A Moscow riddle, our experience, North Korea and Jazz

A riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma......Churchill used this image in a broadcast about Russian foreign policy in the early years of the second world war.

Now that we are homeward bound to London it seems like a vivid way of summarising our experience of life in Moscow.

Some things work very well - the Metro, for example.

The food in shops and supermarkets is good, and cheap, and there is a wide choice of everything.

Drink and cigarettes are very good and very cheap.

The people are very hospitable, love conversation, and are generally very warm and and unaffected - there is very little sense of the snobbery that pervades English life.

Russians are well educated - they know about our literature and world literature whereas we tend to know only about our own.

Russians know how to behave in public spaces - we saw none of the moronic rowdiness and drunkenness that is common in London.

Young people always give up their seats to the elderly on the metro.

There are many beautiful buildings, especially churches, tucked away in nooks and crannies, and Moscow has many quarters of back streets which retain their pre - war living intimacy.

A touching example of the sensibility of Russian people is given by the graffiti on these walls, which illustrates and celebrates the poetry of the great Esenin, a poet who is still a national hero and whose verses are known off by heart by young and old, despite the fact that he died in 1925.

Esenin floats above the church in this graffiti and we even heard a young busker on the metro  sing one of his poems to an appreciative audience on the train

Lines from Esenin's poetry on this backstreet graffiti.

But.

You see a lot of poverty in Moscow - a lot of old women begging on the streets and, a very sad sight, many amputee beggars on the metro trains, and the mainline train stations play host to large numbers of very shifty looking characters. Fagin and his boys are alive but not well here.

Everyone seems to be on the take, and it is generally accepted that every one will rip you off if they can and if you let your guard down.

Service in shops and restaurants is hopeless - people just can't be bothered. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare, and often accompanied by incompetence, so that the helpful attitude is negated by the practical result.

Today we had a fairly typical experience, we were in a bar, an Irish pub called Harat's on Arbat street,  in which the music was painfully loud. We asked if it could be turned down a little - no, but they could turn it up if we would like. Organisations often give the impression of being run for the people who work in them rather than for the people who use them.

This tiny basement in Harat's reverberated with the noise of a painful thrash rock band  which the barman  refused to turn down so stay away if you value your hearing.

My guess is that Russia will soon suffer from an Irish or Spanish style property crash.

Everywhere there are enormous blocks of ugly but expensive apartment blocks going up, and a lot of them seem to have been empty for some time. Economic forces are global, everywhere else has had a property crash, China's is just beginning, so Russia's can't be far behind.

The next crisis will take longer to play out : the Russian economy depends on the export of oil and gas. The infrastructure that makes this possible is rusting away, and recovery rates for Russian oil are declining.
Russia is frightening foreign capital away, so raising the money to replace the pipes and rigs that get Russia's only exports out to its customers going to be a problem, just as the rest of the world is learning to consume less of these anyway.

Russia's own elite does not trust its legal and financial system, hence the Cyprus crisis and the flood of money to London and New York.

If the Kremlin responds to this by punitive measures aimed at Germany, which it perceives to be behind the decision to penalise big depositors in Cypriot banks, it will be cutting off its nose to spite its face, and other customers of Russian energy will take fright.

Surely they can see this for themselves?

But is there anyone running the shop?

Or are there lots of people claiming to own it each of whom are quietly dipping their hands into the till?

Who knows, we hope we are wrong, because we love Russia, its culture and most of its people.

And as usual, we believe the answer is more jazz.

During the Soviet era, jazz was banned. ( of course, jazz demands initiative and individualism, qualities the Bolsheviks discouraged. What a disaster for Russia the Bolsheviks' were - Lenin too was a miserable sod, cruel and narrow minded, a puritan....uggghhh, and what an egotist, statues of him haranguing the people are still standing all over Russia.)

So those that kept jazz alive and revived it once the next disaster called Perestroika arrived are rightly regarded as legends.


We were privileged to experience a performance by the greatest living jazz legend in Russia and to meet him personally at his club in Moscow last night.

Alexey Kozlov is now 77 years old, but he is still playing beautifully with his own band in his own club in central Moscow. The club plays host not only to jazz, but brings together different genres, including opera!

Alexey should go together with Charlie Wright's club in Hoxton, London.

Alexey on stage at his club with his band, tuning his alto saxophone, which he plays with a Parker like fruity and strong sound which swings infectiously.

There is a surprise in store for club goers every night, and for the best and true spirit of Russia get yourself down to Alexey's jazz club as soon as possible.

