(37) Rachel Belth: Mетро
Китай-город metro station, Moscow, any day in June 2011. I descend the shallow steps off улица Маросейка to an underground bazaar—green-tented shops selling pastries, clothing, and gadgets; the dank smell of a basement plus freshly baked butter and jam. A flock of pigeons takes flight around the low ceiling when I walk near. At the turnstile, most people brush their purse or bag against the scanner, but I’m too nervous to have my purse away from my body, even so briefly, so I pull my metro card from the outside pocket of my purse.
An escalator stretches into a tunnel of which I cannot see the bottom for a whole minute. I know this doesn’t sound like a long time, but for me, it’s a long time to have no idea of an endpoint. Along the wall toward the ceiling, the same six or seven advertisements repeat—the same faces, the same smiles, the same bright colors in a hypnotizing pattern. Everyone else on the escalator seems comfortable in this limbo—a middle-aged woman reads another chapter of her book; a teenage couple is French kissing; a suited man with a briefcase rushes down the escalator on my left.
It is a journey unto itself, and I reach the bottom a new person. I live here now, in underground tunnels like a worm. I am greeted by a marble hallway and a bronze bust of Viktor Nogin, a leader in the Bolshevik revolution, still here even though the Soviet Union is long gone.
All of a sudden I’m in the great hall of a courthouse or some important municipal building: high, white-domed ceilings, dark metallic crown molding with lighting built-in, geometric marble columns and marble tiles on the floor and walls. My new sense of self is disturbed. I have grown used to dark, narrow tunnels and now I am greeted by an expanse of light and beauty. Am I above ground or below? What am I supposed to do? Where do I go? Then I begin to register the sounds and smells: the bustle of a crowd and the clack and whine of a metro train intensifying into panic, the smell of sweat.
***
I still have my metro card, a retro design with diagonal blue stripes, and the red block M. I keep it, along with a few leftover rubles and kopecks, in a wooden puzzle box my sister gave me from her trip to Romania that same year.
It was my first trip overseas, with a group of thirteen American college students visiting Moscow for a month to meet Russian college students. In that time, I got to know only a few places: the block or so around our hostel in Китай-город and a few stations of the metro: always starting in Китай-город and ending at Охотный Ряд, at Юго-Западная, at Новые Черёмушки, at Измайловская, at Коломенская.
***
The Moscow metro system is erratic in-depth, stations ranging from surface level to the deepest in the world in the span of 3 kilometers. Partly this is to go under the Moscow River or to access the layer of clay that provides better support for construction, but also it is characteristic of Soviet metro systems that they are deep.
November 6, 1941: Stalin gives a pep talk from the Маяковская station. The Axis army has invaded Russia and air raids are demoralizing the city of Moscow. As in London and other cities, hundreds of thousands of Muscovites take shelter in the deeper stations of the metro whenever there is an air raid. For the anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin and several party officials give speeches from the platform at Маяковская. The carpet is laid out and a large podium set up at one end of the platform, dignitaries seated on either side.
Of any station in the metro, Маяковская feels the least like what it is—a tunnel deep under the earth. The platform is wide, flanked with delicate steel colonnades. The high ceiling consists of a series of cathedral-like domes with inset blue mosaics depicting the “Soviet sky.” The insets are lined with filament lights, giving the effect of a skylight at noon. The whole place is spacious and brightly lit enough to be a palace. The symbolism is clear: Stalin as Russia’s god and king, imposed not chosen, but god and king nonetheless. Stalin as Russia’s sun, shining even in the dark, even underground.
In all this splendor, Stalin’s audience fills the platform, standing room only. They listen and applaud energetically. It is strange to see a static crowd in this place as if someone pressed pause on the usual bustle. One half expects a metro train to fly in at any moment and overwhelm the speech with its roar, the crowd to shove its way through the doors.
“The German invaders want to have a war of extermination with the peoples of the USSR,” Stalin declares. “Well, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they will get it.” He receives an (already) standing ovation.
