There were some delays getting to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. One involved me forgetting my wallet; one involved giving directions to some hopelessly lost (but attractive) Chinese LED merchants bound, somewhat appropriately, for Elektrozavodskaya. But we eventually arrived at Park P-Body, deepest and shiniest Metro station of them all, to attempt on Friday what we’d failed to do on Tuesday.

There’s a giant obelisk in front of the big crescent-shaped museum building; working under the (as it turned out, erroneous) belief that its height was something to do with war deaths, we tried to work out what tiny fraction of a millimetre each dead Soviet got. (Actually, the needle is 10cm for each day of the Soviet involvement in the war; giving 10cm to each death would get you an obelisk several hundred kilometres tall.)

The basement was, I think, the best part; a U-shaped corridor ringing the “Hall of Memory and Sorrow”, with passages fanning out like a five-pointed star and the figure of the Rodina mourning her fallen son beneath thousands of hanging chains. All around the ring were rooms containing lavish dioramas (which seem to be very popular in Russia) – giant, impossibly detailed paintings of battles, with a little foreground set made of genuine weapons and facsimile trenches; the real-world section was usually a bit dusty and tacky, but the paintings themselves are the sort of huge, epic war-glorifying vistas that could convince a generation of young men to march to their deaths, and the Siege of Leningrad diorama in particular was deliciously detailed and grim.

Besides that, the museum was the sort of solid, heroic stuff you’d expect. Few of the cases held anything we hadn’t seen before at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces (Hitler/Mussolini puppets and weird political cartoons involving submariners and pigs notwithstanding) but the general presentation was considerably better, and most of the captions were duplicated in English. And there was some amazing stuff there, the weapons and set-pieces from so many iconic battles and historical photos; the Russians have not yet turned their museums into politically-correct interactive playpens with shiny feely-good lights and interviews from local drunks about the parish. It’s a Museum, a great big building full of interesting, important artifacts chosen with care by well-informed historians, and that is just as it should be. Off in one wing was an art gallery full of heroic Soviet faces in various styles; in another, an exhibition detailed Nazi forced labour systems in such violently anti-German language that my first reaction was “oh now steady on Ivan, that’s the pot calling the kettle a genocidal lunatic”; all the hating on Germany suddenly made sense when we discovered that the exhibition had been put together by Germans, with German government funding. Again like the CMAF, the centrepiece of the entire museum was a huge triumphal section; an immense sculpture of an idealised warrior, in a high-domed room ringed with bas-reliefs of the Hero Cities and great stone slabs bearing the gold-inlaid names of the motherland’s champions.

I like the USSR’s highest honour. No vulgar flash, no paeans to gods or sovereigns or abstract concepts; none of the noise or clutter or grandiloquence of the Soviet second-bests or the West’s greatest honours. A plain red ribbon, a plain gold star, and the simple title HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION.

On the way out, wandering Park Pobedy in search of the railway gun pictured on the museum site, we found a deeply unpromising-looking outdoor military assortment; as far as we could see, the collection on offer was merely a set of generic field guns and a few banged-up panzers. But we coughed up the 75RU and were richly rewarded; beyond the hill there were two railway guns, an armoured train, a non-armoured train, an artillery park, an air wing, a shock army’s worth of tanks, and a squadron of warships and warship bits, scattered across acres and acres of park in the snow (as with both previous times we found ourselves outside surrounded by materiel).

By now thoroughly footsore from a week of cumulative schlepping, we headed for the Tretyakov; we found the elusive bloody thing eventually, but by the time we did so there was barely an hour of opening left. I’m not against paying 450RU (£10+) for an art gallery, but for one hour’s enjoyment that seemed a little steep, and doing museumy things in a rush is always awful anyway. We agreed to put it on the “next Moscow trip” list, and went to browse the Tret’s official Shopful o’ Arts, coming away with some gorgeous and aggressively reasonable posters. So we went hunting for the Tret Modern and its fabled parks-full-of-unwanted-ex-Soviet-statues, but that, too, turned out to be a bust: a pitch-black garden in which we could not possibly see anything, charging an entry fee. Sitting near the colossally ridiculous and ridiculously colossal statue of Peter the Great surfing the Russian navy, we decided to call it a day and fall back to Vladykino, packing up for the journey home.

