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MOSCOW — Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to be. The flag was lowered for the last time on Dec. 25, 1991. That moment still begs deep questions for its heirs: Who were we as Soviets and where are we going as Russians?
Many of those answers can be found on a Moscow boulevard — named Gorky Street, after writer Maxim Gorky, from 1932 to 1990 and renamed Tverskaya Street, a nod to the ancient city Tver, as the Soviet Union was awash in last-gasp reforms.
It was the Soviet Union’s display window on the bright future Kremlin-run communism was supposed to bring. It was where the KGB dined, the rich spent their rubles, Vladimir Lenin gave speeches from a balcony and authorities wielded their power against one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
A view of Tverskaya Street from a top floor of the Hotel National in 1980 and in August. The Moscow street’s changes through the decades encompass the shifts in everyday life from the Soviet Union in the 1920s to Russia today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
In 1990s, Tverskaya embodied the fast-money excess of the post-Soviet free for all. In later years, it was packed with hopeful pro-democracy marchers. And now, under President Vladimir Putin, it is a symbol of his dreams of reviving Russia as a great power, reliving past glories and crushing any opposition to his rule.
Join a tour of Moscow’s famed Tverskaya Street.
The window in Room 107 at the Hotel Nationalfaces Red Square and the Kremlin. It’s a perfect view of Lenin’s tomb — fitting since he was Room 107’s most famous guest.
The Kremlin had been damaged during the Russian Revolution in 1917. So Lenin and his wife moved into Room 107 for seven days in March 1918, making the hotel the first home of the Soviet government.
The Hotel National in Moscow, from top: Artwork in the Socialist Realist style, which artists were ordered to adopt in the 1930s, still adorns the hotel; Elena Pozolotina has worked at the hotel since 1995; the hotel, which contains a restaurant, was built in 1902; and the hotel has hosted notable guests, including Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and actor Jack Nicholson. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The National, built in 1902 during Imperial Russia, also accommodated other Soviet leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the secret police chief. The building continued to be used by the Soviet government as a hostel for official party delegates and was renamed First House of Soviets in 1919.
Guests can now stay in the same room Lenin did for about $1,300 per night. In more recent years, the hotel has hosted notable guests including Barack Obama (when he was a senator) and actor Jack Nicholson.
“This hotel feels a little like a museum,” said Elena Pozolotina, who has worked at the National since 1995.
“We have rooms that look onto Tverskaya Street, and we always explain to guests that this is the main street of our city,” Pozolotina said. “This corner of Tverskaya that we occupy, it’s priceless.”
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded a massive redevelopment of Moscow in 1935, the order came to transform modest Gorky Street into a wide, awe-inspiring boulevard.
Engineer Emmanuel Gendel had the job of moving massive buildings to make way for others. Churches and monasteries were blown up, replaced by newspaper offices and a huge cinema.
The Moscow Central Eye Hospital was sheared from its foundation, rotated 97 degrees, jacked up, hitched on rails and pushed back 20 yards — with surgeons operating all the while, or so official media reported at the time.
In 1935, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded the widening of the modest road, at the time called Gorky Street. Buildings were moved, as shown in this 1940s photo. Today, it is a wide boulevard known as Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Gendel’s daughter, then about 8, proudly stood at a microphone, announcing: “Attention, attention, the building is moving.” Tatiana Yastrzhembskaya, Gendel’s granddaughter and president of the Winter Ball charity foundation in Moscow, recalls that Gendel extolled communism but also enjoyed the rewards of the elite. He drove a fine car and always brought the family the best cakes and candies, she said.
The largest Gorky Street building Gendel moved was the Savvinskoye Courtyard.The most difficult was the Mossoviet, or Moscow city hall, with a balcony where Lenin had given speeches. The building, a former residence of the Moscow governor general, had to be moved with its basement. The ground floor had been a ballroom without central structural supports.
Moving buildings on Gorky Street in 1940, from left: A mechanic at a control panel regulates the supply of electricity while a house is being moved; a postal worker passes a moving house; a specialist unwinds a telephone cable during a building move to maintain uninterrupted communication; and 13 rail tracks were placed under a house, on which 1,200 metal rollers were laid. (Photos by RGAKFD)
Gendel’s skills were used all over the U.S.S.R. — straightening towers on ancient mosques in Uzbekistan, inventing a means to drag tanks from rivers during World War II and consulting on the Moscow Metro.
Like many of the Soviet Union’s brightest talents, Gendel’s freedom was tenuous. His ex-wife was called by the KGB internal spy agency in 1937 and asked to denounce him. She refused, and he avoided arrest.
The largest Gorky Street building moved was Savvinskoye Courtyard, seen behind the corner building in this photo from 1938, a year before it was relocated; now, it is tucked in a courtyard behind No. 6 on Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Under Joseph Stalin’s grand plan for Gorky Street, Moscow city hall had to be moved with its basement. The building is shown in 1986 and September. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“I believe he was not arrested and sent to the camps because he was a unique expert,” said Yastrzhembskaya. World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, interrupted the Master Plan for Gorky Street.
In the 1930s, the head of the elite NKVD secret police, Lavrenty Beria, architect of the Stalin-era purges (known as the Great Terror), ordered the construction of a state-owned restaurant, Aragvi, to showcase food from his home republic of Georgia.
One night, NKVD agents descended in several black cars on a humble Georgian canteen in Moscow that Beria once visited. The agents ordered the chef, Longinoz Stazhadze, to come with them. The feared NKVD was a precursor to the KGB.
Stazhadze thought he was being arrested, his son Levan told Russian media. He was taken to Beria, who said that he had agreed with “the Boss” (Stalin) that Stazhadze would run Aragvi. Stazhadze had grown up a peasant, sent to work in a prince’s kitchens as a boy.
The Aragvi restaurant was a favorite of the secret police after it opened in 1938. Nugzar Nebieridze was the former head chef at Aragvi when it relaunched in 2016. (Courtesy of Nugzar Nebieridze)
Aragvi opened in 1938. It was only for the gilded set, a reminder that the “Soviet paradise” was anything but equal. The prices were astronomical. It was impossible to get a table unless the doorman knew you or you could pay a hefty bribe.
Aragvi, at No. 6 Tverskaya, was a favorite of the secret police; government officials; cosmonauts and pilots; stars of theater, movies and ballet; directors; poets; chess masters. Beria reputedly dined in a private room. Poet Sergei Mikhalkov said he composed the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem while sitting in the restaurant in 1943.
It was privatized in the 1990s and struggled, before closing in 2002.It reopened in 2016 after a $20 million renovation. But the new Aragvi closed abruptly in 2019 amid reports of a conflict between its owner and the building managers.
“You put your entire soul into cooking,” said the former head chef, Nugzar Nebieridze, 59, celebrated for his khinkali, a meaty dumping almost the size of a tennis ball. He was devastated to find himself unemployed. But other doors opened. He now prefers to travel, giving master classes around Russia.
On March 6, 1953, the day after Stalin died of a stroke, an estimated 2 million Muscovites poured onto the streets. They hoped to catch a glimpse of his body, which was covered with flowers and laid out in the marbled Hall of Columns near the Red Square.
Yulia Revazova, then 13, sneaked from her house with her cousin Valery without telling their parents. As they walked toward Pushkin Square, at one end of Gorky Street, the procession turned into a scene of horror. They saw people falling and being trampled. Some were crushed against metal fences. Valery, who was a few years older, grabbed Yulia by the hand and dragged her out of the crowd.
In March 1953, Soviet officials, including Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrenty Beria, followed the coffin of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a processional in Moscow. (Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images)
“He held my hand really tight and never let it go, because it was pure madness,” she recalled recently. “It took us four or five hours to get out of there. People kept coming and coming, I couldn’t even call it a column, it was just an uncontrollable mass of people.”
“I still have this feeling, the fear of massive crowds,” added Revazova, 82. “To this day, if I see a huge group of people or a really long line, I just cross the street.”
Neither Revazova nor her cousin knew about Stalin’s repressions.
“People were crying. I saw many women holding little handkerchiefs, wiping away tears and wailing,” she recalled. “That’s the psychology of a Soviet person. If there is no overarching figure above, be it God or Lenin, life will come crashing down. The era was over and there was fear. What will we do without Stalin?”
Officials never revealed how many people had died that day. The Soviet-approved archival footage of the four days of national mourning showed only orderly marches and memorials.
The Soviet culture minister, the steely Yekaterina Furtseva, was nicknamed Catherine the Third after the forceful Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Furtseva destroyed writers, artists or anyone who challenged Soviet ideas. She livedat an elite 1949apartment for government officials at No. 9 — an ultra-prestigious address with a view of the Kremlin.
Furtseva, a former small-town weaver, made sure that No. 9 was only for the cream of party officials and other notables, like famous Soviet actress Natalia Seleznyova, scientists, conductors and architects.
Riding the coattails of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Furtseva was the only woman in the Politburo and later became the Soviet Union’s cultural gatekeeper despite her provincial sensibilities. She once infamously mixed up a symphony with an opera, and critics were quick to notice.
In the late 1940s, No. 9 was being constructed; today, the building is home to apartments, shops and offices. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“She had little in common with the artistic leaders of her country except a liking for vodka,” wrote Norwegian painter Victor Sparre, in his 1979 book on repression of dissident Soviet writers, “The Flame in the Darkness.”
Furtseva was famous for previewing performances, and banning anyone even subtly critical of Soviet policiesas anti-state. Director Yuri Lyubimov described one such visit to Moscow Taganka Theater in 1969, when she turned up wearing diamond rings and an astrakhan coat. She banned the play “Alive,” depicting a cunning peasant’s struggle against the collective farm system.She “was livid, she kept shouting,” he told L’Alternative magazine in 1984. She stormed out, warning him she would use her influence, “up to the highest levels,” against him.
He was expelled from the party and in 1984 was stripped of his citizenship. She vehemently denounced Solzhenitsyn and banned the Bolshoi Ballet’s version of “Carmen” in 1967 over prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s sensual performance and short “un-Soviet” costumes that did not cover enough leg.
“The ballet is all erotica,” she told the dancer. “It’s alien to us.” But Plisetskaya, whom Khrushchev once called the world’s best dancer, fought back. The ballet went on with some excisions (the costumes stayed) and became a legend in the theater’s repertoire.
Furtseva was nearly felled by scandal in 1974, ordered to repay $80,000 spent building a luxurious dacha, or country home, using state labor. She died months later.
The Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn exposed the Soviet system’s cruelty against some of its brightest minds trapped in the gulag, or prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn was given eight years hard labor in 1945 for privately criticizing Stalin, then three years in exile in Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic at the time. His books were banned. After release from exile in 1956, he was only allowed to make 72-hour visits to his second wife Natalia’s apartment at 12 Gorky St., Apartment 169. Solzhenitsyn had to live outside the city.
“People knew that there were camps, but not many people, if any, knew what life was like in those camps. And he described it from the inside. He had been there himself, and that was shocking to a lot of people,” said Natalia Solzhenitsyna during a recent interview at the apartment, which became a museum in 2018.
“Many people say that he did make a contribution to the final fall of the Soviet Union.”
Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, called Russia “the land of smothered opportunities.” He wrote that it always possible to live with integrity. Lies and evil might flourish — “but not through me.”
The museum displays tiny handwritten copies of Solzhenitsyn’s books, circulated secretly; film negatives of letters smuggled to the West, and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems in prison.
“He spent a lot of time here with his children. We were always very busy. And we just enjoyed ourselves — being together.” They had three sons.
