is still Moscow’s most reliable form of transportation. There are also countless urban legends surrounding the Metro, such as the one about the mysterious underground Metro-2 city, controlled by special forces, or about monsters who inhabit Metro tunnels, threatening brave tunnel explorers. Metro-2033, a book and video game by Dmitry Glukhovsky, in which the Moscow Metropolitan is transformed into a world populated by survivors of a nuclear war, has reinforced our image of the amazing world under our feet. The recent decision to restore a poem with a line about Stalin at Kurskaya station has revived one of the real monsters slumbering in the Metro’s dark tunnels, and probably not the last.

Of course none of this is as scary as the real-life threat of terrorist bombs, as we were reminded just as this issue was going to press. And given the Metro’s role as arteries and veins in and out of the country’s heart, we can expect some serious security clampdowns.

Today I live next to the Metro’s deepest station, Victory Park (Парк Победы), and every time I descend on the crowded escalator I am still transported into another world. It might not seem as enchanting as it was when I was a child, but there is still something wondrous here. And every time I pass through Revolution Square (Площадь Революции) station I am amazed by the number of serious and harried adults who nevertheless take the opportunity to touch the nose of the bronze dog, something that is supposed to bring good luck. The magic continues.