The last day was really a half-day, as we were flying back, and the only item we had planned was Izmailovsky Market. Getting there (stopping en route to visit Elektrozavodskaya, not as polished as advertised but still a palace of light) was again somewhat troublesome, because it turned out that there are actually two Izmailovsky stations on the map – Izmailovskaya and Izmailovsky Park – and one of them (predictably, the one we actually wanted) is called Partizanskaya in the real world. Still, we made it eventually, to The Vernissage, a weird commercial fairyland made of wood and ramshackle stalls. Izmailovsky was the most touristy part of Moscow we encountered, full of loud, obnoxious English-speaking voices in contrast to the bleak silence or quiet, sullen Russian that had generally characterised the holiday.

With that, the market was everything we expected, a sprawling cornucopia of Russo-tat, with overpriced hats and Soviet-adorned hipster trash galore, stalls piled high with crafts and clothes and the flotsam and jetsam of a dozen wars. We browsed at length, but all felt that vague disappointment so specific to markets: they’re full of cool stuff, but there’s very little of it you actually want to own, especially at that price. Looking at the endlessly arrayed semi-cool vendor trash, I felt very much a product of Amazon and eBay: unimpressed by things I can just buy off the internet for less, and anyway rather disinterested in owning things, even mementos unless they actually do something useful or fun. Material possessions just aren’t that great, and they take up so much space; maybe my tune will change when I’m rich, fat, insecure and desperate for anything to cling to mementos of the good years. Bill couldn’t get anyone to sell him a VDV badge, Tom couldn’t find any decent tools for his work (it was all just woodcutting stuff). I found the Mosin-Nagant bolt that Rob asked for, but even after some haggling it was still more than the 700RU left in my pocket, so I spent those roubles on some small gifts for friends and a winter hat. In the end, we bought very little, and chucked our small change at a pathside snack place on the way back to the station, for artery-clogging samosas and meaty pastry blobs.

Then we rolled back to the hotel to pick up our junk and some cheap(er) Aeroexpress tickets, and made one last stomp from the Zarya to Vladykino, one last Metro ride to the terminus. The flight, bracketed by the great long international grind of queues, baggage and passport control (according to Bill, Ottawa > Domodedovo > Heathrow, but airports and their rituals all seem the same to me, generically identical, like red top strip-malls with runways) was as expected; we had an amusing flight attendant who kept trying to get everyone to take more bottles of wine.

([All screens are showing a map of Europe, our plane slowly crossing it.]
“So yeah, this is a good movie.”
“I wonder how it’s going to end?”
“Dunno. Hope there’s a twist.”)

After a week of Moscow, London felt absurdly small and squalid and sweltering, Tube stations insultingly grimy and crude and their trains like grotesque little perambulatory Pringles cans. But we rode one back to Tom’s, and up in his room in the Moscow-time small hours, cracked open my laptop and one of the cheap bottles of Stolichnaya to go through our holiday snaps with and toast to bro-holidays past and future.

Unlike most other Moscow attractions, the Central Museum of the Armed Forces has a jolly nice little map on their site telling you how to get there, which we followed faithfully, and after a brief jaunt along Selezneveskaya Street, with lots of trams rumbling about, were rather perturbed to find that an entirely new metro station (Dostoevskaya) had been built right next to the museum since that map had been uploaded.

Oh well.

