Let a Thousand Nizhnys Bloom

Nizhny Novgorod

ANYONE familiar with Maksim Gorky’s autobiographical My Childhood and My Apprenticeship will have a clear idea of pre-Revolutionary Nizhny Novgorod: a great, noisome, bustling entrepot that amply demonstrated both clauses of the old dictum, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” Its famous fair attracted merchants and goods from throughout the Empire, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, from Siberia to Poland.