MOSCOW: As soon as you enter the Prospekt Vernadskogo metro station in the suburbs of Moscow, a burly security guard demands your bags and puts them inside a metal box that looks like it was built to contain an explosion rather than detect a bomb. Then starts an escalator ride that goes nearly 80 metres down, leading you into a lair that would have done well as a bomb shelter.
It is no wonder that a plunge into Moscow’s remarkable underground world starts with a scene straight out of World War 2. A lot of the Moscow Metro is from World War 2. The city’s suburban stations are many things — a time capsule, a museum that showcases various sides of Russian and Soviet history and a welcoming stage for street musicians — apart from being one of the busiest transport nodes in the world, ferrying an estimated seven million passengers a day across 214 stations. Forty four of the stations are designated cultural heritage sites. The newly-plastered signs that lead passengers to the two stadiums in the city, Luzhniki and Spartak, are the only unwelcome intrusions of the present upon the perfectly preserved past.
Back in 1935 when it was built, the Moscow Metro was the crown jewel of Soviet technology, Stalin’s pride and everyone else’s envy. Stalin wanted his people to absorb Soviet values when they rode the metro, so he stuffed it with art, culture and some designs that seem futuristic even after 80 years.
But then World War 2 started and the metros became so much more. Russian author Vera Kharkova recounts how important the stations were to survival in Moscow as Hitler’s hordes advanced upon the city. “From early mornings, Muscovites formed lines into the subway stations, with their children and bedding materials wrapped in bundles to spend the night in these bomb shelters,” she writes. Life soon shifted en masse to these metros, with libraries, saloons and shops opening deep inside the earth. Stalin himself briefly shifted his administration to the Mayakovskaya Metro station. Imagine that! The great Soviet Union run from inside a metro.
Today, as unsuspecting passengers walk past, their eyes locked on their mobile phones, Moscow’s metro stations still carry chunks of history on its walls. The Mayakovskaya Station, with its arches, pink and white marble floors and roof frescoes, looks every bit a bunker that Stalin would have lived in. Ploschad Revolutsii (Revolution Square in English) has sculptures of Red Army soldiers with knives and guns guarding the terminals to the station. People transiting at the Novoslobodskaya station would walk past multiple stained glass panels that wouldn’t look out of place at a Byzantine-era church. The Dostoevskaya station is a full-blown tribute to author Fyodor Dostoevsky, featuring paintings of him and scenes from his works.
The iconography does not just stop with Soviet Russia’s political history. The Spartak station, which leads to Spartak Moscow’s stadium, has football-themed murals. Their rivals CSKA Moscow though trump them — the station that leads to their stadium is decorated with multiple bronze statues of the club’s former players. Of course, all these fade into the background on matchdays when a ride down the metro involves negotiating past flag-clad, face-painted fans chanting and shouting at the top of their voices, uaware that they are passing through the biggest historical, art and cultural museum in the world.