The Soviets and space

The Soviets were the first in space, with the Sputnik satellite in 1957,and there's celebration of that and other space-firsts all over Moscow. Statues, street names, even hotels glorify the space program.

One of my favourite places in the city is VDNKh - an acronym standing for "Exhibition of Economic Achievements." Its rows of pavillions were opened in the 50s to showcase all Soviet things great and good, with one given over to each of the 15 Soviet republics for them to display national produce, to the different brances of science (electrophysics, nuclear technology, etc.), and of course, later, to spaceflight.

At the end of of a long avenue of fountains you come across this, a Tupolev jet once flown by Aeroflot (and the precise same type that took me to Azerbaijan, even though it's now more than 30 years old), and a rocket suspended in its launcher:




When I was there on one of the last days of nice weather in October, sunny and breezy, kids were death-defyingly climbing up the slippery support struts to the gangway cosmonauts might have used to embark. I also went inside the Tupolev, dusty and smelling of must, where there was a grainy video about Mr. Tupolev showing on a tiny TV screen, and one wall of the cabin lined with a glass display case holding airfix models of Tupolev jets.

Behind the rocket is the biggest of all the pavillions, the one dedicated to space technology. Like all the other pavillions at VDNKh, since the fall of communism it contents have become rather more capitalist in nature. It's now a garden center. Still, the past lingers on. Fading photographs of the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan still adorn some of the walls, and at the very end, covered only by a white sheet as if it was to be unveiled tomorrow, is a massive circular portrait of the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin. You can just about see the outline of the portrait through the sheet, and imagine the atmosphere, although tantalisingly and as if through a gauze, in the original space pavillion 30 or 40 years ago, when crowds flocked and the pride and amazement at the USSR's feat was still fresh and felt.




Next to VDNKh metro station is the Space Obelisk, unveiled in 1964, three years after Gagarin orbited the earth. A rocket roars into the sky on a magnificant, swooping silver plume. On its base are a host of reliefs: Lenin gesturing to the stars, a sun god with hair streaming holding up a hammer and sickle, Gagarin, Laika the dog, the first ever being in space, and a couple lifting up their baby to celestial rays of light.




The atmosphere of and around these monuments always strikes me as a little strange. Religion was outlawed under communism, and the Soviets seem to have turned to the conquest of space, as one example, to let a little bit of heavenly inspiration into their lives. And yet space exploration in this Soviet form always leaves me with a feeling of emptiness - it's a thoroughly human conquest, made by mortals in a cold and impassive universe.




(Outside a suburban metro station near my flat, this man is holding up a Sputnik satellite.)

I've succumbed to the soviet-space-fascination myself. This is in my room. It reads:

GLORY! TO THE SOVIET PEOPLE, THE PIONEERS OF SPACE.

I was at a dacha owned by the American Embassy today, to cover a party held there by a mixed choir for expats/Russians. It's in a place called Serebryaniy Bor, which means 'Silver Coniferous Forest,' or maybe 'Silver Birch Forest' makes more sense, and is reached by a metro ride out to the suburbs and then a bus trip. It's a strange place, still pretty much inside Moscow, but ringed on three sides by the Moscow River, and it feels like you're suddenly in the countryside. It's also pretty exclusive, where a lot of the great and the good have their summer homes. Today it was quiet, blanketed in snow and toe-numbingly freezing.




There was an interesting crowd at the party: lots of people attached to the American Embassy, who told me some of the diplomatic folklore about the American station in Moscow (apparently the dacha was given to the embassy in return for some kind of resort estate for the Russian Embassy staff in the States in the 70s or 80s) and what it was like to be in Russia having grown up during the Cold War; a Norwegian oil and gas diplomat (did you know Norway is the third biggest oil supplier in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Russia, and the second biggest gas supplier, after Russia?); and a member of the embassy slightly drunkenly cussing out Bush as he couldn't take his Russian partner to the States with him as same-sex unions aren't legalised there (I suggested he move to England).

I came home and watched the dance troupe that I wrote about this week on TV with my landlady, Olga. Am putting off writing, even though a load of it's in for Monday. Hopefully going to an ice bar (i.e. a bar carved out of ice) tomorrow for someone's birthday.




The weather yesterday, by the way, was absolutely wack. I was stumbling up the road to the gym at about 5 p.m. yesterday, it was already dark, the wind had picked up, it was snowing, -27 degrees Celsius or something. I had two hoods up (was consequently like a blinkered horse who could only see straight ahead and otherwise by turning head very deliberately to left or right), a scarf, and feet that hurt inside my shoes as my socks were so big. The snow was so powdery that it blew around like drifts of sand on the pavement, forming shapes and travelling round corners as if it was alive. The whole experience was amusing in its bonkers-ness.

