Moscow started off as a fortress (Kremlin) and, like most cities, grew by adding merchants’ and artisans’ quarters, protecting them with walls, incorporating more quarters, and building more walls (the Russian город, like the English ‘town’, means ‘a fenced-in place’). Like most Russian cities, Moscow was subject to frequent raids by steppe nomads and jealous neighbors. Unlike most Russian cities, it became a princely seat (favored at a crucial time by the Mongols), the patriarch’s residence (descended from Constantinople), the capital of a Eurasian tsardom (derived from ‘Caesar’), and, according to one theory, ‘the Third Rome’. The rapid ascent of St. Petersburg and the great fires of 1812 (which sent Napoleon on his circuitous way to Waterloo) took some luster away from Moscow but did not slow it down. The Kremlin remained the symbolic center of Russia; walls, ramparts and moats became concentric ‘ring’ roads and boulevards surrounding the Kremlin; mass immigration of former serfs fed capitalist development while filling the ranks of its gravediggers.

The Bolshevik revolution began in Petrograd, but the new government moved to Moscow, transforming it into the Fourth (anti-imperial) Rome‚ the capital of the future. Wars, famines, forced collectivization, and the proliferation of colleges, commissariats, and construction sites brought more immigrants; private apartments became ‘communal’ as new arrivals crammed into every room, nook, and cranny. Old belfries were torn down, crooked alleys straightened, and new constructivist buildings planned and sometimes built. Russia’s largest church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, was blown up to make way for the world’s largest building: the Palace of Soviets.

When the Nazis came within thirty kilometers of the Kremlin, Stalin reviewed the Revolution Day parade on snow-swept Red Square and told the troops to prove themselves worthy of the great mission history had entrusted them with. They did; most died within weeks. The metal piles from the half-completed foundation of the Palace of Soviets were used to make anti-tank barriers. The Battle of Moscow sent Hitler on his circuitous way to the bunker.

After the war, German prisoners were paraded through the streets of Moscow and employed in the construction of new straight avenues, grand embankments, and ‘Stalin high-rises’, designed to complement the Palace of Soviets while replacing the four hundred or so demolished churches as the city’s defining landmarks. Only seven were built before Stalin’s death (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow University, Ukraine and Leningrad hotels, and three elite residential buildings). The Palace of Soviets never got off the ground.

Khrushchev’s reign began with the decree ‘On Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction’, which put an end to Stalinist monumentalism, and the speech ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’, which was delivered three weeks after my birth. The foundation pit of the Palace of Soviets became the world’s largest open-‑air swimming-pool. The room my parents rented in a one-story house on Pushkinskaya Street had a woodburning stove and a leaky ceiling. My earliest memories are of my father chopping logs for the fire and shoveling snow off the roof. One of our neighbors bred rabbits and kept them in little cages in the courtyard.

Pushkinskaya Street (formerly Bolshaya Dmitrovka, renamed during the Pushkin Jubilee of 1937) ran from the Bolshoy Theater and the Union House to the Pushkin monument on Strastnoy (Christ’s Passion) Boulevard, by way of the mansion where Pushkin lost a fortune at cards, and the Communist Party archive, where I would spend countless hours hoping for something interesting to turn up. The Union House used to be the House of the Assembly of the Nobility, where Liszt and Rachmaninoff dazzled the crowds, my father’s ancestors danced the polonaise, and Dostoyevsky delivered his Pushkin speech, which proved decisive in the canonization of both (on the same day as the mortal remains of Luís de Camões were moved to the Church of Santa Maria de Belém, marking the tricentenary of his death and the beginning of his official canonization). In Soviet times, it was one of the principal venues for solemn state occasions, including the Moscow Show Trials and the lying in state of the Party leaders who died in good odor, including Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev.

