As you come into Moscow from Sheremetevo airport, the way is guarded by a monument marking the limit of the German advance in October 1941: red girders protrude from a sloping plinth, forming a line of three skewed crosses, replicating in miniature the anti-tank defences that once stood here. Then, this would have been an open field: now the monument doubles as the gate to Khimki - more a satellite than a suburb of Moscow, but essentially the city's beginning. Just beyond it is the vast blue oblong of an Ikea store, doubtless taken by many arrivals as a sign of the free market's firm entrenchment in Russian soil. But soon the apartment blocks appear: prefabricated concrete units hastily assembled in the 1960s and 1970s, already crumbling. Behind them and between them the endlessly flat horizon muscles in; here, as elsewhere in Moscow's outlying suburbs, the city seems barely to have taken hold, as if the march of the legions of birch trees ringing it had been halted only temporarily.

LRB 8 August 2002 | PDF Download