Small Shelly Fauna

Golden Russian Women, originally uploaded by Christian.

With the museum closed today, it was necessary to either hide out in the hotel or engage in some “tourism”. Not wishing to have to interact with maids, we opted for the latter. The destination? Six Flags Over Moscow, or as it is properly informally called, the VVTs. At one point the shining star among Communist theme parks, it was a glory to behold, as people would line up for days for a chance on the Tatarstan Tilt-A-Whirl and the largest Ferris Wheel in the unfree world, the Proletariat Revolutions. (N.B.: not really.) Today, the whole thing resembles the former World’s Fair Pavilion in Queens, except that people still come to it. Every building evokes a single word: dilapidated. Once shining facades are cracked and faded, with enormous chunks of cement falling out of arches and black, fungal stains crawling up the walls. Also, the buildings, once each devoted to exhibits highlighting a particular glory of the U.S.S.R., have all become ramshackle bazaars, filled with boutiques and in some cases a tiny pay exhibit. So, for example, on the Science row, the Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Electrification buildings formerly were hallowed with statuary and plaques describing the “achievements” of Lysenko, Commie nukesmiths, and Soviet engineering prowess, but currently are filled with honey and rug stands, with a tiny, overpriced robotic dinosaur display thrown into the mix. Alas, the Physics building, which according to my guidebook “once held a small working atomic pile, whose rods glowed underwater; its portico fresco depicts women and babes picking fruit, promising Eden rather than Chernobyl”, was completely gutted. The one exhibit that we actually did go into (it was the cheapest, at 50 rubles) was the “Peoples of Russia” exhibit in the central hall, which turned out to be a tiny room filled with bad paintings of the host of a local “Wheel of Fortune”-esque game show. On the other side of the main drag (Mainstreet, U.S.S.R., if you will), are the “Soviet States” buildings, with massive halls devoted to a single former satellite and architectural flourishes in the local style: the rocky edifice of Armenia, the log-hewn Karelia, the wheat-bedecked deco of the Ukraine, etc. These too are filled with kitschy crap dealers (and crappy kitsch dealers!) Really, the VVTs are like a really sucky Epcot, except there isn’t the Maelstrom or Living Seas to look forward to. Speaking of “Living”, perhaps the worst part of the park was the former livestock area, where an enormous chariot racetrack has gone to seed, huge metal barns once illustrating the sow-breeding might of the Reds are crumbling (during Brezhnev’s time, “a tour of its pig farm was mandatory for every schoolchild”), and merely walking down the sidewalk, amidst the rusting fallen girders of various greenhouses, begs tetanus. Trying to get in some non-weed-based plant life, we went through the “Botanical Gardens”, which should read “just a tract of woodland that we didn’t get around to building on.” At the end of the gardens, we came upon the former grand Tsarist theater of the Ostankino Palace, looking very out of place in Russia with its pink-and-white façade. It seems to be mainly used for weddings these days, as we saw three coming out off of the grounds, and unfortunately it too has fallen into disrepair: the metallic dome of the main rotunda has most of its white paint flaking off, revealing orange tracts of rust underneath. Depressing.