A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

With eighty tables scattered around a marble fountain and a menu offering everything from cabbage piroghi to cutlets of veal, the Piazza was meant to be an extension of the city—of its gardens, markets, and thoroughfares. It was a place where Russians cut from every cloth could come to linger over coffee, happen upon friends, stumble into arguments, or drift into dalliances—and where the lone diner seated under the great glass ceiling could indulge himself in admiration, indignation, suspicion, and laughter without getting up from his chair.

The Metropol Opened in 1905, the Metropol Hotel is situated on Theatre Square in the historic heart of Moscow. Like the other grand hotels of the era (such as the Waldorf Astoria in New York and the Ritz in Paris), the Metropol set the standard in its city for luxury and service. It was the first hotel in Moscow to have hot water and telephones in the rooms, international cuisine in the restaurants, and an American bar off the lobby. Thus, within days of its opening, the Metropol became the preferred stomping ground not only for cosmopolitan travelers, but for glamorous and well-to-do Muscovites. But just twelve years later, the hotel found itself at the center of the Russian Revolution. For when the victorious Bolsheviks decided to move the capital of Russia back to Moscow (after 400 years in St. Petersburg), the city did not have the necessary infrastructure to house the new government. So, they seized the Metropol, threw out the guests, renamed it the Second House of the Soviets, and used it to house officials and various departments of the fledgling state. In fact, it was in Suite 217 of the Metropol that Yakov Sverdlov, the first chairman of the All-Russia Executive Committee, locked the constitutional drafting committee, vowing he wouldn’t turn the key until they’d finished their work. Within a measure of hours the committee reemerged with that document which officially heralded the victory of the Proletariat over the forces of privilege. Right then and there the Metropol’s existence as a grand hotel should have come to an end. But when the major European nations began restoring trade and diplomatic relations with Russia in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks realized that the hotels of Moscow were going to provide Western visitors with their first impression of the new nation. Should weary ambassadors or businessmen spend their visit in some austere hostel with shared bathrooms, humble furnishings, and limited services, they might draw the conclusion that Communism was failing! So, in order to signal success, the Bolsheviks found themselves kicking out the apparatchiks and restoring the Metropol to its original glory complete with uniformed bellhops in the lobby, silver service in the restaurants, and American jazz in the bar. Within a matter of years, “the Metropol was the new social center for the bourgeois colony,” recalled Eugene Lyons, the United Press’s Moscow correspondent in the early 1930s. “Its main restaurant was a Russian peasant’s dream of capitalist splendors—immense candelabra, oversized lights, heavy furniture, a jazz band of symphony orchestra proportions… The chief pride of the restaurant, its ultra-bourgeois touch, was a great circular pool where lights and rather proletarian-looking fishes played. On grand occasions, the chef in cap and apron emerged from his sanctum with a net over his shoulder and captured a fish for a special valuta [foreign currency] client. The dancing couples rotated around the pool, and sometimes an unsteady customer joined the fishes to the great delight of the assembled crowd…” Thus, during those initial decades of the Soviet Union, which were characterized for the citizenry by all manner of hardship, the Metropol earned a mystique of extravagance equal to that of the Waldorf or the Ritz—despite being around the corner from the Kremlin and a few blocks from the Lubyanka (the dreaded headquarters of the secret police). With its fine food, lavish entertainment, and liberal behavior, the hotel became something of an Oz in the popular imagination—a Technicolor paradise hidden in the midst of a black and white metropolis. Although, for this very reason, the hotel also became a popular trolling ground for the secret police who came in search of loose-lipped Westerners or compromised Russians.