Requiem for an Eyesore

1981

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, dark anyway.

Our gassy, red-and-white Intourist bus plowed through a light-falling January snow toward the heart of the Soviet capital. It was after midnight as we stumbled from the bus, sluggish after a four-hour Aeroflot flight from London and the ensuing hour-and-a-half of customs pleasantries at Sheremetevo airport.

Twenty years ago. Two decades. An eon in the scope of recent Russian history …

Our bus had disgorged us in front of the towering Intourist Hotel, at 22 stories, the closest thing Moscow had to a modern skyscraper in the downtown. Our frenetic leader, Professor Malcolm Gilbert, announced as we were being handed our keys that it was 12:45, and, if we hurried, anyone who wanted could join him for a jaunt over to Red Square to see the 1 am changing of the guard at Lenin’s Tomb. Suddenly, we were awake.

To emerge at night from the underpass near the Historical Museum and ascend up onto Red Square is a magical thing. The Kremlin looms on your right; the spires of St. Basil’s peek over the rise. Slowly, you enter the wide field of red-black cobblestone, and you can sense a thousand years of history—merchants dickered over prices here while Ivan the Terrible brooded behind the Kremlin walls; Peter executed the streltsy here; Red Army troops paraded before Stalin on their way to the front …

After the bells of Spassky Tower tolled and the goosestepping guards performed their ardent ritual, we casually made our way back to the hotel.

Arriving back at my room, I found my roommate, who I’ll call “Tom,” since that was his name, in a state of feverish excitement.

“I’m going to sell my jeans,” he blurted.

“What? We’ve only been here 15 minutes, and already you’ve sold your jeans?”

“This guy came up to me on our way back from Red Square and asked me if I had any jeans to sell. I said I did, and I’m meeting him in the underpass in five minutes.”

With that, Tom raced out the door.

A bit of a history lesson: Two decades ago, Russia had almost no trade in consumer goods with the West—at least none that filtered down to the average Russian. So it was left to the vanguard of capitalism—starving students—to right the situation. Students like us would pick up a pair of off-brand jeans in a London or New York shop for $10 and then sell them to black marketers in Moscow or Leningrad for 100 rubles. It was a win-win grey market transaction: we got rubles at 10:1 or better (when the official rate was worse than 1:1) without having to engage in the dangerous game of black market currency trading; our buyers got something to spend their rubles on at a time when Russia was plagued by shortages (and a complete lack of off-brand Western jeans).

A half-hour later, Tom returned, breathless, his eyes blazing with fear and excitement. It took him a couple of repeats to get the whole story out. He had been “arrested” during his jeans-for-rubles transaction and closeted in a small room in the underpass, then let off with a stern warning, of course minus the jeans and the money. What happened to his partner in crime, we never found out (though I later came to suspect the whole thing as a con job).

That magical, exciting, dark, scary first night in Moscow—in Russia, in the Intourist—is an indelible memory. Tom went on to sell his second pair of jeans for a 1961 hundred ruble note, long since taken out of circulation (first lesson for vanguard traders: know what the money looks like).

1989

The Intourist Hotel was still located in the heart of the Soviet Union, but that would not last for long. Perestroika was in full swing, and the clock was ticking.

It was a time of deficits, and for foreigners dumped in Moscow without a network of svyazi, the Intourist was something of an oasis. While there were many restaurants in the downtown at that time, getting into them was difficult, and getting out in less than a few hours just as hard.

Hidden away on the second floor of the Intourist was a treasure I was led to by a visiting grad school professor: a decent, inexpensive cafeteria that you could bluff your way into even if you weren’t a hotel guest. But you had a tough time getting a Russian in there with you—this was still the era of ruble apartheid: Russians were barred from foreigner hotels unless they were guests of guests (and thus guilty by association). The Intourist had some of the toughest doormen in the city, but there was air-conditioning, and, for a few months, until the food selection got “old,” I made a ritual of weekend lunches at the Intourist while exploring Moscow’s downtown.

1990

August was hot and sticky.

Iraq had invaded Kuwait. War loomed.

