Looming over six lanes of seething traffic untamed by any obvious rules of the road, the US embassy does not enjoy Moscow's most tranquil location.And now, along with the noise, fumes and wailing sirens, Washington's mission is assailed daily by the idiosyncratic protests of a city set staunchly against the US war on Iraq.
Friday night saw Moscow's self-entitled League of Street Racers drive dozens of potentially very fast cars very slowly past the huge mustard and white confection that houses the US embassy.
The occupants of the Mercedes, BMWs and Audis waved anti-war flags, sounded their horns and brought traffic to a near standstill and the blank gaze of policemen leaning resignedly on their Ladas.
The US Ambassador, Mr Alexander Vershbow, was probably not in the embassy late on Friday night, and so may only have seen footage of the cacophonous traffic jam on television the next day, cossetted in the quiet luxury of his historic Spaso House residence.
Only, Spaso House was not at its quietest on Saturday.
Outside the 18th-century mansion, canisters of oil were being lined-up by about 2,000 members of a pro-Kremlin youth group called Moving Together, under a black-lettered banner screaming: "Please take the oil, stop the war."
One worthy of Moving Together - a slightly sinister organisation whose members wear T-shirts bearing the image of President Vladimir Putin - berated the ambassador through a loud speaker, urging him to just take the canisters and be done with military action in Iraq.
There can be few other places where the Soviet hammer-and-sickle and the flags of far right political parties flutter together so amicably, or so often, as they do in shared anti-Americanism outside Washington's embassy here.
And beyond the capital, from Siberia to the Black Sea, Russian media report cafes and bars banning US and British customers in protest at the war on Iraq, which was a Soviet-era ally of Moscow's and has huge oil reserves that Russian firms hope to tap.
Support for President Bush is hard to find here, but one parliamentary deputy stepped from the shadows on Friday. Berated for blocking discussion of a motion that would ban Mr Bush from visiting Russia later this year, deputy parliamentary speaker Ms Lyubov Sliska came clean. "It's because I like him," she said, looking coyly down at her papers, as laughing politicians clapped and catcalled the blushing deputy. "I like him as a man."