If only Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin and Barrack Obama could get down there too, as soon as possible, before some sort of terrible accident happens as these power - mongers posture before their military masters  over who has got the most deadly killing machine.
A couple of pints each, Alexey and his band pushing out a cool vibe, and all could be sorted without any loss of face, which is what counts for these guys.
Here all three of them will discover that there is only one tribe that really matters, and it's called humanity, and that music brings it all together around the rhythms of life.

Talking of tribes, we were amused by Sasha Baron - Cohen on the David Letterman show to promote his film Borat.
Asked if he had learned anything about the USA on his trip, he replied that there was something he wished he had learned before he arrived- that you are not allowed to shoot Red Indians now. He then sincerely apologised to the Indians working in the Nevada casino........

In these posts, we have tried to describe how we found Moscow and Russia, and to find connections between these and the rest of the world. We believe that people are roughly the same everywhere, and that whilst there are obvious differences these are both important and superficial. Important because they provide humanity with variety and more opportunity to solve our common problems, but superficial because our humanity underlies the differences and our recognition that this is the case is ever more vital as the clock ticks towards nuclear midnight and our numbers move towards eight billion.

We will miss Moscow, and we hope to be back soon, meanwhile, here we are, at the exhibition centre on the top floor of the enormous new shopping centre located in the new financial district in central Moscow, posing by the inspiration for Churchill's remark about a riddle wrapped inside an enigma - yes, the Russian Doll  - a mystery indeed.

Next week, back in London, so long Moscow.

The Kremlin in Moscow, Ivan the Third sets a bad example, a Georgian dinner and Azerbaijani wine

Another pleasant day, sunshine sparkling on the diamond studded deep snow piled up on the banks of the paths and roads. The snow leaves little caps on all the street signs and lamp posts, and sleeves on all the boughs and branches of the trees. We will miss it when we get back to London, because there there is only two inches of it, but here we have several feet of it, it is a legacy of primitive communism, it belongs to everyone, and it decorates everyone’s world here, in Moscow, equally.

Talking of communism, we are off to visit the Kremlin.

It is more ancient than the Magna Carta, it was built as a wooden fort in the 12th century to keep out the Golden Horde, and it has been the home of the Czars ever since, apart from a short period when Peter the Great moved the capital to St Petersburg. It is forbidding, a fortress behind high red brick walls, but it has a soft centre of churches and golden domes which you would expect to create an atmosphere of reverence and contemplation, the kind of atmosphere which would lead to a vision of peace and harmony for the world.

But no!

These Czars were a power crazed gang of mafia merchant lords.

Ivan the 3rd turned the free landholding peasants of Russia into Serfs so that he and his mates could make their fortunes selling grain to the newly emerging world markets. He also instituted the ‘strong hand’ style of government, absolute power concentrated in his hands.....are you thinking what we’re thinking?

Capitalism though, was built on slavery and it’s headed that way again, but less of this, back to the Kremlin, where all sense of timeless authority and the peace of God guided by the rituals of the Orthodox church is rudely interrupted by a monstrous soviet edifice. 

It lies like an imposition, a  gargantuan mausoleum for dead dictators slap bang in the middle of a medieval square, a slap in the face to everything humble, meek and mild, gentle and forgiving, the polar opposite of everything illustrated by the almost sensuous, gorgeous but gloomy frescoes that decorate the churches that sit around it, which are cowed into submission by its brute force.

The Dormition Cathedral - The Czars were crowned here.

The Dormition Cathedral - the Patriarchs and Metropolitans were buried here.

The Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. The burial church of Muscovite Princes and the first Czars of Russia including Ivan the Terrible. We counted 45 coffins.
Being brave won't help you dodge the grave. ( Philip Larkin )

At least the soviets were honest. Honest atheists.

Power and force were their ruling weapons of choice and they made no bones about it, if you’ll forgive the pun.

Stalin said that Ivan the Terrible wasn’t terrible enough, he was a bit of a softy really, and there you have it.

Around 40 per-cent of Russians agree with the statement that Stalin was a wise and strong leader, so Ivan the third created a tradition that produced Stockholm Syndrome (one falls in love with one’s captors) on a vast scale.

Less of this, it was time for some fun, so we left these monuments to power and glory behind us and set off to meet Elena’s friend who was due to treat us to a meal at the best Georgian restaurant in Moscow.

She did and it was superb!

Soon we were chilling out and feeling grateful for small mercies, taste buds and constitutions that relax under the influence of alcohol.

