How KPS Menon described Moscow in 1970

When the Soviet Union celebrated the 100th birth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin in 1969-70, one important guest for the festivities was an eminent Indian retired diplomat who considered Russia his second home- K P S Menon.

Serving as the Indian ambassador to the USSR from 1952 to 1961, Menon had developed a special love for the country. So, when he was invited to spend some time in Moscow and other parts of the country in the summer of 1970, the career diplomat happily agreed to visit. A year later, he shared his impressions of the visit in a book titled Russia Revisited. The book is a priceless account of ever-changing Moscow (and seldom frequented places like Crimea) in the Brezhnev era.

As someone who was a direct player in the development of relations between Moscow and New Delhi, he went into finer detail when writing about his journey, starting from the Aeroflot flight.

“When a direct line between Moscow and Delhi across Central Asia was inaugurated in 1957, I gave a banquet at which Marshall Zhavarenko, the Head of Aeroflot, was the chief guest,” Menon said. “In replying to my toast, he compared the sudden expansion of the Soviet airlines to the way in which champagne rushed out of a bottle which our butler had just uncorked.”

On this flight, most of the 186 passengers were Soviet citizens. “Having spent nine of our happiest and I hope, not unfruitful years, we too have a feeling of returning home,” Menon, whose wife was also travelling with him, said. He added a clarification here, because a newspaper once misquoted him as saying he considered Russia his motherland. He was forced to write to the editor of the publication (Current) to clarify his position: “A man could have two homes, I said, but only one mother, and India was and would be my only motherland.”

Passengers to Moscow were offered quite a lavish breakfast spread in 1970! “There were wines and liqueurs galore, but the morning is not a time when one feels particularly bibulous,” Menon wrote. “Having woken up early, we are under the spell of Morpheus, rather than Bacchus, except when we fly over the Himalayas and the Pamirs and see such glorious scenery as Dushyanta did on his aerial journey to the heavens, where had his reunion with Shakuntala.”
A good suggestion, even now, for those taking the early morning Aeroflot flight from the Indian to the Russian capital is to try and get a window seat on the left.

The flying time of six and a half hours between the cities (which has not changed since then), impressed the career diplomat. “It is difficult to think that having left Delhi in the morning we shall be in Moscow in good time for lunch,” Menon said. “My first air journey to Moscow from Delhi took 28 hours via Bombay, Cairo, Geneva and Prague, where we had to change planes. My first journey to Leningrad took 28 days via London; and Afanasi Nikitin’s journey to India, fifty years before Vasco da Gama, took three years. The world has indeed shrunk.”

Changes in Moscow
The evolution of the city was visible in plain sight. “Every time I visit Moscow, I am astonished to see how much Moscow has grown, is growing and planned to grow,” he wrote. “It is no longer the Moscow which I first saw on a cold October day in 1952.”

The first thing Menon noticed about Moscow on his 1970 visit was the larger number of cars in the city. When he served as ambassador in the city, the authorities had actively discouraged people from having cars, and aggressively pushed the use of public transport.

“Indeed, the underground system in Moscow is the most attractive in the world,” he wrote. “However, with the increase in the per capita income, the desire of the average man to own a car could not be suppressed; and the Soviet government has recently entered into an agreement with the Fiat Motor Company, under which 600,000 cars are to be manufactured every year in Togliatti.”

In 1970, the Russian capital was witnessing a massive construction boom, as it was dealing with housing shortages. “Until recently the great difference between Moscow and Leningrad was that Leningrad was a planned city, whereas Moscow had grown anyhow within the space of 800 years,” according to Menon. “Now the face of Moscow too is changing in strict accordance with the Moscow Development Plan. Whole districts are being rebuilt, and some like the fashionable Arbat, where our embassy used to be, is almost unrecognizable.” The diplomat added that a permit system was put in place in a bid to keep internal migration in check.

Another change he noticed in the city was the Lenin (now Luzhniki) Stadium that came up by the Moskva River, near the Moscow State University. “When I arrived in Moscow in 1952, the University building itself was new,” Menon wrote. “It is a magnificent 36-storied structure on this historic Sparrow Hill, now called Lenin Hill. Here, Napoleon stood in 1812, and casting his glance at the splendid panorama, including the Kremlin, the churches, cathedrals and palaces, exclaimed, a little prematurely, ‘All this is mine!’”

Menon also noticed the widening of Tverskaya Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the city centre. The street was renamed after the writer Maxim Gorky during the Soviet era, but now has its original name back. “The street has been widened, without destroying or causing the slightest damage to the buildings on either side,” he said. “This is indeed an art: huge rollers are placed below the foundation, and the buildings are moved back inch by inch.”

Since he came to the city in June, the famed houses of culture like the Bolshoi Theatre were closed for the summer, but he noted how the city had managed to add more facilities. “Cultural amenities, too, never lacking even in the worst days of the war, have been steadily increasing,” he wrote. “There are more than three dozen theatres in Moscow. Some thirty thousand Muscovites go to the theatre every day, and not once have I seen a vacant seat.”

In the five decades since Menon’s special visit for the Lenin Centenary, Moscow has continued on the same path of change and growth. It survived the decay of the latter years of the Soviet Union and the nightmare of the Yeltsin era, only to continue to evolve and stay one of the world’s greatest and most sophisticated cities.