When I was three and a half, we moved to Olkhovskaya (Alder) Street in the northeast of Moscow, not far from Komsomolskaya Square, which boasted three railway stations and one Stalin high-rise (Hotel Leningrad). Formerly a large forest with lakes and meadows, it had become Moscow’s transportation and industrial hub in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were tracks, trains, trams, trolley-bus depots, and railway bridges everywhere; the house in which we lived was surrounded by factories and abandoned warehouses. One could not have wished for a better place to grow up: we played Cossacks and Bandits in flooded labyrinths, blew up streetcars with pretend Nazis inside, watched motoball (soccer on motorbikes, amidst dust, rust, exhaust, and the screeching of unmuffled engines) at the nearby Lokomotiv stadium, and walked to Sokolniki (Falconers’) Park, left over from the Tsar’s hunting woods and used, most memorably, for skating, skiing, strolling, the grilling of shashliks, and marveling at the exhibits of US cargo (beginning with the American National Exhibition in 1959, which featured the Khrushchev-Nixon ‘kitchen debate’). It was the height of ‘the Thaw’: my father, a one-eyed war veteran, was enjoying his second youth (launched at the Moscow International Youth Festival of 1957); my mother, whose father had been killed in the war, her first. They went on long hikes, played a lot of volleyball, and danced to the tapes of Johnny Hallyday, Chubby Checker, and Ray Charles (whom they called ‘Charles Ray’). I preferred ‘Beauty Queen’, a twist by an Armenian composer sung by an Azerbaijani baritone.

Our communal apartment had three rooms(not counting the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet). Ours, at 20 square meters, was the biggest; my father painted it wild colors and decorated it with pictures from Cuba and Poland (the coolest countries on our side of the world) and a watercolor portrait of my mother wearing sunglasses, a red blouse, and bright green deck pants. In another room lived a retired horse-cart driver and his wife, a bed-ridden invalid. They had a TV set, so I spent a lot of time sitting on the old lady’s bed watching soccer, ice hockey, speed-skating, weightlifting, and military parades. One of the strongest impressions of my childhood was watching Eusébio play in the 1966 World Cup. The other room was occupied by a young couple with a girl my age. When her parents were away, she and I played doctor. I enjoyed her company, despite her alleged ill health, but my true love was her father. He was a perfect 1960s hero: a scientist who was also a boxer, mountain climber, and short-story writer. He told funny jokes and taught me the jab. Sometimes, when he was away from home, his wife would entertain an older man who wore a fedora. I hated them both and never returned the man’s sheepish greetings.

In 1968, when the last of the Thaw petered out along with the Prague Spring, we – along with thousands of other Muscovites – moved to a ‘separate’ (non-communal) three-room apartment in the city’s southwest. Khrushchev had kept his word: instead of building cathedrals for posterity, the state had applied itself to the construction of prefabs for the masses. Moscow became surrounded by clusters of identical five-story buildings with no regular streets and an unfathomable numbering system. Ours was called Quarter 38. As I walked home from my first day at the new school, I got lost and was rescued by a boy who seemed to be following his nose. We became friends and went on to spend long hours in my room, drinking Dagestani port wine and listening to rock music. I had posters of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dave Clark Five, and, in due time, David Bowie, on my wall (I, too, grew a mullet). The cargo cult fostered by the International Youth Festival and Sokolniki Park exhibits had blossomed into a proper salvation religion. The only revolutionaries left in Moscow were living in the Patrice Lumumba Friendship of the Peoples University dorms on the other side of a small forest near our house. They defied the local custom by not hanging curtains at their windows and having Che Guevara posters on their walls. Extravagantly attired African students made a spectacle of their attempts to stay up on skis.

In 1975, western goods available for purchase came to include port wine from Portugal. I learned Portuguese, spent time as an interpreter in Mozambique, and, in 1982, went to see where the land ended and the sea began. The following year, I crossed the sea and landed in Texas. By the time I returned to Moscow a few years later, the cargo – authentic and counterfeit – had begun to arrive in bulk. Komsomolskaya Square had filled up with beggars, peddlers, hagglers, billboards, casinos, and shopping malls. My first house had been torn down; Pushkinskaya Street had become Bolshaya Dmitrovka again; the world’s largest open-air swimming pool had reverted to being Russia’s largest church; the Thaw prefabs were melting away; my friend from Quarter 38 had drunk himself silly.

to Moscow a few years later, the cargo – authentic and counterfeit – had begun to arrive in bulk. Komsomolskaya Square had filled up with beggars, peddlers, hagglers, billboards, casinos, and shopping malls. My first house had been torn down; Pushkinskaya Street had become Bolshaya Dmitrovka again; the world’s largest open-air swimming pool had reverted to being Russia’s largest church; the Thaw prefabs were melting away; my friend from Quarter 38 had drunk himself silly.