Wheels Within Wheels

Yesterday, I met with my DOS again to discuss various issues relating to teachng I had been too jet lagged to discuss my first day. I was also given some news about a switch in my assignment. For the first two weeks, at least, I will be teaching not in-company but in a branch school, covering for a teacher who is stuck in Britain because of visa complications. My DOS felt this might be a better way for me to start, since working in-company will mean a lot of traveling around on the Moscow Metro. Getting around Moscow is hard enough for Russians, she felt, and I needed time to get acclimated before I started such a hectic traveling schedule.

Moscow is arranged essentially as a series of rings; imagine the rings in a tree trunk, and you will have a rough idea of the layout of the city. The center is, of couse, Red Square, and the entire city radiates out from it. There is no grid of the kind found in New York or other American cities. Streets seem to wind every which way, and there is no clear naming convention of any kind. So finding your way around can be difficult.

On the other hand, I took my first venture into the Moscow Metro yesterday afternoon and found it a delightful experience. I have the general impression that Moscow's Metro system is about the only thing the Soviets built that actually works the way it was intended to. Trains come about every two minutes, which seems miraculous to me after years of enduring the vagaries of New York's MTA. Nothing seems to be very from anything else when one takes the Metro.

The system, like the city, is also arranged around the ring. There is one line that goes around the center city in a continuous loop, known as the Ring Line. Other lines go into and through it like spokes on a wheel. Traveling on it can pose some challenges to a newcomer, because station names are not always clearly marked. This fact makes it necessary to follow along a map as you go or to try to make sense of the Russian intercom announcements. My Russian is not yet up to the latter task, though I can read Cyrillic names on maps with ease.

An additional challenge is that a station may be known by different names on different lines; for instance, the station closest to Red Square is called Okhotniy Ryad, Teatralnaya, and Revolutioniy Ploshad (Revolutionary Square) on the different lines that run through it. This naming system can make transfers confusing.

The Metro is, nonetheless, a work of art unto itself. The stations are buried deep underground, partly because the land under Moscow is rather marshy, but also because the planners feared the destruction a German air attack might have on what they knew would be a vital transit system. The stations I have seen so far are all examples of what is sometimes called "Stalinist Gothic" style--essentially, a throwback to late Victorianism with a lot of hammers and sickles thrown in.

I made a point of going to a few stations that were not strictly on my itinerary for the day (more on that in a later post). Of these, the most elegant by far was Komosolskaya Station. Named after the Communist youth organization to which virtually all Soviet children belonged, the station is now the center of what my guidebook described as a rather seedy area into which I did not venture. The station, however, retains its pre-perestroika elegance and is replete with chandeliers, dental moldings, and mosaics of figures in Russian history.