A man in the Leningradskiji café at the station - while waiting for the night train to Saint...

A man in the Leningradskiji café at the station - while waiting for the night train to Saint Petersbourg - tells me the Black Square by Malevich is a painting for stupid people. He likes Bruegel better: ‘look, he can paint the hands, the eyes, that is the craft. I am a teacher at the art academy here you know. I am a sculptor.’ He does not stop talking to us, he does not really ask questions, but just rambles on in our direction. About people fleeing the Soviet-Union, that the country is free now and everyone can do as he or she pleases - ‘as long as you have money, you know, like the Americans say: “for every step another dollar” - and acts all fatherly when it comes to eating and drinking in Russia: ‘they have Kazakhs in the kitchens, maybe they do not wash their hands before cooking. You’d better eat at home, make the food yourselves.’ His friend, next to him, has a long grey orthodox beard and a big leather square case in his lap. He is quiet, observing. He is a writer from Novgorod. ‘I write about what happens in life,’ he says, when I ask him what he does in his daily life. ‘Not fiction. Stories from my life.’ Then it is quiet for a moment. ‘You should go to Novgorod, in a next life,’ the sculptor says. He thinks the Black Square is for stupid people, but believes in lives in the hereafter. I leave it at that.

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An icy walk to Moscow University. All buildings surrounding this one giant building are impressive as a million bananas on one tree, but more impressive. When you are in a big city, you can hit several places and show of with your videos and pictures, but in Moscow, one is in need of a really big book with a lot of prints, a whole evening of showing off your films. Thank you Stalin, moscovites and soviet builders, for creating all this crazy stuff

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Alles hier is overdadig, grotesk, schreeuwerig. Het is een kermis on acid, een flipperkast van kleuren, tierelantijnen, vol plakkaten steen, netjes afgepoetste vloeren en goed bewaakte Kremlin ingangen. De metrostations, de gevels van gebouwen, de bontjassen van de vrouwen. Daartussen is het Mausoleum van Lenin - dicht toen we er voorbij liepen - een redelijk rustig gebouw. Eerst was het van hout overigens. Daar lag Lenin in de kluis. Daarna werd hij op de juiste wijze gebalsemd door Boris Iljitsj Zbarskij, die werd beschouwd als de hoofd balsemet van Lenin. Dit werd gedaan onder leiding van Professor Vorobiov, die het project leidde. Her hout uit 1924, het jaar dat Lenin stierf, werd vervangen door graniet tussen 1929 en 1930. Achter het mausoleum is een muur van het Kremlin te zien. Tussen het mausoleum en de muur is een rij gedenkstenen te zien, The Kremlin Wall Necropolis, begonnen in 1917, toen er 240 Bolsjewieken stierven tijdens de Oktober Revolutie. Zij werden in massagraven begraven. Er liggen politici, astronauten en militaire leiders. De laatste begrafenis was die van Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. De Necropolis was toen al elf jaar een beschermd oriëntatiepunt.

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