No. 12 Gorky St., from top: Natalia Solzhenitsyna lived in the apartment for years, and her husband, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was only allowed short visits; the site now houses a museum displaying items connected to him, such as negatives with a copy of a novel he wrote; another exhibit includes Solzhenitsyn’s clothes from when he was sent to the gulag and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems; and the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s desk is featured at the museum. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
If they were discussing something sensitive, they wrote notes to each other because of KGB bugs, and destroyed them. Two KGB agents usually roosted in the stairwell on the floor above and two more on the floor below.
“The Soviet authorities were afraid of him because of his popularity among intellectuals, writers, people of culture and the intelligentsia.”
Her favorite room is decked with black-and-white photos of dissidents sent to the gulag, the Soviet Union’s sprawling system of forced labor camps. “It’s dedicated to the invisibles,” she said, pointing out friends.
Sweden planned to award Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 literature prize in the Gorky Street apartment, but the writer rejected a secret ceremony. A Swedish journalist in Moscow, Stig Fredrikson, was Solzhenitsyn’s smuggler. He carried Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture on tightly rolled film disguised as a battery in a transistor radio, and he brought other letters to the West and photos taped to his back.
“I felt that there was a sense of unfairness that he was so isolated and so persecuted,” Fredrikson said in a recent interview. “I got more and more scared and more and more afraid every time I met him.”
In 1971, the Soviet Union allegedly tried to poison Solzhenitsyn using a secret nerve agent, leaving him seriously ill. Early 1974 was tense. The prosecutor subpoenaed him. State newspapers railed against him.
The morning of Feb. 12, 1974, the couple worked in their study. In the afternoon, he walked his 5-month-old son, Stepan, in the yard below.
“He came back here and literally a minute later there was a ring at the door. There were eight men. They immediately broke the chain and got in,” his widow said. “There was a prosecutor in his prosecutor’s uniform, two men in plainclothes and the rest were in military uniform. They told him to get dressed.”
“We hugged and we kept hugging for quite awhile,” she recalled. “The last thing he told me was to take care of the children.”
He was deported to West Germany. The couple later settled in Vermont and set up a fund to help dissident writers using royalties from his book, “The Gulag Archipelago.” About 1,000 people still receive money from the fund, according to Solzhenitsyna.
When the writer and his wife returned to Russia in 1994, they traveled across the country by train. Thousands of people crushed into halls to hear him speak.
Solzhenitsyn abhorred the shock therapy and unchecked capitalism of the 1990s and preferred Putin’s tough nationalism. He died of heart failure at 89 in August 2008, five months after a presidential election that saw Putin switch places with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in a move that critics saw as a ploy to get around constitutional term limits.
Behind a grand, Stalin-era apartment block at 6 Gorky St. sits an ornate 1907 building famous for its facade, art nouveau glazed blue tiles, elegant arches and baroque spires. Once a monastery dormitory, it was a staple on pre-Soviet postcards from Moscow. But November 1939, the 26,000-ton building was put on rails and pushed back to widen the street.
Linguists Lev and Raisa Kopelev lived at Apartment 201 on the top floor. Their spacious dining room became a favored haven for Moscow’s intelligentsia from the 1950s to the 1980s.
During the Tverskaya Street reconstruction the Savvinskoye building, where Apartment 201 was located, was pushed back into the yard and blocked by this Stalin-era apartment block. Shown in 1966 and today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“People gathered all the time — to talk. In this apartment, like many other kitchens and dining rooms, at tables filled more often than not with vodka, herring, and vinaigrette salad, feasts of thought took place,” said Svetlana Ivanova, Raisa’s daughter from another marriage, who lived in the apartment for nearly four decades.
Solzhenitsyn and fellow dissident Joseph Brodsky were the Kopelev family’s friends, among many other artists, poets, writers and scientists who formed the backbone of the Soviet human rights movement of the 1960s.
Kopelev was a writer and dissident, turning his back on the Communist Party and a prestigious university position. A former gulag prisoner, he inspired the character Lev Rubinin Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle,” depicting the fate of arrested scientists.
“The apartment was a special place for everyone. People there were not afraid to speak their mind on topics that would be considered otherwise risky,” Ivanova said. “A new, different spirit ruled in its walls.”
The Eliseevsky store at No. 16 was a landmark for 120 years — born in czarist Russia, a witness to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, a survivor of wars and a bastion during eras of shortages and plenty. It closed its doors in April.
Eliseevsky fell on hard times during the coronavirus pandemic as international tourists dwindled and Russians sought cheaper grocery shopping alternatives.
In the palace-like interior, two chandeliers hang from an ornate ceiling. Gilt columns line the walls. The front of the store, looking out at Tverskaya Street, has a row of stained glass.
The Eliseevsky store, which opened in 1901, is seen in April, with a few customers and some archival store photos, as it prepared to close as an economic victim of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Denis Romodin, a historian at the Museum of Moscow, said Eliseevsky is one of just two retail spaces in Moscow with such pre-revolutionary interiors. But Eliseevsky’s level of preservation made it “one of a kind,” he said.
The building was once owned by Zinaida Volkonskaya, a princess and Russian cultural figure in the 19th century. She remodeled the house into a literary salon whose luminaries included Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.
St. Petersburg merchant Grigory Eliseev opened the market in 1901. It quickly became a hit among Russian nobility for the selection of European wine and cheeses.
In 1934, the Eliseevsky store is seen next to a building that is being constructed; in September, the market, a landmark for 120 years, was empty, having closed in April. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The Eliseevsky store on Tverskaya Street is seen at night in the 1990s; the nighttime view today is different. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Romodin said it was Russia’s first store with price tags. Before Eliseevsky, haggling was the norm — and it was also unique in its innovative technology for the time: electric-powered refrigerators and display cases that allowed goods to be stored longer.
Even in the Soviet Union’s hungriest years, the 1930s famine, Eliseevsky stocked pineapples.
“One could find outlandish delicacies here, which at that time seemed very exotic,” Romodin said. “It was already impossible to surprise Muscovites with wine shops. But a grocery store with luxurious interiors, and large for that time, amazed and delighted Muscovites.”
In 1989, in a dusty government office by a corner of Pushkin Square, three young artists threw off decades of suffocating state control and opened the first independent art gallery.
That April, Yevgeny Mitta and two fellow students, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut, opened First Gallery. At the time, the Soviet Union was opening up under policies including glasnost, which gave more room for public debate and criticism.
Artists were ordered to adopt the Socialist Realist style in 1934, depicting scenes such as happy collective farmworkers. Expressionist, abstract and avant-garde art was banned. From the 1970s, underground art exhibitions were the only outlets to break the Soviet-imposed rules.
The First Gallery, from top: Yevgeny Mitta, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut opened the Soviet Union’s first independent art gallery in 1989 and received media attention; Mitta worked on a painting that he displays at his gallery; Mitta recalled recently that he “felt we had to make something new”; and an undated photo of Mitta at his gallery in Soviet times. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post and courtesy of Yevgeny Mitta)
“I just felt we had to make something new,” recalled Mitta, 58, who kept his interest in contemporary expressionism a secret at a top Moscow art school in the 1980s.
“It was like nothing really happened in art history in the 20th century, like it stopped,” he said. “The Socialist Realism doctrine was invented and spread to the artists as the only one possible way of developing paintings, films and literature.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists had to “learn how to survive, what to do, how to work and make a living,” he said.
In the Soviet Union’s final years, a mania raged for all things Western. Estée Lauder opened the first Western-brand shop on Gorky Street in 1989 after meeting Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in December 1988.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s, located across Pushkin Square on Gorky Street, opened Jan. 31, 1990 — a yellow-arched symbol of Gorbachev’s perestroika economic reforms. Pizza Hut opened later that year. (In 1998, Gorbachev starred in a commercial for the pizza chain.)
Karina Pogosova and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at McDonald’s on opening day. The line stretched several blocks. Police officers stood watch to keep it organized.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s opened in 1990 and eager customers lined up to enter; Karina Pogosova, left, and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at the fast-food restaurant on Gorky Street then, and they are senior executives with the company today. (Photos by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“The atmosphere was wonderful. The first day I had to smile the entire day and my face muscles hurt,” Patrunina said. “This is not a joke. Russians do not smile in general, so we were not used to smiling at all, not to mention for more than eight hours straight.”
Pogosova and Patrunina were students at the Moscow Aviation Institute when they learned McDonald’s was hiring through an ad in a local Moscow newspaper. Interview questions included: “How fast can you run 100 meters?” It was to gauge if someone was energetic enough for the job.
Pogosova and Patrunina are still with the company today, as senior vice president of development and franchising and vice president of operations, respectively.
“I thought that this is the world of opportunities and this new world is coming to our country, so I must be in this new world,” Patrunina said.
The smiling staff wasn’t the only culture shock for customers. Some had never tried the fountain sodas available. They were unaccustomed to food that wasn’t eaten with utensils. The colorful paper boxes that Big Macs came in were occasionally saved as souvenirs.
McDonald’s quickly became like a landmark on the street.
“I remember very well that the street and the entire city was very dark and McDonald’s was like an island of light with bright signage,” Pogosova said. “The street started to change after McDonalds opened its first restaurant there.”
The end of the Soviet Union uncorked Moscow’s wild 1990s. Some people made instant fortunes on acquiring state-owned enterprises at throwaway prices. Rules were being written on the fly. The city was pulsing with possibilities for those with money or those desperate to get some.
“It was easy to get drunk on this,” said Alex Shifrin, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive from Canada who lived in Moscow from the mid-90s until the late 2000s.
It all was on full display at Night Flight, Moscow’s first nightclub, opened by Swedish managers in 1991, in the final months of the Soviet Union, at Tverskaya, 17. The club introduced Moscow’s nouveau elite to “face control” — who merits getting past the rope line — and music-throbbing decadence.
The phrase “standing on Tverskaya” made its way into Russian vernacular as the street became a hot spot for prostitutes. Toward the end of the 2000s, Night Flight had lost its luster. The club scene in Moscow had moved on to bigger and bolder venues.
Decades before, No. 17 was famous as the building with the dancer: A statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, placed atop thecupola during Stalin’s building blitz.
The statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, could be seen atop the building at No. 17 in this 1943 photo; today, the dancer is missing. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Muscovites nicknamed the building the House Under the Skirt.
“The idea was to have Gorky Street as a museum of Soviet art. The statues represented a dance of socialism,” art historian Pavel Gnilorybov said. “The ballerina was a symbol of the freedom of women and the idea that, before the revolution, women were slaves. It is as if she is singing an ode to the regime.”
The statues were crumbling and were removed by 1958. People forgot them. Now a group of Muscovites, including Gnilorybov, are campaigning for the return of the ballerina.
“It’s an idea that we want to give the city as a gift. It’s not political,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Pushkin Square has been Moscow’s favorite meeting place for friends, lovers and political demonstrations.
In November 1927, Trotskyist opponents of Stalin marched to the 27th House of Sovietsat one end of Tverskaya Street, opposite the Hotel National, in one of the last public protests against the Soviet ruler.
A celebration to say goodbye to winter at Pushkin Square in February 1987. (Igor Stomakhin)A night view in 1959 of Pushkin Square, a favorite meeting place for many. (RGAKFD)
In December 1965, several dozen dissidents gathered in Pushkin Square to protest the trials of two writers. It became an annual event. People would gather just before 6 p.m. and, on the hour, remove their hats for a minute.
In 1987, dissidents collected signatures at Pushkin Square and other locations calling for a memorial to those imprisoned or killed by the Soviet state. The movement evolved into Memorial, a leading human rights group. Memorial was declared a “foreign agent” in 2016 under Putin’s sweeping political crackdowns.
In January 2018, left, and January 2021, right, protesters gathered at Pushkin Square. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny met at Pushkin Square earlier this year. And it is where communists and liberals rallied on a rainy September night to protest 2021 parliamentary election results giving a landslide win to Putin’s United Russia party despite widespread claims of fraud.
