Much of the Moscow Metro’s most distinctive decoration is a celebration of a totalitarian regime responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
From the very beginning, the Moscow Metro was designed as an instrument of propaganda as well as transportation. Its grandiose stations were not only a projection of the power of the regime but also designed as a promise of sorts, a glimpse for the Soviet people of the heaven on earth that communism would (one day) deliver. It was perhaps thus appropriate that some of its marble was said (probably accurately) to have come from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which had been blown up on Stalin’s orders just a year or two before work on the metro began (the cathedral was rebuilt in the Yeltsin years). And, of course, the metro was used to impress foreigners too. Judging by Tucker Carlson’s comments in a recent video, it still does:
We’re standing in front of the Kievskaya Metro station, in this train station next to it. Now, the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. And the question is, how is it doing now after 70 years? So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us. Now, that’s not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin. You may not like him either, but it doesn’t change the reality of what we saw or precisely didn’t see. There’s no graffiti, there’s no filth, no foul smells. There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly.
And how do you explain that? We’re not even going to guess. That’s not our job. We’re only going to ask the question . . .
Even in the 1990s, years when I did take Moscow’s metro from time to time, it was visibly faded around the edges (and more than faded in some places), but still impressive, if disturbingly so: Its most monumental stations were unmistakably a legacy of a totalitarian past, and a hint that that past might have some sort of future.
In 2009, the Kurskaya station was renovated, and, as the New York Times reported, that came with a twist:
One afternoon this week at the Kurskaya subway station, one of Moscow’s busiest, many commuters’ heads turned to catch both the grandness of the renovation and the words of the Soviet anthem as it was sung under Stalin when the station opened in 1950: “Stalin reared us — on loyalty to the people. He inspired us to labor and to heroism.”
“Ordinary” crime has come down a long, long way in Moscow since the 1990s. I could have been lucky, but I never encountered any problems in the metro even then, and, by many accounts, it’s much safer now. Part of the reason for the improvement may be the installation of an extensive facial-recognition system.
Such systems can be a touch dystopian, and in Putin’s Russia, well . . .
Radio Free Europe (June 13, 2022; emphasis added):
Moscow police have detained dozens of journalists and activists after they were identified using a facial recognition system in the city’s metro according to the OVD-Info group, which monitors the arrests of representatives of democratic institutions, rights defenders, and opposition politicians.
According to the group, at least 67 activists and journalists were detained on June 12, which is commemorated as Russia Day, of whom 43 individuals were detained after being identified as potential protesters. They were picked out of the crowds in the Moscow metro by police through the usage of the facial recognition system.
Journalists Pyotr Ivanov, Olga Bazhanova, and Asya Kazantseva, as well as rights activists and participants of previous public actions of protests were among those detained.
They said police told them they were picked up as potential protesters on Russia Day, a national holiday celebrating the then-Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’s declaration of state sovereignty in 1990. Prior to the recent coronavirus pandemic, political opposition and activists traditionally held anti-government protests on Russia Day.
Most of those detained were released hours later.
Kazantseva told the Mediazona website that police demanded she write a statement saying that she went through a “preventive conversation” and “was instructed that persons who had faced administrative arrests in the past cannot enter the metro on the Russia Day.”
Wired (February 6, 2023):
Sergey Vyborov was on his way to the Moscow Metro’s Aeroport station last September when police officers stopped him. The 49-year-old knew that taking the metro could spell trouble. During a protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, police had fingerprinted and photographed him. He’d already been detained four times in 2022. But he was rushing to his daughter’s birthday, so he took a chance.
Vyborov wasn’t arrested that day, but the police informed him that he was under surveillance through Sfera, one of Moscow’s face recognition systems, for participating in unsanctioned rallies. Considered one of the most efficient surveillance systems, Sfera led to the detention of 141 people last year. “Facial recognition, and video cameras in general in a totalitarian state, are an absolute evil,” Vyborov says.
Vyborov finds himself at the bottom of a slippery slope that privacy advocates have long warned about. Under the guise of smart city technology, authoritarian and democratic governments have rolled out huge networks of security cameras and used artificial intelligence to try to ensure there is no place to hide. Cities have touted the ability of such systems to tackle crime, manage crowds, and better respond to emergencies. Privacy campaigners say such systems could be used as tools of oppression. In Moscow, Vyborov and countless others now face that oppression on a daily basis. . . .
In March 2019 . . . the Moscow Department of Transportation, which operates the city’s metro, launched its own surveillance system, Sfera. By October 2019, 3,000 of the city’s 160,000 cameras were enabled with face recognition tech, according to interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev. . . .
In September 2022, just after Putin announced additional mobilization for the war against Ukraine, Viktor Kapitonov, a 27-year-old activist who’d protested regularly since 2013, was stopped by two police officers after being flagged by face recognition surveillance while he approached the turnstiles in Moscow’s marble-covered Avtozavdodskaya metro station. The officers took him to the military recruitment office, where around 15 people were waiting to enlist in Putin’s newly announced draft.
Lurking alongside all this is the possibility of a Chinese or Black Mirror– style social-credit system. So far as I know, that’s not (yet) a point that Russia has reached, but this story from Biometric Update in October caught my eye:
The Moscow Metro is testing a new biometric payment method.
Passengers can link their biometrics to the Moscow Resident Social Card, a personalized plastic card issued to select Moscow citizens, used for identification and accessing municipal infrastructure, transport, banking and medical services. Over five million people use the card, according to January data. After linking their biometric information and bank information to the Moscow Metro app, users can pass through the turnstiles designated for biometrics with a special sticker, without reaching for their card.
Hmm . . .
The Moscow Metro may well be clean, efficient and, for those who play by Putin’s rules, safe, but much of its most distinctive decoration is a celebration of a totalitarian regime responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. And the Moscow Metro may now, it seems, be playing a part in tightening the control of a new Russian despot. Carlson makes clear that his comments are not to be taken as an endorsement of Stalin or Putin, although it is unfortunate that his footage of the Kievskaya metro station — an interesting station to choose at this time (the “Kiev” in the station’s name is the clue) — features an inspirational soundtrack and includes (at 2:09) a mosaic of happy collective-farm workers, red flag, and tractor. On to 2:51, and there’s a smiling Lenin.
Oh well.
The theme of [the station’s] decorations is the history of Ukraine and the friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian people. The station’s 18 pillars are decorated with mosaics made out of smalt. Themes of these mosaics include: Pushkin in Ukraine, Public Celebrations in Kiev, Liberation of Kiev by Soviet Troops in 1943, the Battle of Poltava, Fireworks in Moscow on 9 May 1945, and Friendship between Russian and Ukrainian Kolkhoz [collective farm] Workers.
Strangely, the Soviets’ genocidal murder of millions of Ukrainian farmers and peasants in a man-made famine in the early 1930s doesn’t merit a mosaic.