the Phlog

“The problem is that it’s easier to break down houses and start from zero than to restore them,” says Yulia, before she starts her eight-hour shift at the French café so she can help her mother with the money.

Yulia is 18 and while most Russians her age dream of escaping west she will head to evening university from the café, studying six years of architecture and then, if she has her way, restore half of Moskva.

She grew up close to the centre, in Ostankino, with its palace and 17th century church and TV tower, listening to sailor jokes from her father who had travelled around the world for eight months at a time on a container ship before she was born.

The Russians have a saying about good early years: ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.’ And it was good, especially the bits when her parents would take her through the old parts of the city.

But the communists had died, and Lenin lay pickled a long time before Yulia was born. The best things the Soviets might have left behind for her, after the last bits of ideology had been trashed and swept up by the babushkas at the metro, was their architecture.

The Soviet style, the incredible Stalinsky Empire, connected ideology with design like classical Rome did, showing off the power of the state. And it really is awe-inspiring. Even the onion domes plopped outside the Kremlin are passé. For real style head underground, down into the depths of the metro, and ogle at the art deco fonts, the light fixtures, the stucco and the murals and the statues. But most of all, the fact that the Soviets put their best art into the earth, for the common man. And that’s a beautiful idea, even if they managed to muck it up.

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