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the U.S.S.R., Putin’s Russia carries some echoes of the stories lived out in Soviet times — censorship and repressions are returning. Navalny was poisoned by a nerve agent in 2020 and later jailed. Many opposition figures and independent journalists have fled the country. The hope, sleaze and exhilaration of the 1990s have faded. Tverskaya Street has settled into calm stagnation, waiting for the next chapter.
Arthur Bondar contributed to this report.
About this story
Story editing by Robyn Dixon and Brian Murphy. Photos and videos by Arthur Bondar. Archival footage from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk; footage of Joseph Stalin’s funeral from the Martin Manhoff Archive, courtesy of Douglas Smith. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Jason Aldag. Design and development by Yutao Chen. Design editing by Suzette Moyer. Maps by Dylan Moriarty. Graphics editing by Lauren Tierney. Copy editing by Melissa Ngo.
Joe Biden on Thursday released the framework of a $1.75tn social and climate spending proposal after weeks of fraught negotiations with congressional Democrats.
The framework includes investments in childcare, climate change mitigation and an expansion of healthcare, but it is a significantly pared-down version of the original $3.5tn agenda Biden had proposed.
In a statement, the White House said the president is confident this framework of the bill would be able to pass the House and Senate, although it appears negotiations on the proposal’s specific details will continue.
Here is what we know so far:
What’s in the bill?
The bill includes substantial investment in young children, specifically funding for childcare and early childhood education. Under the proposal, most American families will save more than half of their spending on childcare, with bolstered benefits to working and low-income parents. It also includes universal pre-school for children aged three and four.
A hallmark of the proposal’s climate mitigation plan is $555bn to reduce climate pollution and invest in clean energy. The proposal includes consumer rebates for Americans who invest in renewable energy, for example installing rooftop solar panels or buying an electric vehicle.
The bill also includes incentives to expand renewable energy in the domestic supply chain, an accelerator program that will fund sustainability projects and funding for restoration and conservation efforts.
The framework includes some provisions to bolster healthcare, including reducing healthcare premiums and tax credits to people who have been locked out of Medicaid because their state refused to expand Medicaid access. It will also include investments in affordable housing and an extension of the child tax credit.
What was taken out?
A few provisions that some Democrats were heavily advocating for were left out of the framework.
Most notably, the proposal does not include 12 weeks of paid family leave. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the primary holdout for the provision. Manchin has indicated that he believes a reconciliation bill – which would require only the support of Democrats in the Senate – is “not the place” for “a major policy”.
Significant expansions to healthcare were cut out of the framework, including provisions to have Medicaid cover dental and vision costs, a plan to expand Medicaid to Americans in states that have refused to expand it themselves under the Affordable Care Act, and a proposal to empower Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.
Biden’s plan for free tuition at community colleges was also left out.
The framework notably does not include the “billionaire tax” that was floated by some Democrats on Wednesday before it was swiftly killed by centrist holdouts.
The billionaire tax would have seen a complete shift in the way Americans worth more than $1bn would pay taxes, targeting the billions of dollars in shares they own in their companies. Hours after the proposal was unveiled, Manchin said he would not support such a provision.
How are Democrats planning to pay for it?
Biden estimates the framework will cost about $1.75tn, and the White House says the bill will be funded “by asking more from the very largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans”.
A central provision in the bill’s payment plan is shifting the corporate tax rate to 15% for corporations with more than $1bn in profits. While the current corporate tax rate is 21%, Democrats have agreed that loopholes allowed corporations to report lower profits to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) while boasting lofty profits to shareholders. The next tax rate will apply to the profit that is reported to shareholders.
The bill also includes a surtax on the 0.02% wealthiest Americans and investments in IRS auditing enforcements.
What’s next?
The framework released by Biden on Thursday represents a broad outline of what will end up in the final bill. Congressional Democrats will need to get to work at drafting the actual legislation if everyone, particularly the party’s most progressive and conservative members, can agree on the basic framework. When that will happen will depend on how quickly everyone says they are on board.
The Justice Department reached an $88 million settlement with the families of nine Black parishioners killed by a white supremacist in a South Carolina church in 2015, and with survivors of the shooting, the authorities and lawyers said on Thursday.
The settlement includes millions for families of the victims and survivors of the shooting, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church in Charleston. It resolves lawsuits that accused the government of negligence in its background check system that allowed the gunman to purchase a firearm.
The survivors and the victims’ families had sued the government for wrongful death and physical injuries, the department said. The settlement amounts range from $6 million to $7.5 million for those killed, and $5 million for survivors, the department said in a statement.
“The mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church was a horrific hate crime that caused immeasurable suffering for the families of the victims and the survivors,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in the statement. “Since the day of the shooting, the Justice Department has sought to bring justice to the community, first by a successful hate crime prosecution and today by settling civil claims.”
Supporters of President Trump protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
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Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
Supporters of President Trump protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
On the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa walked through the streets of D.C., surrounded by a throng of Trump supporters. He says he remembers a particular energy in the crowd that night.
“They were clashing with police officers. They were fighting with each other. There was a euphoria,” Costa says. “The mob … it was loud.”
Costa’s new book Peril, which he co-wrote with journalist Bob Woodward, centers on President Trump’s final days in office — specifically the events leading up to and following the Capitol siege.
As the crowd agitated outside, Costa says, inside a “war room” at the nearby Willard hotel Trump lawyers and allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were laying out a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
According to Costa, Trump attorney John Eastman drafted a memo suggesting that an alternate slate of electors be used as a tactic to stop the certification of the election results.
“They were trying to get [Vice President] Pence and others to move the election to the House of Representatives to block Biden from taking office,” Costa explains.
Costa says that Pence declined to go along with the plan — mostly because there were no alternate slates of electors on hand. But, Costa adds, “Imagine if in January 2025 Republicans are much more organized and they have alternate slates of electors ready in many states. What happens then?”
Ten months later, hundreds of members of the mob who stormed the Capitol are facing prosecution for their actions. But it remains to be seen whether anyone from the Willard war room will be charged.
“The looming question for Merrick Garland, the attorney general, is: Is he going to go at the key players, who may not be directly tied to the violence or may not have their fingerprints on the steel bars that were used against the Capitol Police officers that day, but [who] were part of planning an effort to defraud the United States?” Costa says. “I’m not a lawyer, but I think raising the question is certainly understandable based on all of this reporting.”
Interview highlights
On the scene on the street the night of Jan. 5 and into Jan. 6
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster
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Simon & Schuster
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster
[The crowd] was so loud that Trump could hear them. And Trump doesn’t like being outside — from what I’ve witnessed over the years, he’s more of an indoor person — but he keeps the door to the Oval Office open on the night of the 5th after Pence leaves just so he can hear the mob. And Woodward said to me, it’s almost like when he was writing The Final Days with Carl Bernstein, when [Richard] Nixon was talking to the pictures on the wall, Trump is talking to the mob. A few aides come in from the press shop, and say, “Mr. President, Mr. President, it’s cold. We closed the door. Why is the door open?” [And Trump says,] “I want to hear my people. Listen. They have courage. Listen.” And he keeps the door open for the whole meeting on the night of Jan. 5.
On Trump’s direct calls to the Willard war room
The fact that the calls happened is very important in the context of the whole insurrection because for months, as reporters, we know that Trump was pressuring Pence in the Oval Office. That’s been well documented and we knew that Giuliani and Bannon were up to a lot of stuff in Washington that night. What we wanted to figure out when we were looking at this book is was there a connection between the two? And the fact that Trump calls Bannon and Giuliani after Pence leaves the White House around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 5 to update them, it shows that there is at the very least coordination between these two power centers on the eve of an insurrection. It will be up to the DOJ to decide whether this is a conspiracy, a crime to defraud the United States.
On the statement the Trump campaign issued Jan. 5 about Pence’s support, which wasn’t true — and the resulting tension between the president and the vice president
It was a campaign statement on Trump campaign letterhead saying, in Donald Trump’s words, that Mike Pence fully agrees with me. The quote that stunned the Pence people was “Mike Pence is in total agreement that on Jan. 6, the election should be overturned and he should move it to the House.” It was issued on a formal statement.
This is where you start to see the crack in the American democratic system — when the vice president and president are not in sync, and the president starts to speak for other constitutional officers. This is where Pence and his team really go into a bunker mode and they don’t even share the letter Pence ultimately releases on Jan. 6, explaining his decision to not try to do anything crazy on Jan. 6. They don’t even share it with the White House counsel or with Trump. That was the level of tension between the president and the vice president.
On a possible criminal charge of defrauding the U.S. for those who organized the insurrection
It’s a well-known part of the U.S. Code, and if someone wants to look it up, it’s 18 U.S. Code 371. It means that if you have one or two people conspiring to commit an offense against the United States, to defraud the U.S., then you have committed a crime and you shall be fined or imprisoned for possibly up to five years. This is a crime and it’s been prosecuted many, many times.
On the perils that remain and the threats to our democracy
You have a former president in Donald Trump who refuses to share documents to give any kind of information to an investigation about an insurrection that his friends and allies were part of, at least on the legal and political level, in trying to force the election to be overturned. There is violence and connections that need to be explained at a grassroots level and potentially at a higher level. And these unanswered questions are part of the peril that remains. If we don’t have accountability in truth and answers in a democracy, then what kind of democracy is it?
There are so many things that we just still don’t know. … What else don’t we know about the domestic side of things? The QAnon movement, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers seem to be growing by the day across the country. There’s a violence and extremism and a lot of the rhetoric now, publicly. You see Trump out there … he’s as active as ever. … There is a huge effort, whether it’s the Arizona “audit” — isn’t an audit at all. But the Arizona effort to maybe say Trump won the state. All these Republican-controlled states have people in them, in the Legislature’s key leaders who are doing a lot to try to change election laws, change voting rights. And [House Majority Whip] Jim Clyburn … says in our book that “democracy is on fire” because, on the federal level, Democrats won’t break the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation that they all agree on. But Republicans are very busy passing their voting laws in different states. Andwhat I just see on the horizon is a collision of some sort on the voting rights issue and on the foundation of democracy. If the system’s not functioning and people aren’t accepting reality and pushing to change the laws, who knows what happens next?
Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
World leaders are set to gather in Glasgow, Scotland this November for COP26, a two-week United Nations-led summit on climate change. The conference could shape how — and whether — the world effectively slows climate change in the years ahead. Here’s what you need to know.
MOSCOW — Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to be. The flag was lowered for the last time on Dec. 25, 1991. That moment still begs deep questions for its heirs: Who were we as Soviets and where are we going as Russians?
Many of those answers can be found on a Moscow boulevard — named Gorky Street, after writer Maxim Gorky, from 1932 to 1990 and renamed Tverskaya Street, a nod to the ancient city Tver, as the Soviet Union was awash in last-gasp reforms.
It was the Soviet Union’s display window on the bright future Kremlin-run communism was supposed to bring. It was where the KGB dined, the rich spent their rubles, Vladimir Lenin gave speeches from a balcony and authorities wielded their power against one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
A view of Tverskaya Street from a top floor of the Hotel National in 1980 and in August. The Moscow street’s changes through the decades encompass the shifts in everyday life from the Soviet Union in the 1920s to Russia today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
In 1990s, Tverskaya embodied the fast-money excess of the post-Soviet free for all. In later years, it was packed with hopeful pro-democracy marchers. And now, under President Vladimir Putin, it is a symbol of his dreams of reviving Russia as a great power, reliving past glories and crushing any opposition to his rule.
Join a tour of Moscow’s famed Tverskaya Street.
The window in Room 107 at the Hotel Nationalfaces Red Square and the Kremlin. It’s a perfect view of Lenin’s tomb — fitting since he was Room 107’s most famous guest.
