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 If there
were awards for featuring in clichés, Moscow
would win every year. Nerve-centre of the “Evil
Empire”; bastion of the Cold War; a convenient
short-hand for overblown Soviet and Russian
bombast… grim concrete soviet-suprematist
architecture which said more as the backdrop than the
newsreader sitting in front of it. And you thought
this was the whole story?
Behind those clichés is an ancient city built
around the spectacular medieval walled citadel of the
Kremlin – the third-largest city in Europe, and
the fastest-growing. If St Petersburg is San
Francisco, then Moscow is NYC – brash, loud,
high-rise, shameless… and dedicated to having
fun. The cream of the cultural crop is the
city’s soviet legacy – the Tretyakov
Gallery and Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, and not only
the Bolshoi, but at least five other award-winning
venues to enjoy ballet, opera, and classical music.
The Kremlin’s medieval cathedrals, towers and
bastions are only the start of sightseeing which can
take in several ancient monasteries, the grand
mansions the C19th merchants built whilst the
nobility were off in St P, and of course, all that
soviet-legacy stuff too – the Metro, the
“Seven Sisters” Stalin-skyscrapers, Gorky
Park, and lots more.
 The
tempo rises when night falls… Moscow’s
restaurant-scene has catapulted forwards, with
theme-restaurants, trad restaurants and places
serving juicy stuff from the former Soviet Empire
(Russians love Georgian food like the Dutch love
Indonesian) jockeying for your business with names
you already know like TGI-Fridays and The Hard Rock
Café. Russians go wild when they party, and
it’s no-holds-barred… even more so in
the wild hip nightclubs on the new-chic drag of
Kuznetsky Most. And if £1.50 per bottle Stoli
was too much of a temptation last night, fix your
pokhmelie (“hangover”) with a java-jolt
at any of the hordes of new Seattle-style coffee-bars
around the capital.
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