In Europe

not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of India rubber inside?’
    In Moscow the women stand on the staircases of the metro stations, holding their scanty merchandise: a couple of sausages, a few pots of jam, a home-made vest, a little kitten. In the station corridor, Natascha Burlina sings one aria after the other, a box of change at her feet. She's a professional singer, yes, in the opera, but no one can live from that. A little further along one finds the busy shopping streets with all the major brands, Armani, Dunhill, Dior. In a side corridor I sidle past a group of young men selling anti-Semitic literature of a venomousness I recognise only from old back copies of
Der Stürmer
.
    They have
Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler's Last Will and Testament
, books, cartoons and newspapers, all for sale right next to the former Lenin Museum. A Russian acquaintance translates for me a few lines of verse from the
Russian Messenger
:
    Russia stand up
Try to free yourself from the darkness
Don't give your life for the Jews
So, Russia, stand up
And destroy the Jewish Freemasons
And wash the planet clean
Of the Jewish plague
    A few years earlier I had dined with some friends at Hotel Moskva, the huge hotel beside the Kremlin. There were a total of six guests in the dining room, a bedraggled magician was gathering roubles by going from table to table, a plate of chicken soup was almost impossible to get. I amtold that the building is about to close down. I hope it remains standing, however, for Hotel Moskva is one of the most characteristic monuments of the Stalin era; because of its megalomaniacal entranceways and staircases that crush the visitor like an ant, because of the insanely huge dining room where thousands of cheering party members once stuffed their faces, but above all because of its bizarre appearance from the street.
    Hotel Moskva is a monument to fear. Looking closely, you can see that the side of the building looks very different from the front. Soviet legend has it that this asymmetry was caused by a single twitch of one of Stalin's fingers. In 1931, when architect Alexey Shchusev presented his two alternative designs, the Greatest Genius of All Time accidentally approved both of them. No one dared to tell him that he had to choose one of the two. Finally, the story goes, the architect simply warped his design into one building with two different façades.
    True or not, it reflects the mentality that prevailed into the furthest reaches of Soviet society: thousands of party bosses ruled their districts, cities, villages, enterprises, trade unions and collectives with ironclad chaos. The Politburo was often unable to explain precisely what it wanted, and that uncertainty was compounded even further by a sluggish bureaucracy that reacted only to simple commands like faster, slower, stop. As a result, the average Soviet citizen was constantly plagued by whimsical policy changes, impracticable directives and incomprehensible sanctions. And when anything went wrong – which was more the rule than the exception – there were always ‘saboteurs’ and other scapegoats to take the blame.
    That could take extreme forms: in 1937, for example, all the members of the Soviet census committee were arrested for having ‘treacherously attempted to reduce the population of the USSR’. The number of those killed by famine was so huge that it could no longer be expunged from the population figures. The results of the 1937 census, obviously, were never published.
    At Novodevitshe Cemetery, located today in a Moscow suburb, all Stalins great and small of that day lie safely buried, by the dozen, beside the likes of Gogol, Chekhov and poor Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife. His right-hand man and successor Nikita Khrushchev can be visited there as well, as can his faithful foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, butalso the brilliant engineer Andrei Tupolev – his tomb marked, of course, with an airplane – as well as dozens of lesser gods. Khrushchev's monument is a fairly subtle one, showing his round head stuck between a lighter and a darker stone, but even on the far shore of the River Styx most of the other apparatchiks remain hard at work; a general is cleaning his pistol, a paediatrician is slapping a newborn baby on the buttocks, a minister is conferring, a staff officer even stands atop his own grave,