The biggest difference between Russian military museums and British ones is that the Russians remember that they actually won. The CMAF isn’t just a great annotated assortment of Soviet and Russian military junk – though it’s definitely that, with a huge park of tanks outside and a pronounced WW2 bent – it’s a museum of victory, with that famous banner that once flew over the Reichstag (surrounded by captured Nazi weapons and standards liberally scattered with iron crosses) at the centre of the collection. As soon as you enter the museum, you are greeted by an enormous mosaic of heroic, sculpted Soviet soldiers celebrating their triumph. (Alright, so there’s a giant scowling Lenin head just in front of it, and off to the side, there’s a statue of some soldiers kissing, but the mosaic is what catches the eye.)

The post-war military stuff (with the tanks gradually becoming more boring, the planes becoming boring and then suddenly cool again) had lots of fancy Russian small-arms and the remains of Gary Powers’ crashed U-2 spy plane as well as cases devoted to the VDV; the pre-war stuff included a number of wonderful murals and dioramas of the (Russian) Civil War, and one of those little horse and cart jobbies with a machine gun. Out behind the museum building, under a grey sky that turned to snow as soon as we went outside, there was the expected artillery park, tank brigade, fleet of armoured cars, wing of jet fighters/bombers and pile of v-launch ballistic missiles, plus an armoured train and a collection of interesting marine weapons (such as a depth-charge lobber and a small warship.) The whole collection was behind a simple iron fence, within fifty metres of a children’s playground. That would be a cool place to grow up.

The Metro will get a post all of its own because it’s amazing and warrants one, but suffice to say that the new Dostoevskaya station (it’s part of a recent extension) is absurdly beautiful. We went to its equally new and equally stunning sister at Mariyna Roshcha before changing to the circle line, changing again at Prospekt Mira and rolling up to VDNKh.

VDNKh (vey-dey-en-khai to Russians and Bill, vuh-doonk to cool people) was one of the things we’d been looking forward to most: it’s an immense, surreal, semi-abandoned exhibition park, a sort of Soviet Crystal Palace/World’s Fair built on an obscene scale. Outside the park, the Monument to the Conquerors of Space swoops skyward and the great “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” shines stainlessly with the glare of banks of spotlights, and within the triumphal gate the grounds are lined with pavilions built by all the Socialist Republics to show off their wealth and grandeur. The Space Pavilion was perhaps the most amazing of them all, a beautifully engineered hall as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, with a Vostok rocket hanging on its launch gantry outside.

Now bad hip-hop blares from speakers zip-tied to hammer-and-sickle-adorned streetlamps and hawkers try vainly to draw punters to their lean-to dives or carny attractions, but more than anything the place feels empty; not abandoned, but so vast and so thinly populated that you can feel alone. The pavilions are now either home to clutches of small, squalid businesses or just falling down completely; the Space Pavilion is almost deserted, with a few stalls selling flower seeds and garden equipment huddled inside it at one end. Even after dark, with the whole park lit up and Ostankino Tower standing cloud-high underneath an aurora of its own creation, I couldn’t quite imagine the place when it had been great. VDNKh isn’t dead – there are plenty of sad little fairgroundy businesses scratching a living at its fringes. Every so often there’s an attempt to revitalise it and some huge structure is built or renovated, and a few hopeful capitalists still use its huge pavilions for actually exhibiting, but it will never be filled in the same way. It, more than anything else, makes post-Soviet Russia seem like a child wearing its parents’ clothes.

Hungry, we stopped at a stall selling blinis (crepes/pancakes). Unable to really read the menu, Bill and Tom plumped for the most expensive “Tsar Blini” (turned out to be ersatz caviar) while I picked a 75RU one at random (turned out to be jam) and a couple of mystery pastries from the stall next to it (one was meat, one was a sort of tasty Russian sauerkraut.) Thoroughly footsore, we wandered the park a bit more and took a closer look at Worker and Kolkhoz Woman and the Monument to the Conquerors of Space before going on the Metro-exploring trip we’d been mulling since ever.

I think, looking back, VDNKh might eclipse Monino as my favourite memory of the holiday; it is fabulous and decrepit, triumphant and mournful in equal measure, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Next: The Museum of the Great Patriotic War and the Tretyakov (sort of.)

