Tverskaya is wider now than it was then. Its tall apartment buildings were rolled back on subterranean castors in the 1930s to make it better suited for parades. But the diamonds...are back in the windows of shops.... This year was the first time in decades that ICBMS were driven on to Red Square for the Victory Day parade...From Romanov, we could hear them rumbling down Tverskaya in night-time rehearsals.
Finished this one - continuing #June #justmybooks
Shalamov writes....
In Irkutsk, as he waits for the train, he sees books on sale for the first time in years: 'I wouldn't buy books until I got to Moscow. But to hold books, to stand next to the counter of a bookstore was like a dish of hot meaty soup. a glass of the water of life.'
No patient would be left without ideological attention, the book promised. There are evenings of patriotic song, visits by heroes of labour, lectures on communist morality. .... There is a Lenin Room, and a library with tens of thousands of alluring titles such as Urgent Problems in the Internal and External Politics of the Communist Party, and Interpreting the Decisions of the Twenty Sixth Party Congress.
Might skip the library for the pool...
It is rumoured in Moscow - though no one can say it in print - that Putin, who takes an interest in 'Eastern wisdom' of this kind, has assigned money from the national budget to be spent on another search for the doorway to Shambhala in the Altai region of Siberia, a cosmic energy centre where he likes to pose for photographers, seated half-naked on a horse, like some latter-day Mongol khan.
(Because of course he does.)
Nice spot for some reading.
(I lasted less than 5 minutes outside before I had to find this shady spot!)
The library had been catalogued... the numbers marked in purple ink on the inside covers and middle pages 5651, 5652, 7366- and many of the books had been rebound in cardboard dustjackets (also dark purple). If I followed the system correctly, his library had once contained well over ten thousand books, of which a few hundred were left here.... Besides, the non-reading of books, as Benjamin said, is characteristic of collectors
Image via Unsplash by Arseny Kultiasov
To learn to love the city is to become familiar with its little lanes and side streets. Its charms can be discovered either through careful study, or quite by chance, at the very moment when one's attention strays. Yet to learn to love Moscow is also to become familiar with a certain kind of grief, for it is not a city whose authorities are much given to its conservation,
pickThis was a book I picked up years ago and decide to read on a whim. Part travelogue, part history of Russia, part dissection of Russian culture, written by a english academic who lived many years in Moscow and starts her tale with the chance discovery that the building she lives in still holds part of the library of Molotov, one of Stalin's lieutenants. I found this book to be fascinating, informative and at times quite beautiful.
After decades of absolute hunger in the Gulag, he perceived the hunger for books as the condition of his childhood, the condition of his whole life. His primal hunger was such that no number of books could ever slake it. There is no sweeter thing, he said, than the sight of an unread book. (p. 269)
Molotov's Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History | 
