Like Russian Dolls

Discovering Traditional Cuisine And Hidden Haunts In Moscow.

- Jeffrey Tayler

Seeing the Kremlin at night always enthralls me, even after my 23 years in Moscow. The vista of brick towers and crenellated ramparts, so magnificent as to appear unreal, calls to mind an illuminated print from an old book of fairy tales.

My sighting of Russia’s most famous (or infamous) fortress comes as my cab trundles over the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, through air shimmering with a fierce frost. Gusts of wind stir snowdrifts along the banks of the Moskva River below us. No less the seat of power now, during the era of Vladimir Putin, than it was in Ivan the Terrible’s day (or Stalin’s), the Kremlin evokes, for me, a mix of dread and majesty—the emotions I experienced as a child of the Cold War when I both feared Russia (I lived in Washington, D.C., aka ground zero) and marvelled at it. My fascination led to graduate studies in Russian and East European history, to my first visit in 1985, and to a move here for good in the summer of 1993. In 1999 I married a Russian. Moscow is the city I call home.