The Kremlin had been damaged during the Russian Revolution in 1917. So Lenin and his wife moved into Room 107 for seven days in March 1918, making the hotel the first home of the Soviet government.
The Hotel National in Moscow, from top: Artwork in the Socialist Realist style, which artists were ordered to adopt in the 1930s, still adorns the hotel; Elena Pozolotina has worked at the hotel since 1995; the hotel, which contains a restaurant, was built in 1902; and the hotel has hosted notable guests, including Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and actor Jack Nicholson. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The National, built in 1902 during Imperial Russia, also accommodated other Soviet leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the secret police chief. The building continued to be used by the Soviet government as a hostel for official party delegates and was renamed First House of Soviets in 1919.
Guests can now stay in the same room Lenin did for about $1,300 per night. In more recent years, the hotel has hosted notable guests including Barack Obama (when he was a senator) and actor Jack Nicholson.
“This hotel feels a little like a museum,” said Elena Pozolotina, who has worked at the National since 1995.
“We have rooms that look onto Tverskaya Street, and we always explain to guests that this is the main street of our city,” Pozolotina said. “This corner of Tverskaya that we occupy, it’s priceless.”
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded a massive redevelopment of Moscow in 1935, the order came to transform modest Gorky Street into a wide, awe-inspiring boulevard.
Engineer Emmanuel Gendel had the job of moving massive buildings to make way for others. Churches and monasteries were blown up, replaced by newspaper offices and a huge cinema.
The Moscow Central Eye Hospital was sheared from its foundation, rotated 97 degrees, jacked up, hitched on rails and pushed back 20 yards — with surgeons operating all the while, or so official media reported at the time.
In 1935, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded the widening of the modest road, at the time called Gorky Street. Buildings were moved, as shown in this 1940s photo. Today, it is a wide boulevard known as Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Gendel’s daughter, then about 8, proudly stood at a microphone, announcing: “Attention, attention, the building is moving.” Tatiana Yastrzhembskaya, Gendel’s granddaughter and president of the Winter Ball charity foundation in Moscow, recalls that Gendel extolled communism but also enjoyed the rewards of the elite. He drove a fine car and always brought the family the best cakes and candies, she said.
The largest Gorky Street building Gendel moved was the Savvinskoye Courtyard.The most difficult was the Mossoviet, or Moscow city hall, with a balcony where Lenin had given speeches. The building, a former residence of the Moscow governor general, had to be moved with its basement. The ground floor had been a ballroom without central structural supports.
Moving buildings on Gorky Street in 1940, from left: A mechanic at a control panel regulates the supply of electricity while a house is being moved; a postal worker passes a moving house; a specialist unwinds a telephone cable during a building move to maintain uninterrupted communication; and 13 rail tracks were placed under a house, on which 1,200 metal rollers were laid. (Photos by RGAKFD)
Gendel’s skills were used all over the U.S.S.R. — straightening towers on ancient mosques in Uzbekistan, inventing a means to drag tanks from rivers during World War II and consulting on the Moscow Metro.
Like many of the Soviet Union’s brightest talents, Gendel’s freedom was tenuous. His ex-wife was called by the KGB internal spy agency in 1937 and asked to denounce him. She refused, and he avoided arrest.
The largest Gorky Street building moved was Savvinskoye Courtyard, seen behind the corner building in this photo from 1938, a year before it was relocated; now, it is tucked in a courtyard behind No. 6 on Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Under Joseph Stalin’s grand plan for Gorky Street, Moscow city hall had to be moved with its basement. The building is shown in 1986 and September. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“I believe he was not arrested and sent to the camps because he was a unique expert,” said Yastrzhembskaya. World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, interrupted the Master Plan for Gorky Street.
In the 1930s, the head of the elite NKVD secret police, Lavrenty Beria, architect of the Stalin-era purges (known as the Great Terror), ordered the construction of a state-owned restaurant, Aragvi, to showcase food from his home republic of Georgia.
One night, NKVD agents descended in several black cars on a humble Georgian canteen in Moscow that Beria once visited. The agents ordered the chef, Longinoz Stazhadze, to come with them. The feared NKVD was a precursor to the KGB.
Stazhadze thought he was being arrested, his son Levan told Russian media. He was taken to Beria, who said that he had agreed with “the Boss” (Stalin) that Stazhadze would run Aragvi. Stazhadze had grown up a peasant, sent to work in a prince’s kitchens as a boy.
The Aragvi restaurant was a favorite of the secret police after it opened in 1938. Nugzar Nebieridze was the former head chef at Aragvi when it relaunched in 2016. (Courtesy of Nugzar Nebieridze)
Aragvi opened in 1938. It was only for the gilded set, a reminder that the “Soviet paradise” was anything but equal. The prices were astronomical. It was impossible to get a table unless the doorman knew you or you could pay a hefty bribe.
Aragvi, at No. 6 Tverskaya, was a favorite of the secret police; government officials; cosmonauts and pilots; stars of theater, movies and ballet; directors; poets; chess masters. Beria reputedly dined in a private room. Poet Sergei Mikhalkov said he composed the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem while sitting in the restaurant in 1943.
It was privatized in the 1990s and struggled, before closing in 2002.It reopened in 2016 after a $20 million renovation. But the new Aragvi closed abruptly in 2019 amid reports of a conflict between its owner and the building managers.
“You put your entire soul into cooking,” said the former head chef, Nugzar Nebieridze, 59, celebrated for his khinkali, a meaty dumping almost the size of a tennis ball. He was devastated to find himself unemployed. But other doors opened. He now prefers to travel, giving master classes around Russia.
On March 6, 1953, the day after Stalin died of a stroke, an estimated 2 million Muscovites poured onto the streets. They hoped to catch a glimpse of his body, which was covered with flowers and laid out in the marbled Hall of Columns near the Red Square.
Yulia Revazova, then 13, sneaked from her house with her cousin Valery without telling their parents. As they walked toward Pushkin Square, at one end of Gorky Street, the procession turned into a scene of horror. They saw people falling and being trampled. Some were crushed against metal fences. Valery, who was a few years older, grabbed Yulia by the hand and dragged her out of the crowd.
In March 1953, Soviet officials, including Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrenty Beria, followed the coffin of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a processional in Moscow. (Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images)
“He held my hand really tight and never let it go, because it was pure madness,” she recalled recently. “It took us four or five hours to get out of there. People kept coming and coming, I couldn’t even call it a column, it was just an uncontrollable mass of people.”
“I still have this feeling, the fear of massive crowds,” added Revazova, 82. “To this day, if I see a huge group of people or a really long line, I just cross the street.”
Neither Revazova nor her cousin knew about Stalin’s repressions.
“People were crying. I saw many women holding little handkerchiefs, wiping away tears and wailing,” she recalled. “That’s the psychology of a Soviet person. If there is no overarching figure above, be it God or Lenin, life will come crashing down. The era was over and there was fear. What will we do without Stalin?”
Officials never revealed how many people had died that day. The Soviet-approved archival footage of the four days of national mourning showed only orderly marches and memorials.
The Soviet culture minister, the steely Yekaterina Furtseva, was nicknamed Catherine the Third after the forceful Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Furtseva destroyed writers, artists or anyone who challenged Soviet ideas. She livedat an elite 1949apartment for government officials at No. 9 — an ultra-prestigious address with a view of the Kremlin.
Furtseva, a former small-town weaver, made sure that No. 9 was only for the cream of party officials and other notables, like famous Soviet actress Natalia Seleznyova, scientists, conductors and architects.
Riding the coattails of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Furtseva was the only woman in the Politburo and later became the Soviet Union’s cultural gatekeeper despite her provincial sensibilities. She once infamously mixed up a symphony with an opera, and critics were quick to notice.
In the late 1940s, No. 9 was being constructed; today, the building is home to apartments, shops and offices. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“She had little in common with the artistic leaders of her country except a liking for vodka,” wrote Norwegian painter Victor Sparre, in his 1979 book on repression of dissident Soviet writers, “The Flame in the Darkness.”
Furtseva was famous for previewing performances, and banning anyone even subtly critical of Soviet policiesas anti-state. Director Yuri Lyubimov described one such visit to Moscow Taganka Theater in 1969, when she turned up wearing diamond rings and an astrakhan coat. She banned the play “Alive,” depicting a cunning peasant’s struggle against the collective farm system.She “was livid, she kept shouting,” he told L’Alternative magazine in 1984. She stormed out, warning him she would use her influence, “up to the highest levels,” against him.
He was expelled from the party and in 1984 was stripped of his citizenship. She vehemently denounced Solzhenitsyn and banned the Bolshoi Ballet’s version of “Carmen” in 1967 over prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s sensual performance and short “un-Soviet” costumes that did not cover enough leg.
“The ballet is all erotica,” she told the dancer. “It’s alien to us.” But Plisetskaya, whom Khrushchev once called the world’s best dancer, fought back. The ballet went on with some excisions (the costumes stayed) and became a legend in the theater’s repertoire.
Furtseva was nearly felled by scandal in 1974, ordered to repay $80,000 spent building a luxurious dacha, or country home, using state labor. She died months later.
The Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn exposed the Soviet system’s cruelty against some of its brightest minds trapped in the gulag, or prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn was given eight years hard labor in 1945 for privately criticizing Stalin, then three years in exile in Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic at the time. His books were banned. After release from exile in 1956, he was only allowed to make 72-hour visits to his second wife Natalia’s apartment at 12 Gorky St., Apartment 169. Solzhenitsyn had to live outside the city.
“People knew that there were camps, but not many people, if any, knew what life was like in those camps. And he described it from the inside. He had been there himself, and that was shocking to a lot of people,” said Natalia Solzhenitsyna during a recent interview at the apartment, which became a museum in 2018.
“Many people say that he did make a contribution to the final fall of the Soviet Union.”
Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, called Russia “the land of smothered opportunities.” He wrote that it always possible to live with integrity. Lies and evil might flourish — “but not through me.”
The museum displays tiny handwritten copies of Solzhenitsyn’s books, circulated secretly; film negatives of letters smuggled to the West, and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems in prison.
“He spent a lot of time here with his children. We were always very busy. And we just enjoyed ourselves — being together.” They had three sons.
No. 12 Gorky St., from top: Natalia Solzhenitsyna lived in the apartment for years, and her husband, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was only allowed short visits; the site now houses a museum displaying items connected to him, such as negatives with a copy of a novel he wrote; another exhibit includes Solzhenitsyn’s clothes from when he was sent to the gulag and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems; and the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s desk is featured at the museum. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
If they were discussing something sensitive, they wrote notes to each other because of KGB bugs, and destroyed them. Two KGB agents usually roosted in the stairwell on the floor above and two more on the floor below.
“The Soviet authorities were afraid of him because of his popularity among intellectuals, writers, people of culture and the intelligentsia.”
Her favorite room is decked with black-and-white photos of dissidents sent to the gulag, the Soviet Union’s sprawling system of forced labor camps. “It’s dedicated to the invisibles,” she said, pointing out friends.
Sweden planned to award Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 literature prize in the Gorky Street apartment, but the writer rejected a secret ceremony. A Swedish journalist in Moscow, Stig Fredrikson, was Solzhenitsyn’s smuggler. He carried Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture on tightly rolled film disguised as a battery in a transistor radio, and he brought other letters to the West and photos taped to his back.
“I felt that there was a sense of unfairness that he was so isolated and so persecuted,” Fredrikson said in a recent interview. “I got more and more scared and more and more afraid every time I met him.”
In 1971, the Soviet Union allegedly tried to poison Solzhenitsyn using a secret nerve agent, leaving him seriously ill. Early 1974 was tense. The prosecutor subpoenaed him. State newspapers railed against him.
The morning of Feb. 12, 1974, the couple worked in their study. In the afternoon, he walked his 5-month-old son, Stepan, in the yard below.