How do people live without it?

It always makes us feel happy and well disposed to mankind.

Our meal bargain with a unique Georgian creation that looked alarmingly like human testicles.

I have no idea whether they taste like them, but they were delicious, absolutely exquisite, so if they do it might be worth bearing in mind if you are short of an idea for a dinner party and the shops are closed.

Next came another cracker, a pastry with an egg in the middle and cottage cheese - again, delicious.

We had asked for a bottle of Georgian red wine, but it transpired that it was Azerbaijahni wine due to the recent war between Russia and Georgia.

This is when politics get really serious, but it seems that the dispute has been settled and normal service with Georgian wine will resume soon - the glorious arts of peace!

It was time to leave, and we were soon back on the tough streets of Moscow town.

Once again, we came across a set of the telephone box lookalikes that now serve as public toilets.

It is surely the greatest indictment of soviet communism that it was unable to provide decent public toilets for its toiling masses.

There were no public toilets at all in Moscow or anywhere under the soviet system. These telephone box versions are a vindication, at some level, of the idea that market forces respond to consumer pressure, although the pressure would have to be very great indeed to force me into one.

Still, we are glad to be here, we love Moscow despite everything, and anyway, near earth asteroids began to worry us so we needed to get home quickly. The report in the on-line Guardian was very concerning, but frustratingly short on detail.... it seems that it is not hypothetical that one could strike very soon but we weren't sure whether that meant last night...did we have time to go to the loo or could we wait until we got home?

We got home.

A jazz lecture in Moscow, St Petersburg on the train, Mattisse and Picasso, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington swing ,.

This Friday, we decided to attend a lecture at the American Centre here in Moscow on the topic of jazz : what it is, its history, why it became so popular and what it means.

We walked down towards the American Cultural Centre based in the Library of Foreign Literature.

The lecture was given by a charming, breathless and enthusiastic young woman who is herself an accomplished amateur musician,and judging by the rendition she gave during her talk, a very good jazz singer.
In appearance and style she reminded us of a Mormon or Jesuit missionary - the infectious smile, the extraversion suggesting she had seen the light, and would be happy to show it to us.
Still, jazz is the devil’s music, so we must be wrong about this.
I took issue with her when she ascribed the rise of jazz to its encapsulation of American values of freedom, equality and individuality.
Leaving aside the point definitively nailed by the philosopher Isiah Berlin that freedom and equality are opposites in the real political world, something that Americans refuse to believe, I argued that it was the denial of basic freedoms to America’s black population that encouraged their development of a separate artistic and musical identity through  jazz.
Of course, she could have replied that the music itself, insofar as it demands American values of its exponents, has helped to make black and white Americans equal, but since they are patently not equal then one could accuse this argument of being jesuitical - whoops!
The talk was superbly livened up by a video of Duke Ellington’s band playing ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’, which we can’t resist showing here.

The talk over, and very enjoyable it was too, despite the American propaganda, we headed up to the station to catch the 10.10pm to St Petersburg, which would get us in at 6am the following morning.
The solid long snake of steel, 16 long carriages, that would take us the roughly 400 miles through the dark and snow filled night was on the platform. It looked more reliable than the sun coming up tomorrow, it looked stronger than Atlas and if necessary it could have held up the earth. The Soviets built trains in the Victorian style - to last forever, even unto the dawning of capitalism in Russia, or the strange form of it which prevails here.
The attendant in our carriage could have shown any US service organisation how things are done. He took a pride and pleasure in his work, striding along the carriage announcing that he would make tea or coffee for all, and serve it with or without biscuits or croissants.
He was smartly dressed, polite and efficient, our tea arrived with a smile and it was superb. He understood intuitively what many here do not, that the boss is only a temporary stand in for the real boss - the customer. Some people you have to train, others just get it, and he did.
The broad masses in Russia, if this sample are statistically significant, are thoughtful and considerate, respectful of others’ privacy in public spaces, and there is none of the rowdyism one constantly encounters in London. I have never seen the kind of moronic shouting and swearing by large tribes of overweight and red faced young ‘men’ in public here that we see so often at home. We wonder why?

At 6 am, after a good if cramped nights sleep ( I was on the top bunk ) we arrived promptly at the Moscow train station in St Petersburg.
We walked out into a scene that looked as if we had arrived in a fairy tale : spires, stone, domes, palaces and pink and blue churches are everywhere and every street displays the elegance and restrained proportions of eighteenth century architecture. The streets and buildings are as polite as the people, they have taken the trouble to look good, which is a sign of consideration for others - modernism says this is how I feel, I’m authentic, my feelings are in tune with my function, so get used to it. 

