Underneath Moscow (Mother Russia Part III)

When people think about the subways in general they usually think of the Tube in London, or the NY Subway or maybe even the Paris Metro. Russia’s Metro however is usually overlooked which is strange considering that it traffics more people per day than any other metro system in the world, around 8 to 9 million people on weekdays.

However, this statistic is not what makes the Moscow Metro stand out. Intertwined among the miles and miles of tracks and tunnels are some of the most beautiful Metro stations in the world. True, most are Soviet inspired with scenes of soldiers, farmers, and country folk espousing productivity, cooperation and military might but maybe that’s what makes them even more beautiful.

You’ll see a few tourists taking in the beauty but for the most part, Moscovites rush through them without taking a second look (unless they notice people like me intently taking pictures). There are some stations, like Ploshad Revolutsia that has statues set inside the tunnel archways that the locals do interact with, one soldier kneeling is oblivious to the fact that his dogs' nose has been wiped shiny by people affectionately touching it as they pass by. Whether this is for good luck or for a simple “thank you for defending the motherland” is beyond me.

Also, the metro station is where you’ll find a few places where you’ll receive some courtesies that seem few and far between in the rest of the country. The heavy swinging doors leading into stations for instance, more than capable of incurring damage if it were to hit you, are held open by the people in front of you until they are sure you got it. Also, in a jampacked train, if you are near the door, people will ask if you are getting off just to make sure you are not in the way when they get off. During rush hour, me and my mother in law got ejected out of the train in a flood of people one time. No problem, you just turn around and get back on.

Some of the stations and tunnels are located deep below the city. In bustling cities like NY or London, most locals walk down escalators in a rush to get to where they were going. In Moscow however, where some of the escalators look like they lead 4 stories down, locals stand on the right and wait it out. I tried walking down the length of one but had to stop at some point to catch my breath.

Also, not all stations were decked out in the same way, Novodslobodskaya has stained glass windows, Komsomolskaya had roof murals while Kievskaya had murals on the walls and Ploshad Revolutsia had different statues hunched in the archways leading to the platforms. Other stations had paintings of Lenin on one end, others had the hammer and sickle engraved into the domed roof and yet others had statues of heroic soviet soldiers pressing onwards to victory. Whatever the decorations of the station, if you took out all the plastic signs showing you the exit or the connecting lines of the Metro, you would think you were in a lobby of a theatre or a concert hall, not hundreds of feet down with a subway train whizzing beside you.