A friend of a friend showed up in Moscow. My friend asked me to help his friend make some connections (he allegedly had an “amazing business opportunity”), to ride along and offer my impressions. Seemed harmless enough.

“Hundreds of thousands of gas masks. Russia has them. Israel needs them—worried about Iraqi nerve gas. We’re going to broker the deal,” the friend of a friend said.

“OK,” I said, not exactly understanding why two nations pretty well versed in the arms trade needed our help, “how can I help?”

So I went to a few meetings and learned a bit about gas masks. I figured the deal was pretty well scotched after a meeting with an export official revealed that this official also worked for our competition. But of course things are never that simple in Russia.

A week later, the friend of a friend had left town. I got a call from the fellow’s new local fixer. He wanted to meet to get acquainted. “Do you know the bar in the Intourist Hotel?” I did.

Soviet Russia was changing fast. Cooperatives and joint ventures were multiplying and dividing at an incredible rate, filling in every opportunistic niche of the economy that promised a fast buck. The Intourist now had gaudy kiosks with painted aluminum exoskeletons littering its lobby. A shop selling furs was nestled in the back corner; one-armed bandits blinked in another.

The Intourist’s lobby bar was a blanched, noisy space. Marble floors. Wrought iron patio furniture. Empty but for the anorexic prostitute who peeled herself from a nearby chair and came over asking for a light as we sat down and ordered five-dollar instant cappucinos.

“I think we can still do this deal,” the local contact said.

“OK ... ”

“I really think gas masks are only the beginning. I have friends in a closed military enterprise in Lugansk …”

Sometimes people just need someone to talk at. This fellow and the friend of a friend were intoxicated with unrealizable opportunities. As were a lot of other people at the time, some of whom, it later turned out, were stealing the country blind under the guise of privatization. Russia was just beginning to get “hot” in 1990 and everyone was sure the “boom” was just around the corner. It was, actually. But it was not the boom everyone expected. The putsch that would bring down the USSR was scarcely a year away.

The fixer was a gypsy cab driver hiding in the body of a trained engineer. He had a scheme for everything, and a sure belief that he had the tiger by the tail. But he clearly had zero experience with international trade, much less exporting gas masks; he was practicing his schtick on me, which would have been OK, except it turned out I was buying the cappucinos.

1995

Or it could have been 1996. A cool, moonless night. After a long day of meetings, a colleague invites me to dinner. “Mexican,” he said.

I had heard the rumors and seen the ads, but scarcely believed it could be true. And yet it was.

In a tiny room somewhere near the top of the Intourist, we and 20 other expats enjoyed as authentic a Mexican meal as could be expected east of the Moscow river. The room was loud with a party of lawyers at the next table. We were drinking Dos Equis in Moscow, eating enchiladas and looking out through a picture window at a brilliant skyline that almost included the Kremlin.

Everything, as Russians say, seemed possible in the country of wonders.

2002

Mexican restaurants, brew pubs, casinos and all-night supermarkets. Today, everything is old hat in Moscow almost as soon as it’s unveiled. Much happens so quickly—morphing into something new even before the paint is dry on the old transformation—success building on failure building on success.

Mindsets are changing seemingly overnight, with memories dying just as quickly: teenagers don’t even remember a time when Lenin’s Tomb was guarded. The Spassky Tower bells now toll unaccompanied by the crisp cadences of goosestepping sentries. And the capital is littered with stores hawking every conceivable brand of jeans, to say nothing of every imagineable consumer good.

And now even the Intourist, for decades representing the best and worst of Russian reality (often at the same time), is passing into oblivion. It will not crumble under the force of some dramatic explosion, but be deconstructed story by story, slowly peeled away to reveal the more subtle colors and shapes of the historic downtown.

This strikingly ugly yet unusually attractive oasis (in its last years, it had a good Italian restaurant moored near its front entrance) will leave behind a gaping hole when it departs. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of foreigners will ever associate their first impressions of Russia with this sore thumb of Soviet architectural prowess. But they, and I, will get over it. The beds, after all, were lumpier than a sack of potatoes.

— Paul Richardson