Us in an empty Nevsky Prospekt at 6.15 am

A frozen canal near central St Petersburg, 6.30 am

The Winter Palace, or the Hermitage, in the background, 6.45am

First stop, the Winter Palace or the Hermitage, one of the greatest art galleries in the world.
The Czars and Czarinas lived in the palace and Catherine the Great turned much of it into a public gallery, a process completed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
It is utterly sumptuous, gorgeous, dazzling, kitch in many places but irresistible everywhere. You can see where Walt Disney got his Magic Kingdom from.

The Winter Palace and the Alexander's column

The entrance hall of the Hermitage

There is too much to describe, but suffice to say that the room that features Matisse is capable of fixing a human to the spot for a week - there, in one room, is primitivism to perfection, it’s been downhill ever since. We ignored Picasso after this room - soul free geometry, plagiarism without a sense of humour and totally sexless. Matisse is erotic, Picasso is sclerotic.

As we left St Petersburg late Sunday it looked as if the darkness had been painted in, behind and around all the buildings just to show another side of their personality - now they danced and sparkled like young aristocrats at a ball, each waiting to be asked for the next mazurka, whilst behind them, the older or bigger buildings assumed the benign air of their parents, playing cards and looking solicitously across to see how their progeny were faring in the marriage stakes.

We have lived in Tolstoy’s world for a weekend - it’s time to get back, we can only take so much refinement, we need something that will swing. 

And anyone can swing, just look at these Japanese school children playing Benny Goodman.
Jazz has transcended race now, as it was destined to, but don’t forget that it took a white band to spread the music on radio in the USA - ‘race music’ couldn’t get aired until much later.
Black folk weren’t considered refined enough to play their music over the syndicated radio shows in the 1930’s, and such has been the black and white divide that Miles Davis was attacked by some black jazz artists for having the white pianist Bill Evans in his band.
‘I wouldn’t care if he was green, man’ replied Miles, ‘he can play’

Life is music, is what we say, and it should swing.

But how can life swing if we don't share what life has to offer?
There are, in Israel, as there are everywhere, some religious nutters who don't know how to share because they think God wants them to have everything...the most moving illustration of this and its opposite, which gives us some hope, is in The Guardian today ( Tuesday 19th March ) and is a short film about a Palestinian boy and the Israeli opposition who support him and his family against the settler fanatics.

Moscow's vast gated communities, an Orthodox Service with unorthodox service and a safer world

A beautiful day unveils itself before us as we draw back the curtains. Flurries of snow float gently down through the trees. Everything below our 7th floor apartment is hidden beneath a huge and brilliant white duvet of snow. It looks as if the pristine clouds themselves had landed in the night for a rest and couldn’t be bothered to float off again.

We set off into the surprisingly mild air, along the recently cleared paths that cut through the park, part trees, part vast blocks of flats, that we live in, towards the metro station.

The fitness club we belong to is housed inside one of the many enormous gated communities that Moscow has erected to protect its wealthy elite from the barbarian hordes of the unwealthy.

In these, you can safely shop for all your needs, served by the service tribes of Moscow, the descendants of Genghis Kahn who once terrorised the city in the 13th century.
How things change, and like in Heaven, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Which thought reminds us of the unlucky Roman Emperer Valerian who was defeated at the battle of Edessa, captured and spent the last years of his life as the foot stool that the Sassanian emperor Shapur 1st used to mount his horse. Talk about role reversal.

But how safe can you be inside a gated community?

Another gated community, probably inspired by the human penis, reflecting the deep insecurity  felt by  the
wealthy buyers. They may be safe, these gated cities, but they're not pretty. Power trumps pulchritude. 

In South Africa, home of the gated community, the athlete Pistorious’s girlfriend was shot to death by her heavily armed legless lover inside a gated community.

The Barbarians you are so afraid of simply wait outside your gates for you to emerge, as you eventually must.

And can a gated community protect you from the permanent peril of nuclear annihilation that exists as a result of the ‘fire on warning’ nuclear deterrence strategy employed by the USA and Russia?

