The sky over Moscow looked threatening as I set out, one afternoon, to pay an unannounced visit to the Russian writer Georgi Nikolaevich Vladimov. Several months earlier, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1977, he had been put under house arrest, and I was not sure who would greet me upon my arrival. Still, it seemed worth a try.
The metro quickly took me to a part of Moscow where stations are no longer the showplaces heralded in tourist brochures and proudly displayed by Intourist guides. No bronze statues of squatting revolutionaries ready to jump at you from every niche; no mosaic tableaux adorning the ceiling—the stations are functional and unpretentious.
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