C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/2818081/WORKINGFOLDER/BASN/9781107011175C09.3D 171 [171–190] 17.12.2011 12:13PM chapter 9 Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow: literary reality or nightmare? Dina Khapaeva Moscow sprawling below, all lit up, bright, with a holiday look, as usual: it may be a feast in time of plague, but at least it’s a resplendent one. Sergei Luk 0 ianenko 1 Moscow salami, where the life is so balmy. Viktor Pelevin 2 Anyone who has taken even a passing interest in Soviet culture knows that descriptions of Moscow abounded in official literature and journal- ism, with depictions of the architecture of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ capital ’ acting as direct visual legitimation of propaganda claims. In praising this architecturally perfect city, this storehouse of ancient cul- tural values and masterpieces of the Soviet builder’s art, the values of socialism were asserted and underpinned. Such celebrations of the city became inventories of ‘monuments of history and culture’, of selected famous buildings, streets and avenues. Red Square, the Kremlin and Red Porch, the Red Gates, the Kremlin Chimes on Spasskaia Gate, the Bolshoi Theatre, Tverskoi Boulevard, the Garden Ring ... It is notable that even Bolshevik cult sites, the Lenin Mausoleum for exam- ple, had the primary function of architectural attractions, despite the apparently overwhelming importance of the political symbolism attached to them. Soviet Moscow was the nation’s capital in a particularly active sense. Not only was it the centre in every practical respect (administrative, financial, cultural), but the symbolic centre – the place that every social- ist city was supposed to emulate, and the city that every citizen was supposed to love and cherish more than his or her own birthplace. Moscow stood for all Soviet achievements, and for the country in gen- eral, as in the famous song ‘Moscow in May’ by Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach (1938): 171