Moscow’s Art Wonder Down Under

With or without Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s glasnost, as soon as you get to this bustling capital you should go underground.

Your eyes will be arrested as you explore the city subway, truly one of Moscow’s star attractions.

The Metro (as it is called) carries the highest density of riders (3.5 million a day) of any subway or railroad in the world. But this is not what makes the Moscow subway the wonder that it is.

Muscovites are proud of their subterranean railroad and actively encourage tourists to descend for a look--sometimes even taking them by the hand--because the Metro is an art dream, an architectural knockout.

Look Like Palaces

Once below, after having gotten used to the lighting system, the traveler finds himself wowed by stations that look like tunneled-out palaces. With crystal chandeliers and stairways and platforms made of granite, marble and semi-precious stones, each stop is a sight to see.

Some of the stations have walls fitted with murals and frescoes, stained glass, artful floodlighting, molded stucco and other florid, grandiose features.

There are statues and paintings galore by the Soviet Union’s top artists, and several of the barrel-vaulted ceilings are covered with mosaics such as you see only in Italian churches.

In addition, there are multicolored marble columns and rows and rows of eight-sided pylons that abound from station to station.

Perhaps the most striking stop is Kropotkinskaya Station. It was built by the Soviet Union’s two top architects--Dushkin and Likhtenberg--who, allotted an equal share of space down below, were given a free hand to outdo one another.

The result is a hodge of ornate splendor and a podge of stylistic designs that could give a rubberneck art critic a case of myopia.

As there are more than 250 miles of track and 70 stations in the Metro , the tourist would want to hit the most interesting platforms, of course.

Knowledgeable Muscovites who have explored every nook of the below-surface webwork say that one needs about two hours, but three would even be better.

If you want to give it a quickie look, you’ll find that visiting one station may just open your appetite for the full course.

By entering the Prospekt Marya Station, whose entrance is close to the Moskva Hotel in the heart of the city, you will stop first at the Kropotkinskaya. Then you should take a train going in the same direction for pauses at the Park Kultury Station and the Leninskiye Station.

Many Transfer Points

At this point, cross the platform and take a train going back to Park Kultury, where you transfer to a train that will take you to the Oktyabrskaya and Dobryninskaya Stations.

Merely by making a few other transfers, the tourist who wants more of this optical profusion can easily visit the following stations: Komsomolskaya, Mayakovskaya, Kievskaya, Byelorusskaya and Plosechchad Sverdlova, at which point you can exit and find yourself back again at Revolution Square downtown.

Getting around the subway, despite language problems, is a snap; simply copy down the station name in the Cyrillic letters and show them to any passenger. With engaging Russian hospitality, many led me personally to the proper platform. At times they even waited with me until my train came in before they went off in another direction.

The trains, often traveling at 60 m.p.h., arrive every two minutes and are driverless (though a person does sit in the cab, just to make sure the automatic pilot functions). A powerful ventilation system changes the air seven times an hour and, according to the operation engineer’s office, “You breathe purer air underground than you do at street level.”

No matter where you go, you will note a total absence of litter. Nor are there any graffiti defacing the cars or the walls. Vandalism and crime are virtually nonexistent.

But remember: Don’t do the Moscow subway when business hours end. Like anywhere else in the world, it’s the crush hour.