On Wednesday morning we overslept, rousing ourselves only when it was twenty minutes before the end of breakfast, and filled up on buffet in a sleepy daze. Fortunately, once we finally got outside, it turns out that Moscow in November is a wakeup as subtly effective as being beaten with a pillowcase full of ice cubes.

Top priority was Lenin. However, due to some odd notions of being able to store our bags in the State Historical Museum cloakroom, and a number of inconvenient fences, we ended up going around the museum building about three times before finally reaching the mausoleum. But given the ridiculous grandeur surrounding us (and the street attractions, including a couple of chaps dressed as streltsy and a tubby woman with a megaphone heckling everyone in Russian) we weren’t too troubled. For those unaware, Red Square is neither red nor a square; it’s a huge, vaguely rectangular expanse between the Kremlin wall and a vast building that’s nowadays used for shops, with the majestic State Museum building at one end and the ridiculous, unbelievable St Basil’s Cathedral at the other, both bracketed by enough space on either side to drive a fleet of tanks through (and they have). If the Kremlin is a little too fairytale to look like a fortress, St Basil’s is full on Mushroom Kingdom trippy-insanity, an enormous, loopy conglomerate of randomly designed towers and rainbow-coloured cupolas. Lenin’s mausoleum is the only restrained building there, a blocky little Lego-looking thing of black and red marble surrounded by chain fences and unsmiling guards.

When we finally got to see him (sans bags, sans phones, sans cameras, sans everything), we descended marble steps into quiet blackness; the place has been perfectly pitched to inspire silent reverence. There he was, lying in a glass tank, tiny and plastic-looking, wrapped in black velvet and bathed in rosy light so that he looked like an expensive chocolate in a shop window. Seeing him was more than worth the hassle.

(“So, there’s Brezhnev, there’s Kalinin… and hah, there’s Papa Joe. He seems to have more flowers than anyone else.”
“There was this cool Superman miniseries about if he was Soviet instead of Ameri-”
“We are standing at Stalin’s grave and all you can talk about is fucking Superman?”)

The State Museum (250 roubles) contained A (near-) Complete History of Russia, finishing in Tsarist times and starting from before the evolution of man. It had all the artefacts. All of them. I was very sorry we left the camera in the (finally located!) cloakroom; but I gawked at a thousand muskets and maps and arrowheads and fancy uniforms and strange, ancient bronze things; most rooms had at least one case devoted to the East, full of yatagans and mirror-armour and spice traders with unsettlingly thin taches. Items of particular interest included Vereshchagins and an eight-metre canoe carved from some enormous log, and it was of course all in the usual beautiful, solid and built-on-a-wildly-different-scale Russian architecture.

St Basil’s wanted another 250 roubles to get in, and we reckoned that once you’ve seen the insides of all the Kremlin orthodox cathedrals you’ve pretty much seen them all, so we gave it a pass and edged past building works and a van full of soldiers trying and failing to hide behind curtains, finding an unexpected (free) archaeology museum down a side street and spending ten enjoyable minutes looking at even more ancient Muscovite remains. Past a street of cathedrals, with something huge and demolished being picked over by machines beyond their onion-domes, and through bare, desolate Soviet parks populated only by fluffy sparrows, we came to the old KGB headquarters at Lubyanka, followed by the Bolshoi Theatre, both the casus belli for much pointing and photographing. They don’t make things like this at home; and even if they did, they’d be a quarter the size.

Having looped back round to Red Square, we bought a couple of burgers at the McDonalds there in tribute to the triumph of capitalism, and ate them watching the guards change at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, feeding our fries to yet more sparrows. (I’ve missed them at home in the last few years; where have all the sparrows gone?)

