Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews

Author:Owen Matthews [Matthews, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-12-05T11:00:00+00:00

Spring began one night in late April, a few weeks after my arrival. The evening before a wintry chill had lurked in the night air, although the last, tenacious remnants of filthy snow had finally melted the previous week. The lawns were bare and scrubby and the earth smelt bitter and dead. But when I woke the next morning the sky was a vibrant blue, the tentative buds which had begun to emerge days before had all suddenly burst out and the boulevard exhaled an unmistakable tang of life. By that evening spring was firmly established across the city.

Like emerging butterflies, the girls in the streets shed their winter coats and emerged in high heels and miniskirts. On Sundays I would walk down the gravel paths of Tsvetnoi Boulevard to the Garden Ring. At Sad-Sam, I'd turn towards Mayakovsky Square, and head to the American Bar and Grill. There, a gaggle of Moscow Times staffers were usually hunched, gossiping, under a pall of cigarette smoke and half-hidden behind crumpled newspapers, trailing in the remains of eggs Benedict. Here it was at last, I told myself, the life of a foreign correspondent: the glamour, the girls, the hard-drinking, bootson-the-brass-rail colleagues, the camaraderie of young men far from home in a strange and wonderful city. In truth, I was acutely aware, even at the time, that I was living the headiest and most adventurous days of my life. Though in the company of my new colleagues, of course, I was careful to conceal my joy under a cultivated veneer of world-weary flippancy.

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