“He came back here and literally a minute later there was a ring at the door. There were eight men. They immediately broke the chain and got in,” his widow said. “There was a prosecutor in his prosecutor’s uniform, two men in plainclothes and the rest were in military uniform. They told him to get dressed.”
“We hugged and we kept hugging for quite awhile,” she recalled. “The last thing he told me was to take care of the children.”
He was deported to West Germany. The couple later settled in Vermont and set up a fund to help dissident writers using royalties from his book, “The Gulag Archipelago.” About 1,000 people still receive money from the fund, according to Solzhenitsyna.
When the writer and his wife returned to Russia in 1994, they traveled across the country by train. Thousands of people crushed into halls to hear him speak.
Solzhenitsyn abhorred the shock therapy and unchecked capitalism of the 1990s and preferred Putin’s tough nationalism. He died of heart failure at 89 in August 2008, five months after a presidential election that saw Putin switch places with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in a move that critics saw as a ploy to get around constitutional term limits.
Behind a grand, Stalin-era apartment block at 6 Gorky St. sits an ornate 1907 building famous for its facade, art nouveau glazed blue tiles, elegant arches and baroque spires. Once a monastery dormitory, it was a staple on pre-Soviet postcards from Moscow. But November 1939, the 26,000-ton building was put on rails and pushed back to widen the street.
Linguists Lev and Raisa Kopelev lived at Apartment 201 on the top floor. Their spacious dining room became a favored haven for Moscow’s intelligentsia from the 1950s to the 1980s.
During the Tverskaya Street reconstruction the Savvinskoye building, where Apartment 201 was located, was pushed back into the yard and blocked by this Stalin-era apartment block. Shown in 1966 and today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“People gathered all the time — to talk. In this apartment, like many other kitchens and dining rooms, at tables filled more often than not with vodka, herring, and vinaigrette salad, feasts of thought took place,” said Svetlana Ivanova, Raisa’s daughter from another marriage, who lived in the apartment for nearly four decades.
Solzhenitsyn and fellow dissident Joseph Brodsky were the Kopelev family’s friends, among many other artists, poets, writers and scientists who formed the backbone of the Soviet human rights movement of the 1960s.
Kopelev was a writer and dissident, turning his back on the Communist Party and a prestigious university position. A former gulag prisoner, he inspired the character Lev Rubinin Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle,” depicting the fate of arrested scientists.
“The apartment was a special place for everyone. People there were not afraid to speak their mind on topics that would be considered otherwise risky,” Ivanova said. “A new, different spirit ruled in its walls.”
The Eliseevsky store at No. 16 was a landmark for 120 years — born in czarist Russia, a witness to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, a survivor of wars and a bastion during eras of shortages and plenty. It closed its doors in April.
Eliseevsky fell on hard times during the coronavirus pandemic as international tourists dwindled and Russians sought cheaper grocery shopping alternatives.
In the palace-like interior, two chandeliers hang from an ornate ceiling. Gilt columns line the walls. The front of the store, looking out at Tverskaya Street, has a row of stained glass.
The Eliseevsky store, which opened in 1901, is seen in April, with a few customers and some archival store photos, as it prepared to close as an economic victim of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Denis Romodin, a historian at the Museum of Moscow, said Eliseevsky is one of just two retail spaces in Moscow with such pre-revolutionary interiors. But Eliseevsky’s level of preservation made it “one of a kind,” he said.
The building was once owned by Zinaida Volkonskaya, a princess and Russian cultural figure in the 19th century. She remodeled the house into a literary salon whose luminaries included Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.
St. Petersburg merchant Grigory Eliseev opened the market in 1901. It quickly became a hit among Russian nobility for the selection of European wine and cheeses.
In 1934, the Eliseevsky store is seen next to a building that is being constructed; in September, the market, a landmark for 120 years, was empty, having closed in April. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The Eliseevsky store on Tverskaya Street is seen at night in the 1990s; the nighttime view today is different. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Romodin said it was Russia’s first store with price tags. Before Eliseevsky, haggling was the norm — and it was also unique in its innovative technology for the time: electric-powered refrigerators and display cases that allowed goods to be stored longer.
Even in the Soviet Union’s hungriest years, the 1930s famine, Eliseevsky stocked pineapples.
“One could find outlandish delicacies here, which at that time seemed very exotic,” Romodin said. “It was already impossible to surprise Muscovites with wine shops. But a grocery store with luxurious interiors, and large for that time, amazed and delighted Muscovites.”
In 1989, in a dusty government office by a corner of Pushkin Square, three young artists threw off decades of suffocating state control and opened the first independent art gallery.
That April, Yevgeny Mitta and two fellow students, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut, opened First Gallery. At the time, the Soviet Union was opening up under policies including glasnost, which gave more room for public debate and criticism.
Artists were ordered to adopt the Socialist Realist style in 1934, depicting scenes such as happy collective farmworkers. Expressionist, abstract and avant-garde art was banned. From the 1970s, underground art exhibitions were the only outlets to break the Soviet-imposed rules.
The First Gallery, from top: Yevgeny Mitta, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut opened the Soviet Union’s first independent art gallery in 1989 and received media attention; Mitta worked on a painting that he displays at his gallery; Mitta recalled recently that he “felt we had to make something new”; and an undated photo of Mitta at his gallery in Soviet times. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post and courtesy of Yevgeny Mitta)
“I just felt we had to make something new,” recalled Mitta, 58, who kept his interest in contemporary expressionism a secret at a top Moscow art school in the 1980s.
“It was like nothing really happened in art history in the 20th century, like it stopped,” he said. “The Socialist Realism doctrine was invented and spread to the artists as the only one possible way of developing paintings, films and literature.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists had to “learn how to survive, what to do, how to work and make a living,” he said.
In the Soviet Union’s final years, a mania raged for all things Western. Estée Lauder opened the first Western-brand shop on Gorky Street in 1989 after meeting Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in December 1988.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s, located across Pushkin Square on Gorky Street, opened Jan. 31, 1990 — a yellow-arched symbol of Gorbachev’s perestroika economic reforms. Pizza Hut opened later that year. (In 1998, Gorbachev starred in a commercial for the pizza chain.)
Karina Pogosova and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at McDonald’s on opening day. The line stretched several blocks. Police officers stood watch to keep it organized.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s opened in 1990 and eager customers lined up to enter; Karina Pogosova, left, and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at the fast-food restaurant on Gorky Street then, and they are senior executives with the company today. (Photos by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“The atmosphere was wonderful. The first day I had to smile the entire day and my face muscles hurt,” Patrunina said. “This is not a joke. Russians do not smile in general, so we were not used to smiling at all, not to mention for more than eight hours straight.”
Pogosova and Patrunina were students at the Moscow Aviation Institute when they learned McDonald’s was hiring through an ad in a local Moscow newspaper. Interview questions included: “How fast can you run 100 meters?” It was to gauge if someone was energetic enough for the job.
Pogosova and Patrunina are still with the company today, as senior vice president of development and franchising and vice president of operations, respectively.
“I thought that this is the world of opportunities and this new world is coming to our country, so I must be in this new world,” Patrunina said.
The smiling staff wasn’t the only culture shock for customers. Some had never tried the fountain sodas available. They were unaccustomed to food that wasn’t eaten with utensils. The colorful paper boxes that Big Macs came in were occasionally saved as souvenirs.
McDonald’s quickly became like a landmark on the street.
“I remember very well that the street and the entire city was very dark and McDonald’s was like an island of light with bright signage,” Pogosova said. “The street started to change after McDonalds opened its first restaurant there.”
The end of the Soviet Union uncorked Moscow’s wild 1990s. Some people made instant fortunes on acquiring state-owned enterprises at throwaway prices. Rules were being written on the fly. The city was pulsing with possibilities for those with money or those desperate to get some.
“It was easy to get drunk on this,” said Alex Shifrin, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive from Canada who lived in Moscow from the mid-90s until the late 2000s.
It all was on full display at Night Flight, Moscow’s first nightclub, opened by Swedish managers in 1991, in the final months of the Soviet Union, at Tverskaya, 17. The club introduced Moscow’s nouveau elite to “face control” — who merits getting past the rope line — and music-throbbing decadence.
The phrase “standing on Tverskaya” made its way into Russian vernacular as the street became a hot spot for prostitutes. Toward the end of the 2000s, Night Flight had lost its luster. The club scene in Moscow had moved on to bigger and bolder venues.
Decades before, No. 17 was famous as the building with the dancer: A statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, placed atop thecupola during Stalin’s building blitz.
The statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, could be seen atop the building at No. 17 in this 1943 photo; today, the dancer is missing. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Muscovites nicknamed the building the House Under the Skirt.
“The idea was to have Gorky Street as a museum of Soviet art. The statues represented a dance of socialism,” art historian Pavel Gnilorybov said. “The ballerina was a symbol of the freedom of women and the idea that, before the revolution, women were slaves. It is as if she is singing an ode to the regime.”
The statues were crumbling and were removed by 1958. People forgot them. Now a group of Muscovites, including Gnilorybov, are campaigning for the return of the ballerina.
“It’s an idea that we want to give the city as a gift. It’s not political,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Pushkin Square has been Moscow’s favorite meeting place for friends, lovers and political demonstrations.
In November 1927, Trotskyist opponents of Stalin marched to the 27th House of Sovietsat one end of Tverskaya Street, opposite the Hotel National, in one of the last public protests against the Soviet ruler.
A celebration to say goodbye to winter at Pushkin Square in February 1987. (Igor Stomakhin)A night view in 1959 of Pushkin Square, a favorite meeting place for many. (RGAKFD)
In December 1965, several dozen dissidents gathered in Pushkin Square to protest the trials of two writers. It became an annual event. People would gather just before 6 p.m. and, on the hour, remove their hats for a minute.
In 1987, dissidents collected signatures at Pushkin Square and other locations calling for a memorial to those imprisoned or killed by the Soviet state. The movement evolved into Memorial, a leading human rights group. Memorial was declared a “foreign agent” in 2016 under Putin’s sweeping political crackdowns.
In January 2018, left, and January 2021, right, protesters gathered at Pushkin Square. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny met at Pushkin Square earlier this year. And it is where communists and liberals rallied on a rainy September night to protest 2021 parliamentary election results giving a landslide win to Putin’s United Russia party despite widespread claims of fraud.
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the U.S.S.R., Putin’s Russia carries some echoes of the stories lived out in Soviet times — censorship and repressions are returning. Navalny was poisoned by a nerve agent in 2020 and later jailed. Many opposition figures and independent journalists have fled the country. The hope, sleaze and exhilaration of the 1990s have faded. Tverskaya Street has settled into calm stagnation, waiting for the next chapter.
Arthur Bondar contributed to this report.
About this story
Story editing by Robyn Dixon and Brian Murphy. Photos and videos by Arthur Bondar. Archival footage from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk; footage of Joseph Stalin’s funeral from the Martin Manhoff Archive, courtesy of Douglas Smith. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Jason Aldag. Design and development by Yutao Chen. Design editing by Suzette Moyer. Maps by Dylan Moriarty. Graphics editing by Lauren Tierney. Copy editing by Melissa Ngo.
President Joe Biden, accompanied by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (second from left) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., (left) arrives to meet with House Democrats at the Capitol on Thursday.
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President Joe Biden, accompanied by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (second from left) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., (left) arrives to meet with House Democrats at the Capitol on Thursday.
Andrew Harnik/AP
President Biden traveled to Capitol Hill on Thursday to persuade House Democrats to back a $1.75 trillion framework of social and climate spending and end a weeks-long stalemate over the passage of a separate bipartisan infrastructure bill.
After meeting with House Democrats, Biden returned to the White House to publicly outline the deal. “After months of tough and thoughtful negotiations, I think we have, I know we have, a historic economic framework.”