After that, we tried the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, on the basis that even if it was shut or wanted a fee it’s a pretty spectacular building from the outside. The present cathedral is unusual in that it’s brand new: the original was torn down by the Communists in order to build an immense “Palace of the Soviets” which was eventually cancelled by WW2 (afterwards, Stalin had the Seven Sisters built instead, and Krushchev had a gigantic open-air swimming pool [!?!] placed on the cathedral’s remains.) So the new cathedral, a mostly-faithful copy of the old with bronze reinterpretations, was built from private donations in the nineties, and it’s stunning. As with Metro stations, it’s just nice to see new things being built properly and tastefully; the closest parallel I can think of is Coventry Cathedral (which is still a bit clumsy from the outside). The cathedral is white marble, bronze, gold and (of course) vast; it’s got that very Moscow combination of expensive materials, inspired design, proper build quality and genuine care lavished upon it, and is crammed with Orthodox murals and icons as shining and beautiful as the day they were made, without the centuries of entropy that all the Kremlin’s classics have clearly endured. Outside stands a monumental statue of Tsar Alexander II, whose two-headed eagle medallion is lifted by the wind and clanks rhythmically against his great bronze chest.

We crossed the footbridge that sticks out from the cathedral’s foundations, being blown about by the wind across the river, watching the spotlights on the Kremlin slant up into the gentle rain and the traffic glitter off the titanic (and I’m seriously going to run out of synonyms for “big” in a minute; Moscow is like that) statue of Peter the Great over the river. Then a wander through warehouse-districts-turned-nightclubs in the built up areas south of the river, hunting a metro station that turned out to be Polyanka, and back to the hotel for a dinner of borscht and dumplings.

Next: VDNKh and the Central Armed Forces Museum.

Myself in front of a prototype jet bomber.

N.B.: This is a really big plane… and not even close to the biggest there.

The plan for Tuesday was the Tretyakov Gallery and Park Pobedy (“Victory Park”, henceforth Park P-Body), home of the Great Patriotic War Museum. However, the plan was somewhat dashed by Bill feeling all fragile and lurgy-ish, and moping around the flat. By noon the day was going to have to be seriously cut down (we’ve been planning for, and having, 8am starts), and he still wasn’t feeling up to the Russian winter. So we replanned (“if he feels better, let’s forget the Tret and just go to the GPW museum”) and replanned (“well, it closes at 7, we should still manage to get some time out of this…”) and replanned (“he’s not getting better, is he; reschedule to Friday?”)

We had the Central Air Force Museum at Monino pencilled in for Friday, on the vague and tentative understanding that it could be scrubbed if something else came up (as it just had). This was going to hurt me more than it hurt Bill and Tom: the Monino museum is home to ALL THE COOL COLD WAR STUFF, including quite a few one-of-a-kind machines (among which the phrase “world’s largest” crops up with impressive frequency), and was the only thing outside the city limits we’ve planned at all. It was also the replacement for Kubinka tank museum, which seemed to be implausibly troublesome and expensive, and far too likely to end with us somehow banged up in Russian jail drinking chifir’ while we waited for my friends to graduate, get on to Fast Stream, get into the diplomatic service and get us out. When it became clear that it was rushed-now or never, now seemed preferable.

The only real guide we had getting to Monino was this one, written by some internet plane-nerd and found on Wikipedia. Fortunately, it’s amazingly comprehensive and detailed, and I loaded the relevant tabs, plonked my laptop and sammich-assembled-from-stolen-breakfast-ingredients into my bag, grabbed a Tom and left for Vladykino. We followed all the steps as detailed on the site, which went off fine (apart from a misread Metro sign which caused a double-back) and the train as we rolled out was exactly as I’d hoped: Real Russia, in a banging, creaking tub on wheels full of surly people in hats and random buskers – shortly after the train started moving, a duo with guitar and violin came onto our carriage, and played so amazingly well I gave them a fistful of small-denomination roubles and asked if I could take their picture; after determining that I was a tourist and not an oddly dressed undercover cop, they said yes. But no ice-cream sellers.

(“Ice cream? Seriously?”
“When in Russia…”
“When in Russia, wrap up warm and don’t do as the locals do because they’re fucking insane.”)

