Arbatskaya
The Arbat (a Mongol word meaning ‘suburb’) lies west of the Kremlin and was once the Bohemian heart of Moscow. In the 19th century the nouveau riche and nobility inhabited it, but by the time of the Revolution a more creative crowd of writers, artists and scientists had moved in. Consequently its population suffered terribly under Stalin’s horrific regime.
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has one of the most impressive collections of Impressionist art, while just along the road is the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s to build a ‘Palace of Soviets’. It’s worth a visit purely on account of the history that it holds, and is a fine example of the opulence that can be displayed during a turbulent economy.
Arbat Square is a profusion of noise, with traffic and people moving quickly in every direction. There is a real sense of organized chaos here. The square is the link between the contrasting Old and New Arbat ulitsas. The old road was pedestrianized in the 1980s after ‘Novy Arbat’ was created.
New Arbat is now the main artery heading westwards out of Moscow, lined with an array of shops, restaurants and casinos. Vesna is a shopping centre cum department store, with upmarket clothing and cosmetics as well as a restaurant. At night the street turns into a sea of neon lights and pumping music in an attempt to create a Russian Vegas, but it doesn’t quite make the grade, instead feeling rather tacky.
The pedestrianized Old Arbat is part street theatre and part art market with a handful of souvenir tat thrown in for good measure. Overpriced burger bars, pizza joints and cafés jostle for custom, as do the buskers and kiosk vendors desperate to sell their fur hats and matrioshka dolls. The cobble-stoned street runs for over a kilometre from Arbatskaya Square on the Boulevard Ring to Smolenskaya Square on the Garden Ring, and is crowded with domestic and foreign tourists.
If you can dodge the instant portrait painters and leave the madding crowd to explore the backstreets and lanes of the Old Arbat, a little of the historic atmosphere seeps through the modern rush, making for a pleasant stroll; there is nowhere else quite like it in Moscow. Deneznhy Pereulok is a street lined with old Russian houses that are mostly embassies now. One of our favourite places to eat, Cantinetta Antinori, a family-run Tuscan restaurant, occupies one of them.
Further on, the White House will conjure up memories of Yeltsin and the tank on the bridge firing shell after shell into the building a quarter of a mile away. Over the river, directly opposite, the Ukraine Hotel occupies one of the Stalinist ‘wedding cake’ buildings. Head on out to the Moscow City Hall building, where the trendy Red Bar lurks on the 27th floor. This corner of Moscow is particularly appealing at night, when these buildings and Kutuzovsky Prospekt are lit up.
