Seeing Moscow for what it is!

Our first day in Moscow didn’t meet my expectations. It’s a big city, it’s the center of Russian trade, the people although not attractive and cold, are not as intimidating as I expected. The whole city is not as intimidating as I had expected, but then I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s when Russia was the evil empire that at any moment could rush our shores and change our way of life.

Red Square was a large paved parade ground bordered on one side by the Kremlin and on the opposite side by the Gum, an upscale department store featuring Dior, Versace, St. Laurent. There were no soldiers, no tanks, Lenin’s tomb was hardly guarded and there was no line to view his body, no one seemed to care. The Kremlin is a mixture of the old and the newer; first a government center much like Washington D.C. office buildings, and the churches built by the Czars as monuments to themselves most of which are not open to the public.

The people of Moscow remind me of country people trying to keep up with the “big city people” and not confident about how their doing. It’s obvious that the Russians are attempting to become “westernized” on a limited budget.