And I was very glad of the train journey and the not-being-in-a-city, because I got to see Actual Russia, which is exactly as I had imagined it, full of enormous pieces of gently decaying public infrastructure and the stereotypical huge blocks of flats surrounding miserable-looking public parks. Everywhere there were stunningly overbuilt residential districts, down-headed Russians heading on their everyday business, swish new Japanese cars rolling past crap, broken-down old Russian ones, and random power plants and factories looming out of the grey mist and adding to it from forests of red-and-white-striped chimneys. It was post-Soviet porn, and it was amazing. I saw a MiG-17 in a random garden and was convinced beyond all doubt that yes, This Was A Good Idea.

The train journey was, however, long, and when after an hour and a quarter of journey the urban wilderness had turned into just plain normal wilderness (though peppered with little abandoned and semi-abandoned allotments and settlements) Tom and I were getting a little worried that we had the wrong train. Checking the map on the train (as we probably should have done at the start), we found that we were on the right train and one station away.

Monino was again one of those stereotypes; past the big, empty station and the excuse for a shopping strip it was all just broad avenues through grey, miserable Soviet tower blocks, some abandoned, all suffused with an atmosphere of general neglect. I didn’t get the feeling that anyone really lives in Monino, though I have no doubt a lot of people exist there. As we got to the edge of the military academy and double-checked our directions next to a great big sign praising Yuri Gagarin, wondering how much further it was, it began to gently snow.

Helped in the last stage by a Russian woman who took one look at our greatcoats and vaguely lost expressions and said “musee?”, we got to the airbase in what was by British standards already a blizzard, and coughed up the entrance fee. What happened next was a sustained kid-in-candy-store period of me gleeing all over Soviet nuclear bombers, jet fighters, giant helicopters and insane historical curios I’d never even heard of before, in a developing blizzard. Suffice to say IT WAS AMAZING; masses of pictures will be up when I’m back on a decent connection.

(“So what proportion of the stuff at Monino did you photograph?”
“All of it.”
“Thank you.”)

When we got back, after lots more Monino-exploring and camwhoring in a snowbound derelict construction site, Bill was feeling much more alive, and we all got on the Metro down south of the river to see the University proper and fill up on dinner; the chap in the same kebab-making cube as Monday recognised us, so we didn’t need to explain the concept of “vegetarian” twice, and we strolled up to Moscow State University in the listless slush and gaped at its endless glory. It really needs pictures to explain, but after Moscow I am ruined for all universities.

Tomorrow (well, today, as I’m writing this a day after the fact): Red Square.

Myself at the Kremlin.
N.B.: This is a really big wall.

The Zarya is immense and empty in that somewhat stereotypical hotel way – in our triple room we were unsurprised at the lack of Bibles, but the absence of a Gideonovich Communist Manifesto was a letdown. We ordered some terribly overpriced dinner in the bar and sat pondering navigation and listening to some loud Americans talking politics before it arrived (my dumplings took forever, but were amazing.) Then to bed, to rise at 7:45 (which in our jetlagged minds was 3:45, and in Moscow time falls into that roughly-24-hour period each day called “Really Cold O’Clock”.

Fortified by all-you-can-eat brekky at the Zarya (which is going to be exploited massively this week, I feel), we rolled down to the Kremlin (Lenin is shut on Mondays, so we’re doing Red Square later in the week) on the Metro to Borovitskaya, popping out at the library and muttering some half-hearted Metro 2033 references before wandering towards the enormous fort. There’s something slightly surreal, slightly fairytale about it all: the walls are immense and ancient, the equal of anything I’ve ever seen (Kumbhalgarh aside… mostly), but the towers and crenellations look like elaborate toys. The palace blocks inside are stunning and ridiculously big, but something about the combination of white trim and flat, pastel colours makes them look a bit too much like cakes to be taken seriously. And the cathedrals! I’m used to English churches, which have a generally defined anatomy of sections building on each other logically, but these mad Russian godholes start vertical and just go up and up and up, great cereal-box things capped with clutches of golden onions. Inside the walls are vast murals and endless little pictures of beardy saints and biblical scenes, and inside the onions are gigantic scowling Jesus faces. And don’t get me started on the retardedly huge cannon in the impossible solid-iron carriage, or the sundered bell big enough to live in. Every part of the Kremlin makes me think it was put together from a slightly breathless description by someone completely colourblind: it’s too clean, too cartoonish, the proportions are too odd. I see it, but I don’t quite believe it.

