Red Square, 1999: The Soviet-era GUM department store on the left, St. Basil’s to the right, and the Hotel Rossiya to the rear. The Rossiya was demolished soon after, and now a park occupies the acreage.
Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 74: Down a rabbit hole, deep into the Belgian beer paradise (1998).
Insofar as ordinary Americans know to find Moscow on the European continent and not in Idaho, we tend to associate the city with fear, loathing and the grandiosity of the tsars (both God-ordained and Soviet), as well as the frozen immensity of the Russian winter.
In 1999 when Barrie Ottersbach and I spilled into Moscow, we learned to our chagrin that it can get hot enough in high summer to fry eggs on Red Square’s missile-polished paving stones.
Our stated objective was to visit Danish buddies Allan G. and Kim W., both of whom were working in Moscow at the time. The city was dramatically different than I remembered it from a mere decade previous, although it hadn’t yet become the skyscraper-dotted oligarchic landscape of today.
Moscow River, viewed from Lenin Hills in 1999.
The same view today, with the photo credit to Fine Art America.
For Russia, 1999 was an interregnum...
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