I would ask all those denizens of gated communities, here in Russia, in the United States and the United Kingdom, to reflect on how much safer they would be if this system were replaced by one in which both sides shared their technologies of Anti - Ballistic Missile defense and replaced their offensive missiles with these defensive systems.
The present setup is almost bound to lead to disaster, either by accident, or by design.
Scrap most of the offensive missiles and share the means of defense against the few that remain. This would make both powers safe from each other and from any ‘ rogue states’ out there. It would also set a good example and lead to co-operation in other areas of life that we all so desperately need.
Mr Obama, Mr Putin, time please for some statesmanship.
Like Kruschev and Kennedy did over Cuba, ignore your military and your hawks and put humanity first!
Gated communities, open the gates of your hearts and minds, write to your president, bombard him with pleas on behalf of your children and theirs to come, stop this insanity now!

Anxious now about how much longer we might be in this world, we decide to make one more foray into the waiting rooms of the next and attend the evening service at the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the headquarters of the Russian orthodox church and the site of the Pussy Riot protest.

The evening service here begins at five, (different from most other churches in Russia which start at six) an unhelpful time for a lot of working Muscovites, and indeed the congregation was small.
Despite the sumptuous marble, gold and silver everywhere, there appeared to be no access for disabled people or wheelchair users, something of an extraordinary oversight given that it was built in 1997. Perhaps the priesthood are relying on the infinite mercy of God to get my pious and disabled friend up the steps and down again to the service?

When Stalin demolished the original cathedral back in 1929 he replaced it with a swimming pool, but the citizens of that time were not impressed by the pool and nicknamed it the big Moscow puddle.
Top down systems would seem to have their limitations, assuming the Orthodox church to be a top down system with a similar organisational model to the Stalinist one in which the top is a very long way from the bottom, but with the crucial difference that nobody comes back from a meeting with the ultimate boss of the church.

An orthodox service is difficult for me - there are no pews or seats, and suffering is therefore built in if you have a bad back, especially given the number of times one must get down on ones knees to kiss the floor.

The choir was beautiful although something of an austerity choir given that there were only three of them,but then there were not many worshippers either.

I respectfully suggest that pushing back the service to six pm and providing wheelchair access would make a huge difference to the numbers attending, and therefore to the number of souls that the church could save.
But then we’re assuming that that’s what they want to do.
Unfortunately, we left feeling no closer to God but a lot closer to the long suffering Russian believer of elderly years or with any disability at all.

Talking of safety, perhaps we’d all be better off if we could get back to the days when Kings or Foreign Minister equivalents were happy to engage in trial by combat, jousting in full armour upon their sturdy steeds, just like in the movie The Knights Tale. Perhaps then they would think a little more carefully about how to arrive at a compromise.

Moscow bus tour, the truth, Putinka vodka and Prince Harry, maybe Cameron and Clegg

Elena and I had been showing a friend around Moscow. Not knowing much about it, we decided to take a guided bus tour. The destinations and the information relayed were both eloquent testimony to what the successful tour operator, targetting Russian speaking tourists, thought that Russian citizens would like to see and know - which was what a great, vast and historic city Moscow is, a city which has borne more than its fair share of adversity, has come perilously close to extinction, a city which has always clung to God even when he was banned.
We did spend quite a bit of time at the memorial to the Great Patriotic War, which whilst completely understandable, must rate as one of the most soul - less and depressing examples of memorial architecture and public space ever constructed. We hope that the ghosts of all the 26 million Russian dead of world war two are harrying and howling at the architect and whoever commissioned and approved this monstrosity as they try to rest, and that they will be chased into their graves by the sheeted dead of the Red Army.
We were also informed, as we raced by them,of the former Soviet leaders who had lived in the various massive apartment blocks near the Kremlin, and finally the solid block of a building that is the Ministry of War was pointed out to us.
We hoped that they had nothing to do in there and that they were sitting around yawning with boredom and playing chess..........but if they were not busy with war, they were probably playing war games on their computers or watching internet pornography.

After this edifying tour, which did succeed in displaying the scale and grandeur of Moscow, which was its main aim in two hours, we walked across Red Square, past St Basil’s Cathedral, which looks as if it should be in Disneyland, to the Tretyakov Gallery.

Of the many stunning works in this treasure trove of art, one which seems so apposite for our times, is the masterpiece by Nikolay Gay, depicting Pontius Pilate asking Christ ‘ What is truth?’

We wonder how many are employed to shape the truth nowadays, on behalf of governments, corporations or celebrities or charities, or to suppress it altogether? It’s called public relations or advertising, and whilst every individual case for someone to make sure that the protagonists’ view is heard seems reasonable enough,  the total result must surely be that nobody knows what is truth anymore.
We are with John Lennon, again, on this.