I suspended disbelief long enough to go on the bell tower tour (one of the guides, who was very jolly in the way stereotypes insist that sober Russians aren’t, took one look at Tom and told him he looked like the last Tsar [he does]). We saw lots of sculpted bits of history and listened to a long, glib-voiced history of the Kremlin down the ages. Sadly, even the freezing air wasn’t enough to keep me properly awake and I can’t remember half of it; hopefully I will recover soon (insomnia is fine but I am fundamentally out of sync with Russia).

After the Kremlin, we went on a long, aimless meander along Arbat, being handed spam by people dressed as hamburgers and marvelling at how amazing all the buildings looked. Moscow architecture is something else; I always thought the Scots were past masters in large, solid, tastefully adorned public buildings, but Moscow makes the combined work of Scotland’s best look sick. Even the brutalist Kruschev-era nightmares had a style and a substance unmatched at home, and the Seven Sisters I want to steal and take home and hide in forever. Say what you like about Stalin, he encouraged some nice buildings.

After a stodgy potatoey lunch at some random snack bar (food, sadly, costs almost as much as in London) we found our way back onto the Metro, and headed for Sportivnaya in search of the Metro Museum. We went up at the wrong vestibule (metro stations almost without exception have two entrances, one at each end, with quite a distance between them) and so had to pay another ticket for the privilege of going back through the station, but Sportivnaya station is glorious so that wasn’t a problem. The museum was very well hidden, behind a side door, through an abandoned locker room and up a staircase past a locked door with children’s voices behind it. It was somewhat creepy and also felt like the opening to every Soviet-era low-dialogue drama you’ve ever seen. Once there, we met a very amiable Russian trainspotter with excellent English and a fantastically encyclopaedic knowledge of the Metro (it was only at turfing-out time that we found out he wasn’t actually an employee of the museum) and saw lots of old maps and metro stuff, including some great big public parades in the thirties cheering the building of the system (even if they’re all posed and there’s a commissar with a revolver just offscreen, it would be nice if every once in a while we had people with placards actually praising our public infrastructure improvements).

Pushkinskaya was full of communists when we arrived, with big red banners flying around and lots of nervy looking cops stopping punters getting too close, and it turned out that Google Maps had lied to us about the location of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. We spent quite a long time wandering semi-lost around Metro streets hunting for it before finding a convenient Marriott hotel; the reception gave us proper directions, which told us we had been heading in entirely the wrong way. It wasn’t a complete loss: we saw many fine buildings, a trollface in one shop’s Halloween decorations, and a policeman with an AKS-74U. Schlepping along the right route to MMMA, with cloth-covered lorries full of police going by, we found that both it and the cafe beneath it were closed until Nov 28, but managed to locate a terribly overpriced tea shop to drown our sorrows, go to the loo and plot our next move.

Our next move was the University, which like Birmingham has its very own station, all the way down the red line (past Sportivnaya again). Around the vestibule was a street market, with lots of sealed glass stalls (all Moscow street vendors hide in glass cubes with tiny pop-open windows to squeeze goods through, which seems incredibly sensible) and old women wandering around vaguely trying to sell balloons and melon gratings. Bill was feeling queasy and didn’t fancy the walk (the university seemed quite distant, especially given how massive it is) so after some fantastic 90RU kebabs from a happy little food-selling glass cube (the kebabs reminded me a lot of something similar in Granada, many moons ago) we Metroed back to Vladykino, warmth, weird Russian TV, and bed.