Something slightly scary happened in the gym. I was taking some weights off a bar, weakling that I am, and the guy that had been sat at the reception desk downstairs suddenly appeared and shouted, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Everyone else in the gym of course stopped what they were doing and looked. I mumbled, "Er, I wanted it without these..." And he goes again, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" I decided I had no answer that would satisfy him, and so crept away to the other side of the room and did some non-weight-involving exercises on a gymnastics mat instead.




It's warm and toasty in my room now, thanks to above heater on windowsill. I didn't tell my parents as I didn't want to worry them (sorry mum, dad,) but I spent two days being absolutely, disgustingly cold. I woke up one morning and sat at my desk wearing my outdoor jacket and duvet over the top. It was miserable.

Now, however, I have to restrain myself from inviting in my chilled Italian flatmate Pietro to show off how cosy my room is.

Aren't I hard?

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4625756.stm

Am writing from The Moscow Times newsroom. It's a converted factory of some sort, open-plan, with very high ceilings criss-crossed by steel girders and big fluorescents hanging down. Journalists are on the phone researching stories, the editors are wandering around hurrying the journalists up, and I'm sat reading e-mails.

A couple of experiences and observations on the extreme cold:
- Mucus freezes inside your nose. You can feel it crackle slightly.
- When the wind blows it feels like your cheeks are burning.
- It's foolish to take your gloves off to take a photo (reminder to self).
- Internet thermometers stop working.
- It's misty in the mornings, with the sun shining through it. It's quite beautiful, to come out of your building on the way to work, be bitterly cold, crossing a normally busy but now deserted 6-lane steet dusted in white, to see golden flecks glinting in every building's windows.

The temperature outside is currently -30. I can feel it - despite my double-glazed windows being cellotaped up along the edges, in true Russian winter style, a chill is still coming through them. Yesterday the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in the space of an afternoon, from -5 to -15 over lunchtime, and today when I woke up it was -25.

It wasn't actually that bad. I stepped outside this morning and expected to feel like I'd been hit with something, as if the Russian Santa Claus, Ded Moroz (Father Frost), himself was giving me a big hug. I was probably too neurotically dressed, with 2 sweaters and a jacket 4 inches thick on top, and socks so thick my feet hurt inside my shoes. However, I did have -extremely- cold thighs. The coldest thighs I've ever had.

The effect of the cold weather was compounded by the the local power company today deciding that to conserve power when people will predictably all switch on their electric heaters at home, power to industrial users should be cut off. Including our office. So at 3pm, the lights flickered off, and the only light in the office was from two emergency bulbs and the pale blue glow of computer screens on the faces of forty journalists and editors. We all looked like teenagers with an unhealthy nighttime addiction to the internet (speaking from experience). At 4, as it began to get dark, everyone lit tealights, and the paper's photographers were taking photos to commemorate the occasion.

Apparently it might be -40 at the end of the week.

Mayakovsky Square and -15

Mayakovsky Square is one of the coolest-looking places in Moscow. It's named after the guy in the middle, an absolutely iconic figure from the 20s and 30s. He was a Soviet poet and artist, and also produced some amazing, bonkers posters. This one is for a rubber company, of all things.




The words, which he wrote, go something like:

IT'S BEST TO SUCK.
THERE WASN'T AND THERE ISN'T [such good rubber as ours?].
READY TO SUCK UNTIL OLD AGE.

Like the statue of him looking visionarily into the glorious (Soviet) future, it has a certain power, I think.

The metro station below the square, also named after him, is beautiful. As you come up the escalators from the original station, built with delicate lofting arches and small gold-embossed stars and hammer-and-sickles, the dome of the new entrance appears above you. It's a vast mosaic of a blue summer sky, with clouds and birds. Lines of his poetry, the letters 2-feet high, float across, as does a rainbow.




Behind the statue in the square is the Peking Hotel, intended when it was opened as a monument to Sino-Russian friendship. It was originally built for the KGB however, and the rooms that guests now stay in were to be interrogation cells, and still have the red and green lights above the doors that would have shown if they were in use or not.

On the left, which you just can't see, is the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. I was there on Monday to research an article on a famous folk dance troupe. Against my will I was forced to take an interview in Russian (Me: "Can we speak in English?" Her: "What's your paper called?" Me: "The Moscow Times." Her: "Ah, The MOSCOW Times. And is it a Russian paper?" Me: "Er, yes." Her: "Right then, let's begin" (said in Russian.)). I spent 4 nervous hours that evening with a dictionary and my dictophone.