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Molotov's Magic Lantern : Travels in Russian History Rachel Polonsky (2011) Moscow Lenin Library or Russian State Library (Rumantsyev museum) p.11 Николай Фиодоров its famous keeper known as the 'Russian Socrates" : "To study" meant "not to reproach and not to praise, but to restore life". p16 Romanov Lane 3 "the House of the Generals" or the invisible nomenklatura lived there. It had been built first for university professors, advocates, physicians then took over by the Bolschevicks as the most prestigious residence for the party elite outside the Kremlin, transformed in коммуналка, Actress of the Moscow Art Theatre (one of them gave sheltered to the famous British agent Sidney Reilly who plotted against Lenin and Trotsky)
The building became known as the "Fifth house of the Soviets" People living there после револучии = "people of the past" sent to labour camps or shot in the 30's. No trace of them.
Zoological museum Большая Никитская p20 Mandelstam "Lying around unsupervised in the dark vestibule of the zoological museum on Nitkitski street is the jawbone of a whale, like a huge plough". The museum's curator was a friend and inspiration to Mandelstam and the poet would sit drinking Georgian wine in his vast office in the depths of the museum. " Cherry Brandy" 1931. "I will tell you straight.....everything is just brandy, cherry, brandy, my angel". Government buildings in the first years после револучии on Vozdvizhenka No 5. (one of oldest road) Staline and Molotov would walk from there to their appartments in the Kremlin - 100 yards without bodyguards. Then end of the 30's, report from the secret police "Comrade Stalin be immediately required to cease travelling around the city by foot". P.21 Moscow University Press Small classical palace, once the succession of Russia's noblest families (Golitsyns, Orlovs, Meshcherskys). Romanov Lane No 5 Large appartments being communal and renovated. Built 15 years after the No 3 became communalised in the 20's. Lower rank than No 3 bolshevicks lived there. Many night arrests too. P 25
Баня Sandunovskaya Bathhouse P.93 "It was likewise a kind of scholarly deformation profesionnelle that led me to peep, one Friday evening, at the jacket on the thick red book that the beauty opposite me was reading as she recllined between steamings on a leather divan, legs waving languidly in the air, in nothing but a pair of plastic beach slippers and a turban. She had a Barbie-doll figure, a sunbed tan and a butterfly tattooed on one hip. She was reading Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. And why not ?" Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. After WW1 it captured the zeitgeist and a wide readership. In Russia, the book was received with public enthousiasm and scholarly solemnity and immediately translated in The sunset of Europe. Spengler's vision of Russia was drawn from Dostoievsky...."" His morphology of history......gave Russian messianism* a shining new edge. The decline of the West is an inevitable part of its organic historical life-cycle. The primitive soul of Old Russia was never capable of adapting to Western civilisation with its individualistic notions of justice and personal fulfilment, its materialistic world cities.......the mystical love of brothers under equal pressure all along the earth, self-oblivious, sharing in collective guilt and redemption.... "the primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even today apppropriate to the Russian wolrd". From Russia European culture demands only the reverence due to the beloved dead. The next thousand years will belong to Dostoievsky's Christianity, Spengler promised. * about Russian messianism see also Study Subjects
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