Biden said that “No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that’s what compromise is, that’s consensus and that’s what I ran on.” He said that “this isn’t about moderates versus progressives,” but rather “competitiveness versus complacency.”
Biden appealed to Congressional Democrats to approve the plan, arguing it’s what he ran on last November. “The agenda that’s in these bills is what 81 million Americans voted for,” he said. “Their voices deserve to be heard, not denied, or worse ignored.”
Biden’s framework also got a statement of support from former President Obama. “In a country as large and diverse as ours, progress can often feel frustrating and slow, with small victories accompanied by frequent setbacks. But once in a while, it’s still possible to take a giant leap forward,” Obama wrote. “That’s what the framework announced today represents.”
Biden at the Capitol
Earlier, Biden joined House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and a room full of Democrats in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol on Thursday morning. In his remarks, Biden made an urgent case for a vote later in the day on the bipartisan bill, telling Democrats that in order to succeed, they needed to succeed today, according to a source familiar with the gathering.
Biden explicitly told Democrats that he needs their help and their votes, the source said. The comments were aimed at holdouts in the Congressional Progressive Caucus who have said they will not vote for the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August until there is a final agreement on social spending.
And it’s not clear that two key Senate holdouts are on board. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Az., issued a statement that praised the framework but stopped short of saying she would vote for it. “After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with President Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package. I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead,” Sinema said.
The other holdout, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV., said only that “this is all in the hands of the House right now.”
Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told reporters ahead of the meeting that she intended to stick with her position.
“What we said consistently is that we want to see what’s actually in the bill,” Jayapal said. “We want to see the legislative text. And then assuming that we’re fine with that, we’ll vote both bills through at the same time.”
A slimmed-down framework
Senior Biden administration officials believe the policies in the framework can become a bill that passes both the House and the Senate, despite the decision to cut the original $3.5 trillion spending goal in half.
The social spending package, which senior administration officials described as “transformative,” would make investments in children and families, boost efforts to combat climate change, provide affordable health care, and help middle-class families.
It includes major priorities for Democrats including universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, an additional year of the expanded monthly child tax credit payment, invests in affordable housing, premium reductions under the Affordable Care Act and significant investments to address climate change. The bill would also create a nationwide green jobs program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The legislation would be paid for with a series of taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Notably absent from the framework are major party priorities, including:
Many Democrats have blamed Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for the failure to reach a deal on paid family leave and free community college.
The framework comes at a critical moment for Biden, who is set to leave Washington on Thursday afternoon for a series of meetings in Europe with global leaders on climate change and the world economy. Senior congressional Democrats say they believe Biden wants at least one of the bills passed ahead of those talks.
The framework includes:
universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds (the provision would expire in six years);
child care support for about 20 million children that limits costs to no more than 7% of income for families earning up to 250% of state median income, as long as parents are working, seeking work, in training or dealing with a serious health issue (this provision would also expire in six years);
more than $500 billion in spending on climate, including clean energy tax credits for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, clean energy production; a civilian climate corps program; and investments in clean energy technology and manufacturing;
an extension of the expanded Affordable Care Act premium tax credits through 2025;
hearing costs through Medicare for seniors; and
$100 billion for reforms to reduce backlogs in the immigration asylum process.
The taxes include:
15% minimum tax for large corporations that report profits of more than $1 billion to shareholders;
1% tax on stock buybacks;
15% minimum tax on foreign profits of U.S. corporations; and
a surtax on the top .02% wealthiest Americans of 5% on income over $10 million, and an additional 3% on income over $25 million
Addressing those in the upper income brackets who would have be hit by higher taxes to pay for his plan, Biden said “All I’m asking is pay your fair share. Pay your fair share. Pay your fair share.”
Biden added that “For much too long the working people of this nation, and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American deal. It’s time to deal them back in.”
The Justice Department reached an $88 million settlement with the families of nine Black parishioners killed by a white supremacist in a South Carolina church in 2015, and with survivors of the shooting, the authorities and lawyers said on Thursday.
The settlement includes millions for families of the victims and survivors of the shooting, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church in Charleston. It resolves lawsuits that accused the government of negligence in its background check system that allowed the gunman to purchase a firearm.
The survivors and the victims’ families had sued the government for wrongful death and physical injuries, the department said. The settlement amounts range from $6 million to $7.5 million for those killed, and $5 million for survivors, the department said in a statement.
“The mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church was a horrific hate crime that caused immeasurable suffering for the families of the victims and the survivors,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in the statement. “Since the day of the shooting, the Justice Department has sought to bring justice to the community, first by a successful hate crime prosecution and today by settling civil claims.”
Supporters of President Trump protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Supporters of President Trump protest outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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On the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa walked through the streets of D.C., surrounded by a throng of Trump supporters. He says he remembers a particular energy in the crowd that night.
“They were clashing with police officers. They were fighting with each other. There was a euphoria,” Costa says. “The mob … it was loud.”
Costa’s new book Peril, which he co-wrote with journalist Bob Woodward, centers on President Trump’s final days in office — specifically the events leading up to and following the Capitol siege.
As the crowd agitated outside, Costa says, inside a “war room” at the nearby Willard hotel Trump lawyers and allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were laying out a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
According to Costa, Trump attorney John Eastman drafted a memo suggesting that an alternate slate of electors be used as a tactic to stop the certification of the election results.
“They were trying to get [Vice President] Pence and others to move the election to the House of Representatives to block Biden from taking office,” Costa explains.
Costa says that Pence declined to go along with the plan — mostly because there were no alternate slates of electors on hand. But, Costa adds, “Imagine if in January 2025 Republicans are much more organized and they have alternate slates of electors ready in many states. What happens then?”
Ten months later, hundreds of members of the mob who stormed the Capitol are facing prosecution for their actions. But it remains to be seen whether anyone from the Willard war room will be charged.
“The looming question for Merrick Garland, the attorney general, is: Is he going to go at the key players, who may not be directly tied to the violence or may not have their fingerprints on the steel bars that were used against the Capitol Police officers that day, but [who] were part of planning an effort to defraud the United States?” Costa says. “I’m not a lawyer, but I think raising the question is certainly understandable based on all of this reporting.”
Interview highlights
On the scene on the street the night of Jan. 5 and into Jan. 6
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster
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Simon & Schuster
Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Simon & Schuster
[The crowd] was so loud that Trump could hear them. And Trump doesn’t like being outside — from what I’ve witnessed over the years, he’s more of an indoor person — but he keeps the door to the Oval Office open on the night of the 5th after Pence leaves just so he can hear the mob. And Woodward said to me, it’s almost like when he was writing The Final Days with Carl Bernstein, when [Richard] Nixon was talking to the pictures on the wall, Trump is talking to the mob. A few aides come in from the press shop, and say, “Mr. President, Mr. President, it’s cold. We closed the door. Why is the door open?” [And Trump says,] “I want to hear my people. Listen. They have courage. Listen.” And he keeps the door open for the whole meeting on the night of Jan. 5.
On Trump’s direct calls to the Willard war room
The fact that the calls happened is very important in the context of the whole insurrection because for months, as reporters, we know that Trump was pressuring Pence in the Oval Office. That’s been well documented and we knew that Giuliani and Bannon were up to a lot of stuff in Washington that night. What we wanted to figure out when we were looking at this book is was there a connection between the two? And the fact that Trump calls Bannon and Giuliani after Pence leaves the White House around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 5 to update them, it shows that there is at the very least coordination between these two power centers on the eve of an insurrection. It will be up to the DOJ to decide whether this is a conspiracy, a crime to defraud the United States.
On the statement the Trump campaign issued Jan. 5 about Pence’s support, which wasn’t true — and the resulting tension between the president and the vice president
It was a campaign statement on Trump campaign letterhead saying, in Donald Trump’s words, that Mike Pence fully agrees with me. The quote that stunned the Pence people was “Mike Pence is in total agreement that on Jan. 6, the election should be overturned and he should move it to the House.” It was issued on a formal statement.
This is where you start to see the crack in the American democratic system — when the vice president and president are not in sync, and the president starts to speak for other constitutional officers. This is where Pence and his team really go into a bunker mode and they don’t even share the letter Pence ultimately releases on Jan. 6, explaining his decision to not try to do anything crazy on Jan. 6. They don’t even share it with the White House counsel or with Trump. That was the level of tension between the president and the vice president.
On a possible criminal charge of defrauding the U.S. for those who organized the insurrection
It’s a well-known part of the U.S. Code, and if someone wants to look it up, it’s 18 U.S. Code 371. It means that if you have one or two people conspiring to commit an offense against the United States, to defraud the U.S., then you have committed a crime and you shall be fined or imprisoned for possibly up to five years. This is a crime and it’s been prosecuted many, many times.
On the perils that remain and the threats to our democracy
You have a former president in Donald Trump who refuses to share documents to give any kind of information to an investigation about an insurrection that his friends and allies were part of, at least on the legal and political level, in trying to force the election to be overturned. There is violence and connections that need to be explained at a grassroots level and potentially at a higher level. And these unanswered questions are part of the peril that remains. If we don’t have accountability in truth and answers in a democracy, then what kind of democracy is it?
There are so many things that we just still don’t know. … What else don’t we know about the domestic side of things? The QAnon movement, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers seem to be growing by the day across the country. There’s a violence and extremism and a lot of the rhetoric now, publicly. You see Trump out there … he’s as active as ever. … There is a huge effort, whether it’s the Arizona “audit” — isn’t an audit at all. But the Arizona effort to maybe say Trump won the state. All these Republican-controlled states have people in them, in the Legislature’s key leaders who are doing a lot to try to change election laws, change voting rights. And [House Majority Whip] Jim Clyburn … says in our book that “democracy is on fire” because, on the federal level, Democrats won’t break the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation that they all agree on. But Republicans are very busy passing their voting laws in different states. Andwhat I just see on the horizon is a collision of some sort on the voting rights issue and on the foundation of democracy. If the system’s not functioning and people aren’t accepting reality and pushing to change the laws, who knows what happens next?
Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
World leaders are set to gather in Glasgow, Scotland this November for COP26, a two-week United Nations-led summit on climate change. The conference could shape how — and whether — the world effectively slows climate change in the years ahead. Here’s what you need to know.
MOSCOW — Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to be. The flag was lowered for the last time on Dec. 25, 1991. That moment still begs deep questions for its heirs: Who were we as Soviets and where are we going as Russians?
Many of those answers can be found on a Moscow boulevard — named Gorky Street, after writer Maxim Gorky, from 1932 to 1990 and renamed Tverskaya Street, a nod to the ancient city Tver, as the Soviet Union was awash in last-gasp reforms.
It was the Soviet Union’s display window on the bright future Kremlin-run communism was supposed to bring. It was where the KGB dined, the rich spent their rubles, Vladimir Lenin gave speeches from a balcony and authorities wielded their power against one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
A view of Tverskaya Street from a top floor of the Hotel National in 1980 and in August. The Moscow street’s changes through the decades encompass the shifts in everyday life from the Soviet Union in the 1920s to Russia today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
In 1990s, Tverskaya embodied the fast-money excess of the post-Soviet free for all. In later years, it was packed with hopeful pro-democracy marchers. And now, under President Vladimir Putin, it is a symbol of his dreams of reviving Russia as a great power, reliving past glories and crushing any opposition to his rule.
Join a tour of Moscow’s famed Tverskaya Street.
The window in Room 107 at the Hotel Nationalfaces Red Square and the Kremlin. It’s a perfect view of Lenin’s tomb — fitting since he was Room 107’s most famous guest.
The Kremlin had been damaged during the Russian Revolution in 1917. So Lenin and his wife moved into Room 107 for seven days in March 1918, making the hotel the first home of the Soviet government.
