Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city’s history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn’t exactly embrace the casual tourist.
But Rachel Polonsky was not a casual tourist. A scholar of Russian literature who lived in Moscow for a decade, she knew better than to start looking for the essence of the city in Red Square. Instead, she began on a single street, inside a single flat.
The street was her own: Romanov Lane. The flat was inhabited by her upstairs neighbour, an expat banker with a Texas drawl. But in a previous era it had belonged to Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s greyest and most loyal henchman. Molotov’s daughter had rented it to the Texan banker and — no doubt certain that he would never touch them — she left her father’s carpets, books and magic lantern inside. ‘You’re the scholar, you’ll know what to make of it all,’ said the banker, and handed Polonsky the key.
Instinctively keeping silent, Polonsky crept up the stairs (the concièrge had recently told the nannies tending foreign children in the courtyard that ‘This house is listened to. It always has been, and always will be’). Once inside, she found Dante, Edgar Allan Poe, Pushkin and The Theory of Historical Materialism. Also a special Russian edition of Churchill’s History of the Second World War — translated solely for the benefit of the party elite — with the passages on Molotov underlined by Molotov himself. He was, Churchill had written,
fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine … I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.
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