The Humorless Ladies of Border Control by Franz Nicolay

only true Communist I knew, by the way. He still votes for them.”
    We played at an outdoor festival, organized in the parking lot around an old factory building that now housed a collection of boutique clothing stores. The event was nominally in honor of the queen of England’s jubilee. A two-story banner with the queen’s image hung across the front of the building, and the flyers were in English. Nevertheless, the crowd was entirely Russian, and all were dressed in the international hipster style commonly associated with Vice magazine. A small group loosed paper balloons with lit candles inside aloft into the gray drizzle. An American in “the only bluegrass band in Russia” invited us to their weekly jam session, which they hold in a Starbucks.
    The Moscow subway was a real triumph. Each station was a spotless museum hall of marble, chandeliers, and socialist realist ceramic murals of jet planes and grain harvests. More important, the trains run every ninety seconds. New York City MTA, I thought, this is your Sputnik moment. I looked at our fellow passengers: A pregnant, leashless dachshund squatted at the feet ofits owner, who was focused on a crossword. A man accessorized his black velour tracksuit with a red plastic gym whistle on a lanyard.
    We were on our way to the so-called Fallen Monument Park, where statues of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Molotov, Brezhnev, and the others came to rest after 1992. To which one might say, “Look upon my works, ye mighty,” etc., but looming over the park was an exponentially taller and more decadent monument combining the deification of the will of a single man with the gaudy baroque of the corrupt. It was a hundred-foot steel column studded with the prows, sterns, and flags of various embedded ships and topped by a full ship with a mast twice its length. An outsize statue of Peter the Great, taller than the largest ship was long, grasped the uppermost ship’s wheel in one hand and flourished a rolled parchment in the other. The whole thing sat on an artificial island in the middle of the Moscow River and was three hundred feet tall if it was an inch. It was designed by the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, infamous flatterer and megalomaniac gigantophile, who has made a career of designing and building huge monuments and offering them to cities around the world—for example, a forty-foot teardrop titled “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism” for the harbor of Bayonne, New Jersey.
    Although Tsereteli has successfully placed such projects in various locations around the world, more often they are rejected for barely disguised reasons of good taste. The Peter statue was conceived and built for the Christopher Columbus quincentennial and offered to the United States, which politely demurred, then to Puerto Rico, which begged off, citing financial problems.Yuri Lezhkov, the corrupt Moscow mayor and boss, stepped in and offered to buy the statue on one condition: that Tsereteli remove the head of Columbus, add a mustache, and call it Peter the Great. (The now-unnamed Niña , the Pinta , and the Santa Maria remained in situ.) Tsereteli duly complied, and the towering monstrosity was installed in the river and soon voted one of the ten ugliest statues in the world.
    We had big plans to go see the Mayakovsky museum (a ramped maze of cartoon propaganda), or the Bulgakov museum (two competing museums, actually, one private and one public, the latter his old apartment, with giant cat graffiti curling up the stairs and an actual obese, fluffy black feline roaming the halls), or the Treasury. Błażej had bigger plans, though, to get drunk in the sun with his colleagues, and steered us to a rooftop patio. When we ordered Bloody Marys, they came in pieces: a tray with tomato mix, a shot glass of vodka, and greens laid out next to each other. Self-assembly drinks, an Ikea of booze. Thus passed the remainder of the long afternoon. We stumbled home