The Hotel National in Moscow, from top: Artwork in the Socialist Realist style, which artists were ordered to adopt in the 1930s, still adorns the hotel; Elena Pozolotina has worked at the hotel since 1995; the hotel, which contains a restaurant, was built in 1902; and the hotel has hosted notable guests, including Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and actor Jack Nicholson. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The National, built in 1902 during Imperial Russia, also accommodated other Soviet leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the secret police chief. The building continued to be used by the Soviet government as a hostel for official party delegates and was renamed First House of Soviets in 1919.
Guests can now stay in the same room Lenin did for about $1,300 per night. In more recent years, the hotel has hosted notable guests including Barack Obama (when he was a senator) and actor Jack Nicholson.
“This hotel feels a little like a museum,” said Elena Pozolotina, who has worked at the National since 1995.
“We have rooms that look onto Tverskaya Street, and we always explain to guests that this is the main street of our city,” Pozolotina said. “This corner of Tverskaya that we occupy, it’s priceless.”
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded a massive redevelopment of Moscow in 1935, the order came to transform modest Gorky Street into a wide, awe-inspiring boulevard.
Engineer Emmanuel Gendel had the job of moving massive buildings to make way for others. Churches and monasteries were blown up, replaced by newspaper offices and a huge cinema.
The Moscow Central Eye Hospital was sheared from its foundation, rotated 97 degrees, jacked up, hitched on rails and pushed back 20 yards — with surgeons operating all the while, or so official media reported at the time.
In 1935, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded the widening of the modest road, at the time called Gorky Street. Buildings were moved, as shown in this 1940s photo. Today, it is a wide boulevard known as Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Gendel’s daughter, then about 8, proudly stood at a microphone, announcing: “Attention, attention, the building is moving.” Tatiana Yastrzhembskaya, Gendel’s granddaughter and president of the Winter Ball charity foundation in Moscow, recalls that Gendel extolled communism but also enjoyed the rewards of the elite. He drove a fine car and always brought the family the best cakes and candies, she said.
The largest Gorky Street building Gendel moved was the Savvinskoye Courtyard.The most difficult was the Mossoviet, or Moscow city hall, with a balcony where Lenin had given speeches. The building, a former residence of the Moscow governor general, had to be moved with its basement. The ground floor had been a ballroom without central structural supports.
Moving buildings on Gorky Street in 1940, from left: A mechanic at a control panel regulates the supply of electricity while a house is being moved; a postal worker passes a moving house; a specialist unwinds a telephone cable during a building move to maintain uninterrupted communication; and 13 rail tracks were placed under a house, on which 1,200 metal rollers were laid. (Photos by RGAKFD)
Gendel’s skills were used all over the U.S.S.R. — straightening towers on ancient mosques in Uzbekistan, inventing a means to drag tanks from rivers during World War II and consulting on the Moscow Metro.
Like many of the Soviet Union’s brightest talents, Gendel’s freedom was tenuous. His ex-wife was called by the KGB internal spy agency in 1937 and asked to denounce him. She refused, and he avoided arrest.
The largest Gorky Street building moved was Savvinskoye Courtyard, seen behind the corner building in this photo from 1938, a year before it was relocated; now, it is tucked in a courtyard behind No. 6 on Tverskaya Street. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Under Joseph Stalin’s grand plan for Gorky Street, Moscow city hall had to be moved with its basement. The building is shown in 1986 and September. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“I believe he was not arrested and sent to the camps because he was a unique expert,” said Yastrzhembskaya. World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, interrupted the Master Plan for Gorky Street.
In the 1930s, the head of the elite NKVD secret police, Lavrenty Beria, architect of the Stalin-era purges (known as the Great Terror), ordered the construction of a state-owned restaurant, Aragvi, to showcase food from his home republic of Georgia.
One night, NKVD agents descended in several black cars on a humble Georgian canteen in Moscow that Beria once visited. The agents ordered the chef, Longinoz Stazhadze, to come with them. The feared NKVD was a precursor to the KGB.
Stazhadze thought he was being arrested, his son Levan told Russian media. He was taken to Beria, who said that he had agreed with “the Boss” (Stalin) that Stazhadze would run Aragvi. Stazhadze had grown up a peasant, sent to work in a prince’s kitchens as a boy.
The Aragvi restaurant was a favorite of the secret police after it opened in 1938. Nugzar Nebieridze was the former head chef at Aragvi when it relaunched in 2016. (Courtesy of Nugzar Nebieridze)
Aragvi opened in 1938. It was only for the gilded set, a reminder that the “Soviet paradise” was anything but equal. The prices were astronomical. It was impossible to get a table unless the doorman knew you or you could pay a hefty bribe.
Aragvi, at No. 6 Tverskaya, was a favorite of the secret police; government officials; cosmonauts and pilots; stars of theater, movies and ballet; directors; poets; chess masters. Beria reputedly dined in a private room. Poet Sergei Mikhalkov said he composed the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem while sitting in the restaurant in 1943.
It was privatized in the 1990s and struggled, before closing in 2002.It reopened in 2016 after a $20 million renovation. But the new Aragvi closed abruptly in 2019 amid reports of a conflict between its owner and the building managers.
“You put your entire soul into cooking,” said the former head chef, Nugzar Nebieridze, 59, celebrated for his khinkali, a meaty dumping almost the size of a tennis ball. He was devastated to find himself unemployed. But other doors opened. He now prefers to travel, giving master classes around Russia.
On March 6, 1953, the day after Stalin died of a stroke, an estimated 2 million Muscovites poured onto the streets. They hoped to catch a glimpse of his body, which was covered with flowers and laid out in the marbled Hall of Columns near the Red Square.
Yulia Revazova, then 13, sneaked from her house with her cousin Valery without telling their parents. As they walked toward Pushkin Square, at one end of Gorky Street, the procession turned into a scene of horror. They saw people falling and being trampled. Some were crushed against metal fences. Valery, who was a few years older, grabbed Yulia by the hand and dragged her out of the crowd.
In March 1953, Soviet officials, including Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrenty Beria, followed the coffin of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a processional in Moscow. (Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images)
“He held my hand really tight and never let it go, because it was pure madness,” she recalled recently. “It took us four or five hours to get out of there. People kept coming and coming, I couldn’t even call it a column, it was just an uncontrollable mass of people.”
“I still have this feeling, the fear of massive crowds,” added Revazova, 82. “To this day, if I see a huge group of people or a really long line, I just cross the street.”
Neither Revazova nor her cousin knew about Stalin’s repressions.
“People were crying. I saw many women holding little handkerchiefs, wiping away tears and wailing,” she recalled. “That’s the psychology of a Soviet person. If there is no overarching figure above, be it God or Lenin, life will come crashing down. The era was over and there was fear. What will we do without Stalin?”
Officials never revealed how many people had died that day. The Soviet-approved archival footage of the four days of national mourning showed only orderly marches and memorials.
The Soviet culture minister, the steely Yekaterina Furtseva, was nicknamed Catherine the Third after the forceful Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Furtseva destroyed writers, artists or anyone who challenged Soviet ideas. She livedat an elite 1949apartment for government officials at No. 9 — an ultra-prestigious address with a view of the Kremlin.
Furtseva, a former small-town weaver, made sure that No. 9 was only for the cream of party officials and other notables, like famous Soviet actress Natalia Seleznyova, scientists, conductors and architects.
Riding the coattails of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Furtseva was the only woman in the Politburo and later became the Soviet Union’s cultural gatekeeper despite her provincial sensibilities. She once infamously mixed up a symphony with an opera, and critics were quick to notice.
In the late 1940s, No. 9 was being constructed; today, the building is home to apartments, shops and offices. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“She had little in common with the artistic leaders of her country except a liking for vodka,” wrote Norwegian painter Victor Sparre, in his 1979 book on repression of dissident Soviet writers, “The Flame in the Darkness.”
Furtseva was famous for previewing performances, and banning anyone even subtly critical of Soviet policiesas anti-state. Director Yuri Lyubimov described one such visit to Moscow Taganka Theater in 1969, when she turned up wearing diamond rings and an astrakhan coat. She banned the play “Alive,” depicting a cunning peasant’s struggle against the collective farm system.She “was livid, she kept shouting,” he told L’Alternative magazine in 1984. She stormed out, warning him she would use her influence, “up to the highest levels,” against him.
He was expelled from the party and in 1984 was stripped of his citizenship. She vehemently denounced Solzhenitsyn and banned the Bolshoi Ballet’s version of “Carmen” in 1967 over prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s sensual performance and short “un-Soviet” costumes that did not cover enough leg.
“The ballet is all erotica,” she told the dancer. “It’s alien to us.” But Plisetskaya, whom Khrushchev once called the world’s best dancer, fought back. The ballet went on with some excisions (the costumes stayed) and became a legend in the theater’s repertoire.
Furtseva was nearly felled by scandal in 1974, ordered to repay $80,000 spent building a luxurious dacha, or country home, using state labor. She died months later.
The Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn exposed the Soviet system’s cruelty against some of its brightest minds trapped in the gulag, or prison camps.
Solzhenitsyn was given eight years hard labor in 1945 for privately criticizing Stalin, then three years in exile in Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic at the time. His books were banned. After release from exile in 1956, he was only allowed to make 72-hour visits to his second wife Natalia’s apartment at 12 Gorky St., Apartment 169. Solzhenitsyn had to live outside the city.
“People knew that there were camps, but not many people, if any, knew what life was like in those camps. And he described it from the inside. He had been there himself, and that was shocking to a lot of people,” said Natalia Solzhenitsyna during a recent interview at the apartment, which became a museum in 2018.
“Many people say that he did make a contribution to the final fall of the Soviet Union.”
Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, called Russia “the land of smothered opportunities.” He wrote that it always possible to live with integrity. Lies and evil might flourish — “but not through me.”
The museum displays tiny handwritten copies of Solzhenitsyn’s books, circulated secretly; film negatives of letters smuggled to the West, and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems in prison.
“He spent a lot of time here with his children. We were always very busy. And we just enjoyed ourselves — being together.” They had three sons.
No. 12 Gorky St., from top: Natalia Solzhenitsyna lived in the apartment for years, and her husband, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was only allowed short visits; the site now houses a museum displaying items connected to him, such as negatives with a copy of a novel he wrote; another exhibit includes Solzhenitsyn’s clothes from when he was sent to the gulag and beads made of compacted bread he used to memorize poems; and the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s desk is featured at the museum. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
If they were discussing something sensitive, they wrote notes to each other because of KGB bugs, and destroyed them. Two KGB agents usually roosted in the stairwell on the floor above and two more on the floor below.
“The Soviet authorities were afraid of him because of his popularity among intellectuals, writers, people of culture and the intelligentsia.”
Her favorite room is decked with black-and-white photos of dissidents sent to the gulag, the Soviet Union’s sprawling system of forced labor camps. “It’s dedicated to the invisibles,” she said, pointing out friends.
Sweden planned to award Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 literature prize in the Gorky Street apartment, but the writer rejected a secret ceremony. A Swedish journalist in Moscow, Stig Fredrikson, was Solzhenitsyn’s smuggler. He carried Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture on tightly rolled film disguised as a battery in a transistor radio, and he brought other letters to the West and photos taped to his back.
“I felt that there was a sense of unfairness that he was so isolated and so persecuted,” Fredrikson said in a recent interview. “I got more and more scared and more and more afraid every time I met him.”
In 1971, the Soviet Union allegedly tried to poison Solzhenitsyn using a secret nerve agent, leaving him seriously ill. Early 1974 was tense. The prosecutor subpoenaed him. State newspapers railed against him.
The morning of Feb. 12, 1974, the couple worked in their study. In the afternoon, he walked his 5-month-old son, Stepan, in the yard below.
