Some Russians can be very possessive when it comes to foreigners under their supervision, and Boris already has Bob putting on his coat.
"We have to go," says Boris, as the two start for the door.
Saint Basil's Cathedral in Red Square.
(Silvia Otte)
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Bob, I notice, has forgotten his briefcase, but when I reach under the table to get it for him, Boris is back in a flash.
"That's ours!" he barks, yanking it out of my hands.
A waitress, who probably thinks I'm a thief, flicks her middle finger against her neck, a gesture Russians use to indicate someone who's had too much to drink. Since I'm the only customer left, I assume she means me.
I wanted to revisit Soviet Moscow, and something tells me I just arrived. After being told off in the Metro station and now getting insulted at lunch, I've finally found the Moscow I was looking for, or has it found me?
THE LAST TIME I WAS HERE, Lenin's tomb, in Red Square, was closed for repairs, and it is again, which accounts for the group of disappointed tourists milling around in front of the red and black marble mausoleum.
"We were looking forward to seeing him," says a woman from England. I was, too, and start telling her about the only time I ever made it inside -- the funeral parlor quiet, the eerie red light and the body, hands folded in front and tilted forward for better viewing.
"Do you think it's really . . . him?" someone asks.
It looked like him to me, not counting the bogus-looking moustache and goatee. There's occasional talk about burying Lenin, who died in 1924. Stalin, his mausoleum roommate for a time, was removed and buried in the Kremlin wall more than 40 years ago. When Yeltsin proposed doing the same with Lenin, communist protesters gathered around the tomb -- identified in Kremlin Cold War speak as "Strategic Location No. 1" -- to keep watch until the threat subsided.
Despite the beefed-up police presence in response to recent terrorist bombings (earlier this year one in the subway killed 41 people), Red Square bears little resemblance to the place where Politburo potentates once congregated for holiday parades. Where communist banners used to hang there are casinos, expensive restaurants and an upscale shopping mall.
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has turned the whole area into an urban-renewal project. The English-language Moscow Times recently criticized Luzhkov for tearing down scores of historic buildings, many of them around Red Square, such as the Moscow Hotel, which is in the final stages of demolition when I arrive. The hotel's asymmetric appearance -- observant vodka drinkers may know it from the Stolichnaya label -- was said to be the result of Stalin's approval of two separate designs, a mistake his subordinates must have been afraid to point out. Plans call for rebuilding a replica of the old hotel that will also have offices and, of course, a casino.
