Red Square, with San Basilio in the background
It has more than 1,000 km2 and 12 million inhabitants and is the city with the most millionaires in the world . Here everything is big. Whatever the people of Buenos Aires, there is also the widest avenue on the planet (La Stalingrado, with 16 lanes and 160 m) and the most luxurious metro. Louis Vuitton stores are counted by handfuls, in posh restaurants they prefer national diners to foreigners (needless to say, the Spanish), because they leave much more tips, and many pay the flats in cash, because they don't trust of the banks.
In four frames we tell you four stories that perhaps you did not know.
1) A CUSTOM SCENE
"That's how they are from the Russians of traitors, who change Lenin for a hamburger" . It is one of the first pearls that Sergey, our guide, gives us when we arrive at the Red Square and we pinch ourselves before the colored domes like appetizing meringues of the church of San Basilio, which we have seen so many times on the news. For decades, more than 3,000 people a day have visited Lenin's mausoleum in the center of the esplanade (it was recently closed to the public for three months for renovation).
When he died, in 1924, queues of admirers eager to pay their respects to leading him for weeks on end. "Things are not what they used to be," our guide tells us. The Russians are still queuing, it is true, but now the objects of veneration have diversified . First was the opening of the first Mac Donald's, in 1990, a few steps from here. On the day of the premiere alone, more than 30,000 visitors passed through the register, fascinated, not only by trying the hamburgers of the giant with the golden em, but also because they found it most exotic to be able to choose between what was written on the blackboard , and that everything was available. Over time, McDonald's has calmed down, among other things because there are already more than 250 branches in Russia and a Big Mac is nothing new, but also because a lot of competition has arisen. However, it seems that Muscovites are reluctant to lose the tradition of patiently waiting their turn to enjoy their passions.
The last of his great delusions (aside from compulsive shopping) is religion Banned for decades. They demonstrated it in a big way in November 2011, when the city received the relic of the Virgin's belt, brought from Mount Athos, and the queues, at minus five degrees, lasted more than 24 hours. They also show it every day in their temples, always full and with many young people. And here the vocations are on the rise. If not, tell the mother abbess of the Novodevichy Monastery convent, with a brilliant career as a doctor, divorced and with two children, she has changed her white coat for her mature habits. She tells us: “in the rest of Europe, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs are built in the old churches, which no one visits anymore. Here it is the other way around, we have to build new ones, because the ones that exist are not enough”.
A McDonald in Moscow
2) A BLACK HUMOR GAG
We continue with the tomb of Lenin because Sergey has stories to write a novel. And the thing is not for less. to start because here a corpse is not venerated, but a mummy , who receives the proper care of a medieval princess: the body is scrupulously cleaned frequently and every year it is submerged in a bath of chemical products, whose secret and miraculous recipe that prevents its decomposition, only a few know.
This circus has its detractors and defenders. There are those who ask that Lenin be buried next to his mother, as was his last wish; there are simple ideological followers, or those who pay indecent amounts of rubles to be immortalized in the same way, a trend that has taken root among mafia bosses. A third group goes further and is not satisfied with seeing the incorrupt body of the character, but rather wants to check his vital signs. They can do it in the new Museum of the USSR, where a wax doll has been installed with a system that simulates breathing (really creepy).
The black humor gag does not end with the inflatable doll because here too we have a case of mickaeljacksonization: that of the Angolan President Agostinho Neto . As had been done with other communist leaders, when the president died in 1979, as a sign of deference, the Russian authorities offered the services of their scientific team to embalm him so that it could be exposed in a mausoleum. They did not count on a small detail, which was black, and the formula, as the days went by, made the skin lose pigmentation, which, as you can imagine, he supposed was a real scandal in his country.
The exterior of the Lenin Mausoleum
3) THE SOAP SOAP
And this time in the most literal sense of the word. Because although one could not imagine it, one of the most successful social phenomena in this country was precisely the broadcast of the Mexican soap opera The rich also cry, in the 80s . Such was its success that not only was it dubbed into Russian, but Boris Yeltsin himself, when times were more than turbulent, even asked for it to be broadcast up to three times a day to avoid demonstrations and protests and ensure that people stayed. at home (something that had already been done in Spain in Franco's time on May 1, Labor Day, when football or bullfighting was never lacking on the grill). Verónica Castro, the protagonist of it, was received in the Kremlin like a superstar when she visited Russia.
4) THE CRIME OF PASSION
But, for Mexican soap operas, none better than that of Ramón Mercader, the Spaniard who killed Trotsky. It was in 1940, when the Catalan, at the age of 26, won the favor of his servant in order to have access to his house in exile in the Mexican neighborhood of Coayacán, and assassinated the president with an ice ax. Trotsky, architect along with Lenin of the Bolshevik Revolution and creator of the Red Army, turned and bit him, but the thrust had the expected fatal effect, an image that for the rest of his life came to Mercader's head over and over again. in an obsessive way. After learning of the love affair, the maid committed suicide and Mercader was arrested and spent years in prison. He died in Havana in 1978. His ashes rest in the Kuntzevo cemetery in Moscow, reserved for the Heroes of the Soviet Union. , very close to the grave of the English spy Kim Philby. His story has been immortalized in a film, The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), by Joseph Losey (with Alain Delon as the murderer and Richard Burton as the victim), and a documentary: Storming the Skies (1996), by José Luis López-Linares and Javier Rioyo.