“He came back here and literally a minute later there was a ring at the door. There were eight men. They immediately broke the chain and got in,” his widow said. “There was a prosecutor in his prosecutor’s uniform, two men in plainclothes and the rest were in military uniform. They told him to get dressed.”
“We hugged and we kept hugging for quite awhile,” she recalled. “The last thing he told me was to take care of the children.”
He was deported to West Germany. The couple later settled in Vermont and set up a fund to help dissident writers using royalties from his book, “The Gulag Archipelago.” About 1,000 people still receive money from the fund, according to Solzhenitsyna.
When the writer and his wife returned to Russia in 1994, they traveled across the country by train. Thousands of people crushed into halls to hear him speak.
Solzhenitsyn abhorred the shock therapy and unchecked capitalism of the 1990s and preferred Putin’s tough nationalism. He died of heart failure at 89 in August 2008, five months after a presidential election that saw Putin switch places with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in a move that critics saw as a ploy to get around constitutional term limits.
Behind a grand, Stalin-era apartment block at 6 Gorky St. sits an ornate 1907 building famous for its facade, art nouveau glazed blue tiles, elegant arches and baroque spires. Once a monastery dormitory, it was a staple on pre-Soviet postcards from Moscow. But November 1939, the 26,000-ton building was put on rails and pushed back to widen the street.
Linguists Lev and Raisa Kopelev lived at Apartment 201 on the top floor. Their spacious dining room became a favored haven for Moscow’s intelligentsia from the 1950s to the 1980s.
During the Tverskaya Street reconstruction the Savvinskoye building, where Apartment 201 was located, was pushed back into the yard and blocked by this Stalin-era apartment block. Shown in 1966 and today. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“People gathered all the time — to talk. In this apartment, like many other kitchens and dining rooms, at tables filled more often than not with vodka, herring, and vinaigrette salad, feasts of thought took place,” said Svetlana Ivanova, Raisa’s daughter from another marriage, who lived in the apartment for nearly four decades.
Solzhenitsyn and fellow dissident Joseph Brodsky were the Kopelev family’s friends, among many other artists, poets, writers and scientists who formed the backbone of the Soviet human rights movement of the 1960s.
Kopelev was a writer and dissident, turning his back on the Communist Party and a prestigious university position. A former gulag prisoner, he inspired the character Lev Rubinin Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle,” depicting the fate of arrested scientists.
“The apartment was a special place for everyone. People there were not afraid to speak their mind on topics that would be considered otherwise risky,” Ivanova said. “A new, different spirit ruled in its walls.”
The Eliseevsky store at No. 16 was a landmark for 120 years — born in czarist Russia, a witness to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, a survivor of wars and a bastion during eras of shortages and plenty. It closed its doors in April.
Eliseevsky fell on hard times during the coronavirus pandemic as international tourists dwindled and Russians sought cheaper grocery shopping alternatives.
In the palace-like interior, two chandeliers hang from an ornate ceiling. Gilt columns line the walls. The front of the store, looking out at Tverskaya Street, has a row of stained glass.
The Eliseevsky store, which opened in 1901, is seen in April, with a few customers and some archival store photos, as it prepared to close as an economic victim of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Denis Romodin, a historian at the Museum of Moscow, said Eliseevsky is one of just two retail spaces in Moscow with such pre-revolutionary interiors. But Eliseevsky’s level of preservation made it “one of a kind,” he said.
The building was once owned by Zinaida Volkonskaya, a princess and Russian cultural figure in the 19th century. She remodeled the house into a literary salon whose luminaries included Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin.
St. Petersburg merchant Grigory Eliseev opened the market in 1901. It quickly became a hit among Russian nobility for the selection of European wine and cheeses.
In 1934, the Eliseevsky store is seen next to a building that is being constructed; in September, the market, a landmark for 120 years, was empty, having closed in April. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
The Eliseevsky store on Tverskaya Street is seen at night in the 1990s; the nighttime view today is different. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Romodin said it was Russia’s first store with price tags. Before Eliseevsky, haggling was the norm — and it was also unique in its innovative technology for the time: electric-powered refrigerators and display cases that allowed goods to be stored longer.
Even in the Soviet Union’s hungriest years, the 1930s famine, Eliseevsky stocked pineapples.
“One could find outlandish delicacies here, which at that time seemed very exotic,” Romodin said. “It was already impossible to surprise Muscovites with wine shops. But a grocery store with luxurious interiors, and large for that time, amazed and delighted Muscovites.”
In 1989, in a dusty government office by a corner of Pushkin Square, three young artists threw off decades of suffocating state control and opened the first independent art gallery.
That April, Yevgeny Mitta and two fellow students, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut, opened First Gallery. At the time, the Soviet Union was opening up under policies including glasnost, which gave more room for public debate and criticism.
Artists were ordered to adopt the Socialist Realist style in 1934, depicting scenes such as happy collective farmworkers. Expressionist, abstract and avant-garde art was banned. From the 1970s, underground art exhibitions were the only outlets to break the Soviet-imposed rules.
The First Gallery, from top: Yevgeny Mitta, Aidan Salakhova and Alexander Yakut opened the Soviet Union’s first independent art gallery in 1989 and received media attention; Mitta worked on a painting that he displays at his gallery; Mitta recalled recently that he “felt we had to make something new”; and an undated photo of Mitta at his gallery in Soviet times. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post and courtesy of Yevgeny Mitta)
“I just felt we had to make something new,” recalled Mitta, 58, who kept his interest in contemporary expressionism a secret at a top Moscow art school in the 1980s.
“It was like nothing really happened in art history in the 20th century, like it stopped,” he said. “The Socialist Realism doctrine was invented and spread to the artists as the only one possible way of developing paintings, films and literature.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists had to “learn how to survive, what to do, how to work and make a living,” he said.
In the Soviet Union’s final years, a mania raged for all things Western. Estée Lauder opened the first Western-brand shop on Gorky Street in 1989 after meeting Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in December 1988.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s, located across Pushkin Square on Gorky Street, opened Jan. 31, 1990 — a yellow-arched symbol of Gorbachev’s perestroika economic reforms. Pizza Hut opened later that year. (In 1998, Gorbachev starred in a commercial for the pizza chain.)
Karina Pogosova and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at McDonald’s on opening day. The line stretched several blocks. Police officers stood watch to keep it organized.
The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s opened in 1990 and eager customers lined up to enter; Karina Pogosova, left, and Anna Patrunina were cashiers at the fast-food restaurant on Gorky Street then, and they are senior executives with the company today. (Photos by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
“The atmosphere was wonderful. The first day I had to smile the entire day and my face muscles hurt,” Patrunina said. “This is not a joke. Russians do not smile in general, so we were not used to smiling at all, not to mention for more than eight hours straight.”
Pogosova and Patrunina were students at the Moscow Aviation Institute when they learned McDonald’s was hiring through an ad in a local Moscow newspaper. Interview questions included: “How fast can you run 100 meters?” It was to gauge if someone was energetic enough for the job.
Pogosova and Patrunina are still with the company today, as senior vice president of development and franchising and vice president of operations, respectively.
“I thought that this is the world of opportunities and this new world is coming to our country, so I must be in this new world,” Patrunina said.
The smiling staff wasn’t the only culture shock for customers. Some had never tried the fountain sodas available. They were unaccustomed to food that wasn’t eaten with utensils. The colorful paper boxes that Big Macs came in were occasionally saved as souvenirs.
McDonald’s quickly became like a landmark on the street.
“I remember very well that the street and the entire city was very dark and McDonald’s was like an island of light with bright signage,” Pogosova said. “The street started to change after McDonalds opened its first restaurant there.”
The end of the Soviet Union uncorked Moscow’s wild 1990s. Some people made instant fortunes on acquiring state-owned enterprises at throwaway prices. Rules were being written on the fly. The city was pulsing with possibilities for those with money or those desperate to get some.
“It was easy to get drunk on this,” said Alex Shifrin, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive from Canada who lived in Moscow from the mid-90s until the late 2000s.
It all was on full display at Night Flight, Moscow’s first nightclub, opened by Swedish managers in 1991, in the final months of the Soviet Union, at Tverskaya, 17. The club introduced Moscow’s nouveau elite to “face control” — who merits getting past the rope line — and music-throbbing decadence.
The phrase “standing on Tverskaya” made its way into Russian vernacular as the street became a hot spot for prostitutes. Toward the end of the 2000s, Night Flight had lost its luster. The club scene in Moscow had moved on to bigger and bolder venues.
Decades before, No. 17 was famous as the building with the dancer: A statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, placed atop thecupola during Stalin’s building blitz.
The statue of a ballerina, holding a hammer and sickle, could be seen atop the building at No. 17 in this 1943 photo; today, the dancer is missing. (Photos by RGAKFD and Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Muscovites nicknamed the building the House Under the Skirt.
“The idea was to have Gorky Street as a museum of Soviet art. The statues represented a dance of socialism,” art historian Pavel Gnilorybov said. “The ballerina was a symbol of the freedom of women and the idea that, before the revolution, women were slaves. It is as if she is singing an ode to the regime.”
The statues were crumbling and were removed by 1958. People forgot them. Now a group of Muscovites, including Gnilorybov, are campaigning for the return of the ballerina.
“It’s an idea that we want to give the city as a gift. It’s not political,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Pushkin Square has been Moscow’s favorite meeting place for friends, lovers and political demonstrations.
In November 1927, Trotskyist opponents of Stalin marched to the 27th House of Sovietsat one end of Tverskaya Street, opposite the Hotel National, in one of the last public protests against the Soviet ruler.
A celebration to say goodbye to winter at Pushkin Square in February 1987. (Igor Stomakhin)A night view in 1959 of Pushkin Square, a favorite meeting place for many. (RGAKFD)
In December 1965, several dozen dissidents gathered in Pushkin Square to protest the trials of two writers. It became an annual event. People would gather just before 6 p.m. and, on the hour, remove their hats for a minute.
In 1987, dissidents collected signatures at Pushkin Square and other locations calling for a memorial to those imprisoned or killed by the Soviet state. The movement evolved into Memorial, a leading human rights group. Memorial was declared a “foreign agent” in 2016 under Putin’s sweeping political crackdowns.
In January 2018, left, and January 2021, right, protesters gathered at Pushkin Square. (Photos by Arthur Bondar for The Washington Post)
Protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny met at Pushkin Square earlier this year. And it is where communists and liberals rallied on a rainy September night to protest 2021 parliamentary election results giving a landslide win to Putin’s United Russia party despite widespread claims of fraud.
Nearly 30 years after the fall of the U.S.S.R., Putin’s Russia carries some echoes of the stories lived out in Soviet times — censorship and repressions are returning. Navalny was poisoned by a nerve agent in 2020 and later jailed. Many opposition figures and independent journalists have fled the country. The hope, sleaze and exhilaration of the 1990s have faded. Tverskaya Street has settled into calm stagnation, waiting for the next chapter.
Arthur Bondar contributed to this report.
About this story
Story editing by Robyn Dixon and Brian Murphy. Photos and videos by Arthur Bondar. Archival footage from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk; footage of Joseph Stalin’s funeral from the Martin Manhoff Archive, courtesy of Douglas Smith. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Jason Aldag. Design and development by Yutao Chen. Design editing by Suzette Moyer. Maps by Dylan Moriarty. Graphics editing by Lauren Tierney. Copy editing by Melissa Ngo.
BOSTON (CBS) – Hundreds of thousands of businesses and homes are still without power in Massachusetts after a powerful nor’easter brought down trees and wires, and for some people the restoration could take days.
Roughly half a million homes and businesses lost power at one point Wednesday as strong winds from the nor’easter hit eastern Massachusetts. The outages hit a high of roughly 499,000 by mid-morning and slowly began to decline.
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