***
In 2011 I had weathered my first year away from home, unmoored from my family in Indiana and not yet belonging at college in Ohio. I felt loneliness and despair, disjointed from the friendly Midwestern culture around me. I had this romantic idea that I could go someplace new and find immediately that I belonged there. Having read and resonated with a handful of Russian novels, I thought that place was Russia. It had been the only place on my mind for several years. I was nineteen. (Was anyone ever so young? I am still very young.)
The complicating factor is that it did feel that way. Finally, I found myself in a place where I was not expected to smile in greeting to every passerby, a place that allowed for contradiction and incongruity. For example, there remains no official logo for the Moscow metro. Despite halfhearted efforts at standardization, it remains a red M in your choice of block font.
***
It is up for historians to debate whether the original metro stations were designed deep enough to double as bomb shelters or whether it was an added benefit that appeared in 1941. But after the war, the Soviets continued building metro stations for this double purpose. Only now it was the Cold War with the threat of nuclear bombs, so they had to go even deeper.
1953: A new Арбатская opens, parallel to the Арбатская destroyed in the war. The original station was 8 meters underground; the new one is 41 meters deep with an extra-large platform. The tunnel is an unusual elliptical shape, supported with thick arches, all in white with red marble at the base. The ceiling is decorated with floral reliefs and lighted with chandeliers. One can imagine Pushkin—who once lived on улица Арбат directly above—walking this platform, an underground funhouse mirror of its counterpart above ground.
***
It is commonplace that Russia is a mystery, but I disagree. Russia puts on no pretenses. She does not put on a good face for you; she could not care less what you think of her; she does not try to make a cohesive story of her history. She is nothing but herself right from the start.
***
1986: Construction begins on Парк Победы, the deepest station in Moscow (fourth deepest in the world) at 84 meters—about 20 stories—underground. The ceiling is plain white. Thick square pylons are faced with red and gray marble, the floor a matching red and gray checkerboard—everything is simple, clean, and heavy. The back walls at the ends of the tunnel are deeply colored mosaics of the Great Patriotic War and the 1812 French invasion of Russia.
I have not been able to find the reason it is so deep. Maybe this type of thing is why people call Russia a mystery.
Парк Победы is also home to the longest escalators in Europe, 126 meters long and about 3 minutes to ride. They are in a plain white tunnel with spherical light fixtures on sticks between the two escalators like an infinite line of glowing lollipops.
***
In The Underground by Hamid Ismailov, the Moscow metro is the home of dead things, including the novel’s narrator, Kirill. Even though a large minority of the novel’s action takes place above ground, the metro is the frame of reference for the entire story. It is the shadow cast over every scene. For Kirill, the metro is significant as a personal refuge and as the place where his life begins and ends. But it also illustrates a deeper truth: that Moscow has an unusual relationship with her metro, at once independent and codependent. Each station of the metro that Kirill spends time in is described with fastidious care, from Комсомо́льская to Новокузнецкая to Домодедовская. Because each station is uniquely designed and decorated because the tunnels are so deep—physically removed from the city above—the metro takes on a life and personality of its own.
The escalators exaggerate this sense. Moscow stations are deep, and they feel even deeper because Moscow almost exclusively prefers escalators over elevators. (Much could be said here about Russia’s infrastructure excluding people with disabilities, but I am not the person to write that essay.) Every journey, every excursion into the city, begins and ends with a long escalator ride.
Unlike elevators, escalators force you to feel the depth (or height) to which you are going. You experience the slow crawl underground for 6 or 10 or 20 stories. You are forced to look into the endless tunnel and contemplate its depth, experience its lack of an ending. When I think back to my time in Russia, it is one of the things I long for the most. That disorienting journey to the underworld.
Rachel Belth is an instructional designer, creative nonfiction writer, and poet. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Crack the Spine, and The Critical Flame, among other places. She writes from an east-facing window in Columbus, Ohio.