A Gentleman in Moscow

On June 21, 1946, a man wearing a winter coat and dragging his right leg walks through Red Square; he does not draw attention because “in 1946, there were men limping about in borrowed clothes in every quarter of the capital” (274). He observes a long line of people waiting to look at the dead body of Lenin, who had died in 1924. Taking a look around the city and noting that “so many of the old facades [were] unspoiled” (275), he goes to the Metropol Hotel.

It is the five-year anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, or the German invasion of Russia. Moscow was overtaken by “lawlessness” (275) and grew “crowded with refugees and deserters who were sleeping in makeshift encampments and cooking looted food over open fires” (275). In expectation of the invasion, the government prepared to move to Kuybyshev, and bridges were “mined so that they could be demolished on a moment’s notice” (275). On October 30, members of the Politburo, the Communist Party government, gathered at the Mayakovsky Metro Station as Stalin announced he was staying in Moscow and that in November, “the annual commemoration of the Revolution would be celebrated on Red Square as usual” (276).