Day 1: success.

Next (hopefully): The Tretyakov and Museum of the Great Patriotic War.

The holiday got off to an inauspicious start: as soon as I arrived at New Street and started hunting for my train to London, I was informed that something had broken somewhere down the line and no trains were getting in or out of Euston (I have also found garbled, slowly-loading internet scuttlebutt that other unlucky passengers may have been menaced by a lion) so I was advised to go to Moor Street and take the slower train to Marylebone. Upon doing so, I found that a) the Moor Street trains had both power sockets and free wifi, b) someone had left an unopened packet of chocolate coins in the luggage rack. This seemed a fair trade for an extra half hour on the train.

London, as we headed to Tom’s after a rendezvous at the Cock, was gradually turning into the traditional Fifth of November warzone, thunder-flashes on the skyline and spouts of flame rising from every back garden. Although Islington Council sadly haven’t reinstated the Highbury Fields bonfire after calling it off twelve years ago (skinflints), Tom’s dad got into the spirit of things by firing some maritime distress flares off into the sky (you can tell he used to be a rock star) before cooking us all a scrummy veggie dinner. Then we watched the final episode of Generation Kill, which Bill hadn’t seen for some inadequate reason, and all went off to bed twitching with anticipation.

Up at 5:30 for toast and tea and traipsing through still-dark streets, riding down to Paddington in a bus that was congested in every possible sense of the word. Past various fine gasworks on the Heathrow Express, through all the usual tedious airport clichés and formalities, we found ourselves on the correct plane at the correct time, and mostly fell asleep. The flight was meant to be four hours, but runway tomfoolery at both ends stretched it out. Stacked up in a holding pattern above Domodedovo, watching the horizon burning that utterly beautiful red you can only get with serious air pollution, we descended into a dark purple haze scattered with cobwebs of city lights. The plane banked hard towards the dying sun on the last run, splashing red light across the wing beside me, and as it evened out I watched the shadow line run from the knuckle of the engine pylon all the way down the wingtip, vortex-fins glinting for a moment with my own private sunset.

It seems so far that everything is big in Moscow; the Aero Express certainly is. It’s a broader gauge than in Britain (though I think still not as huge as if Brunel had got his way), and the trains are massive in all senses. On the 45-minute run into Moscow proper, the train didn’t sway, it didn’t roll, and while it ground and vibrated it was in the same implacable way as massive factory machinery. Through the window I could see great stripy chimneys pumping out white smoke, and hundreds upon hundreds of semi-lit tower blocks.

The Metro deserves its own post and will get one, but is about the only part of the journey that went as quickly and efficiently as hoped, but after considerable navigation-confusion and traipsing around freezing Moscow streets in the darkness, we found our roost for the week, the Maxima Zarya hotel.

Tomorrow: The Kremlin.

So the original plan for The Bro-Holiday between Bill, Tom and I, back in the mists of time, was The Great American Road Trip. That sort of failed for lots of reasons, mainly revolving around the “road” aspect and the “student poverty” aspect. Less of an issue for Bill, who has a driving license, and is a comparatively loaded PhD wanker, but Tom and I are mere BAs stuck in the sculpture/gun mines, poor and incapable of operating a steering wheel. Moscow was originally an area of interest for profoundly geeky reasons, but as BROMERICA 2011 gradually became less and less likely, its somewhat briefer, somewhat cheaper, other-side-of-the-Cold-War counterpart became more and more so.

Short story shorter, we fly to Russia tomorrow.

We have advice and recommendations from such luminaries as the great Sarah Mcintyre and an awesome Russian student I kept bumping into at law events. We have an itinerary, a soundtrack, a camera, a pre-Kennedy phrasebook, a post-internet phrasebook, and bitchin’ winter coats.

where doing this bros
where MAKING THIS HAPEN

for additional brosterity & possibly panicked fact-checking