June, 2008
The last time I was in Moscow was in 1988. It was the days of Perestroika and Glasnost. The times were changing but hadn’t quite changed yet. There were very few cars, and the cars that were there were really dreadful. But the Metro was quite unbelievable. There was absolutely nothing to buy. The shops were empty, there were no cafés or bars or groovy restaurants but there was the Bolshoi and classical concerts at next to no cost. Culture was high on the agenda. And there was this extraordinary mystique about being behind the iron curtain.
I remember the hotel we stayed at. It was miles away from the city center. I’m not sure if the hotel itself or the service was more awful. There was an interesting observation about the Soviet Union at the time. It went something like this — “workers pretended to work, and the state pretended to pay them” — and that pretty much summed up the service sector. It was great! On the other hand, there we were in the heart of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin, the mystique, a communist empire that stretched to the Balkans and divided Germany. Art museums were plentiful and free, the pre-Revolutionary architecture was breathtaking. It was just an extraordinary place.
Fast forward to 2008, and here I am heading to Moscow again, this time to watch a football game. What a difference two decades makes! First, I certainly look different. Secondly, there are more cars in Moscow I think than in Los Angeles. Imagine the spectacle of Red Square in 2008: The beautiful art nouveau GUM department store, once just a glorious building with nothing inside to buy, and now home to every leading designer name one can think of. There are restaurants, cafés and bars everywhere. And people smile. Even the soldiers who were out in full force to look after 75,000 devoted football fans who came to watch the Champions League final smiled and were not adverse to lending their hats for a bit of tourist photographing.
The metro was as I remembered it twenty years ago. The escalators were longer than any I’ve taken in my whole life. Trains were remarkably efficient, and given the fact that I certainly could not speak Russian, people seemed terribly friendly and helpful as we struggled to find our way to the center of town.
And Red Square. It is as breathtaking as the first day I walked across it 20 years ago. It is simply beautiful. In the distance there were the colorful domes of ancient St. Basil’s Cathedral, Ivan “the Terrible’s” dream masterpiece, and the powerful and imposing Kremlin all contained within this fantastic piazza. The GUM Department store was illuminated like Harrods in London, and the Bolshoi ballet Theatre just outside the square with the imposing statue of Karl Marx was a reminder of Russia’s great achievements in the arts. And of course, Lenin. . .well, yes, he is still there too, looking pretty much the same as the last time I saw him in ’88, which is not bad considering he’s been there since 1924 pulling in tourists and reminding everyone what a powerful fella he really was.
And the game, you ask? Well, the game was played out from 10:45pm to 1:30am. The only game I’ve ever been to that encompassed two days. What a game it was! At the end of it, 75,000 people in the most orderly fashion trundled back onto the metro and disappeared efficiently into the Moscow morning. Only in Russia, I thought, would that happen.
It’s a place I need to go back to.
See you out there somewhere.
Peter Jones
President and Co-Founder, ACIS