Of course, as a reformed advertising man, I realise that the medium is the message, and that a lot of the time, it’s the way that you say it, not what you say, that gets results. And herein lies the problem: we are too often with our guard down, our critical faculties are on the lookout for the wrong stuff, when we are protecting ourselves from misinformation we are buying a bottle of vodka in a supermarket, and guess what?
Yes, we bought a bottle of Putinka vodka on special offer, and very good it was too!

It’s hard to imagine David Cameron adopting a similar strategy - Cameron Ale, it’s thick and rich, would be my slogan, or Clegg Bitter, will help you to say anything, and still leave that famous bitter taste in your mouth.

Still, Prince Charles manages to sell ridiculously overpriced organic food in Britain, and we reckon that Prince Harry could sell his own brand of cocktails to Russia’s new rich youngsters in their nightclubs.
It would be called Helicopter Harry’s - these will get you up there whilst your trousers remain down here - from the artist formerly known as Prince Harry.

Moscow, North Korea, Christ the Saviour, Shishkin and things are hotting up....

In yesterday’s post, Elena and I included the famous scenes of nuclear obliteration that conclude Dr Strangelove.



Well who’d have thought it - our first day out in Moscow and North Korea threatens a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA. We’re not laughing. In the marvellous Pushkin Museum today we saw a very large statue of David, he who slew the giant Goliath. The Parallels are obvious. David aimed for Goliath’s soft spot between the eyes. History shows that every empire has one.

Remember Admiral Kimmel of the US Navy. He was in charge at Pearl Harbour.

Here in Moscow we read that the prominent Russian author Shishkin has refused to represent his country at the New York book festival because he thinks it has been stolen by a gang of crooks and thugs. This statement proves him to be a brave man. Mr Putin does not take kindly to this sort of criticism from journalists and authors. You can take a man out of the KGB, but you can’t take the KGB out of the man.



Everything connects....... destruction and creation are each waiting to be born at every moment.....the future hides away in the crannies of the present ( A.N Whitehead ) and today we visited the glorious Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In an act of vandalism that puts our Oliver Cromwell into the shade, Stalin destroyed the original in 1929 and replaced it with a swimming pool. Honestly, do these things have to be either or?

In 1998 it was rebuilt as an exact replica using funds raised from the public and taxpayers

money. It is a soaring invocation of the possibility of God, it raises your eyes to a possible heaven of endless youth, beauty, and the lamb lying next to the lion, even in an atheist hardened pair of hearts like ours.

But we were soon brought down to earth by the vendor outside the Cathedral who sold us a

cabbage pastry minus any cabbage and charged us a small fortune for a watery coffee.

If only the church would venerate life instead of death, speculate on the millions of mysteries that remain about life and mind and admit that none of us knows nor can ever know the half of it.

Jesus was kind and gentle most of the time, but he talked of putting the sword away and getting it out again. He wore sandals, despised wealth and power, and thought the world would end very soon. Let’s hope he was wrong. He was wrong about everything else. That’s what makes him so interesting - he was an influential human being, prone to error and full of contradictions. But he would never have worn an expensive watch, or high heels. Get with the message, clerics all!

Central Moscow has a church or cathedral wherever you turn, golden domes and crosses defy the freezing, sceptical and indifferent skies, sending the suns rays back with the message that the answer is within and they’re not letting it go.

No wonder Dosteovsky went mad with religion - he was brought up in Moscow. At the mock execution staged by the Czar with a bizarre sense of humour, Dosteovsky, wild eyed with excitement, said to his fellow putative victim, ‘ We are about to be with Christ’.

‘What’ replied Pleshnev, ‘with a speck of dust?'

Inside the Pushkin Museum, our blood started to circulate again and we were able to speak.

The museum has a brilliant collection of ancient Egyptian art and mummies. The paintings, miraculously preserved since the second century BC, put us straight in touch with the individuals depicted, we now know them, and we are certain that contemporary art from 1880 onwards is merely recycling the genius, media and techniques of the distant past, only this time it isn’t even original.

Look at these folk from 200 years before Christ. like us, we are sure you know them. it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said the end was coming soon. We’ve forgotten that we haven’t been here very long.



The museum has great piles of statuary looted from Greece and everywhere else - as does every museum in the world, but almost every piece seems to be about to come back to life - like the scene in The Winter’s tale.

Here is Tamara staring up in wonder at David.

Well, he was a big boy.