apes. Apes on the take. The place was no more than fifteen years old, and the plaster was flaking, the floor tiles were buckling, the walls were crooked, the windows didn’t fit. The carpet was unraveling into long, smelly coils. You could break down the doors with a blunt remark. And there, on a wobbly table with a veneer top wrinkled like a relief map of the Urals, sat the little Toshiba, doing the one thing that nothing made in the Soviet Union ever seemed to do: It worked. I was blaming this wild incompetence on Marxism until I walked in St. Basil’s Cathedral, that mountain of Persian domes and painted dazzle that is the very symbol of Russia, not to mention the symbol of U.S. TV anchormen broadcasting from Russia and telling us what’s what. One thing they don’t tell is that the inside of St. Basil’s is a dusty jumble of catacombs and closets, badly made and primitively decorated—that the whole thing is really just a pile of bricks and timber, and more like something molded out of mud by kids than a real piece of architecture. St. Basil’s was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, 350 years after the cathedral at Chartres. According to legend, Ivan had the architects blinded to keep them from building another. Perhaps he went too far, but he certainly should have had them beaten over the head with a book of lessons about how to make vaults and arches. Barbaric touches persist in Russia. Packs of wild dogs roam the streets of Moscow. One pack lived by Red Square, lurking on Vetoshny Street in the back doorways of the GUM shopping mall. Another pack lived behind the best hotel in town, mine, in an alley directly below my window. They barked all night and slept all day, tempting me to open my casements in the middle of the afternoon and shout, “Sit! Fetch! Roll over!” for a couple of hours. Russia possesses more recent vulgarities, too. Lenin remains on display by the Kremlin walls, laid out like a bad ideological salad under a big glass sneeze guard. Not many people come to see the dead maniac anymore, but the military sentinels are still there, as serious as ever, and still empowered, as all government authorities in Russia always have been, to make your life a misery if you laugh or moon the sarcophagus. A few days after the election, I took the night train to St. Petersburg. It was still dusk when I left at midnight. I dozed for a while in my compartment, but by 4:30 the sun was up. I sat on my bunk watching the dormant countryside, sipping terrible sparkling apricot wine that I’d bought by mistake at a party-hearty kiosk.
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