Dialogue: A city of big bronzes and unsmiling women

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

On the edge of Moscow's Red Square is a tall, grey building with a facade so discordant it slaps the eye. Imagine the Auckland Museum with a wing on each side of quite different proportions.

In a city where architectural symmetry is otherwise naggingly insistent, this aberration demands explanation. The story behind it - seemingly too good to be true but universally told - is that plans for the building, with alternative designs for the wings, were placed in front of Stalin for a decision. He looked at them and said, "Yes."

The way out of this terrifying quandary was to put one on each side.

But two deep-dyed images of Moscow I've carried around for years have been dispelled - that its buildings are all bleak, "Soviet Gothic" grey piles and its women the ultimate frumps.

The postwar Moscow University building, dominating a low headland on this flat terrain and looking like a cross between a cathedral and a dormitory, perhaps best represents Soviet Gothic. A vast vista rolls away and on each side of the building's forecourt is a giant statue in what looks like lead. One is a male and the other a female worker-scholar, contemplating huge open books. A fine joke among people who seem to enjoy so few is that deeply, boldly engraved on the back of each book is the graffiti, Playboy and Playgirl.

By the way, a McLauchlan Law has been confirmed this week - that a nation's freedoms are in inverse ratio to the scale and frequency of its statuary. The big bronzes are everywhere.

Many of Moscow's buildings are beautiful and colourful, though, even the Kremlin, and the determination of the city to gradually lift the burden of its history and to surmount the drabness of its past is symbolised by the Church of Christ the Saviour.

Many years ago it was demolished by Stalin as a grand gesture against religion and was to be replaced by a monument to Lenin. But because it is alongside the river, the foundations kept filling with water. So it was turned into a swimming pool.

Not long ago, the city government decided to rebuild the church and there it sits, recently finished, square and squat but lovely, with its startling, gilded onion dome attended by four smaller replicas, one at each corner. Around the walls is a frieze of bronze statuary of saints.

Close by is a brilliantly imaginative monument to Peter the Great, the sailor king. He stands as tall as a four-storey building against the rigging of a ship beneath which are images of many ships' prows poking out towards the four points of the compass; and beneath it all is a fountain representing a bow wave. It's not mentioned in guidebooks, nor is it marked on city maps. Muscovites resent it because P the G's city was St Petersburg.

On a clear spring day, Moscow seems a city that should become a lure for Western tourists once it sets up an appropriate infrastructure. In the meantime, difficulties remain. Wide streets with few crossings and a profligate use of space among buildings - understandable perhaps in a country so big it has 10 time-zones - make moving around difficult without serious advance planning. Also, there are no telephone books, no cruising taxis, and the local population is too preoccupied getting by to think much about cooing over visitors.

One thing, though: it's said that if you stand on the footpath and hitch, you will easily get a lift from a private car travelling in the right direction if you can give them an address in Russian, and you won't offend them with a gift of a few dollars. I'll try that and report back.

And another thing: the Metro is grand in every sense of the word.

Oh, yes, the women. Well, an amazing number of them are tall, slender, move with easy grace, are elegantly dressed and beautifully made up. Most don't have much money but, I'm told, believe in putting on a show to enhance their morale. What they still lack is a ready smile.

A New Zealand woman with Russian friends said they think Westerners smile too often and too loosely. But once friends, these people are warm and wonderfully confiding. And anyway, she added, what have they to smile about? They are oppressed by their history and times are still hard. Even lately some have twice had their savings wiped out by currency collapse.

Okay, but once they learn to laugh, watch out Hollywood.