RUSSIA: Moscow's metro is wide open to terrorist attack, as Deaglán de Bréadún found
The Moscow Metro is one of the few surviving glories of the old Soviet regime. As was said of his fellow-dictator Mussolini, Stalin made the trains run on time, at least the underground ones.
The Metro stations in Moscow are famed for their pictorial depictions of Soviet achievements and communist aspirations, done in the official state-approved style of Socialist Realism. Now communism is gone, but the Metro survives and continues to be a crisply efficient mechanism for moving people around this huge city. The only change I noticed on a recent visit to Moscow was that the voice-over which warns you that the next station is coming up, has become softer and more human.
But there are other, inhuman forces at work, such as the person or persons responsible for the latest appalling bombing in the Metro which caused so many civilian casualties. I travelled at least a dozen times on the Metro the weekend prior to that blast and was surprised at the lack of security precautions, other than the women at the entrance who gave passengers a cursory glance as they passed along.
A sitting duck for a terrorist attack, in other words. The lackadaisical official attitude was typical of a surprisingly easy-going approach to security in this capital of a former police state. True, one had to pass through a metal detector on the way into the Pushkin Museum and the Bolshoi Theatre, but there wasn't the same sense of fairly rigorous scrutiny that you get, say, at Dublin Airport or Heathrow.
When I worked there 10 years ago for The Irish Times, Moscow often felt like Dodge City and it still has that air about it. The city needs tourists but ought to look after them better.
For example, I was making my way to Red Square for a first look at the Kremlin in a decade, when suddenly a man walked across my line of sight. As he did so, a wad of US dollars fell from his pocket to the ground.
Although I noticed the money falling I did not attempt to pick it up. As I stared, he picked up the wad himself. Another man appeared and the pair of them started to jostle and abuse me. It was the good old tourist shakedown, Moscow-style.
My policy in these situations is to make a private event into a public one, because these rats always scurry away when the light is shone on them. I stood my ground and shouted in the loudest possible voice: "No-Nyet!" It worked.
The wad of dollars was a new twist. A friend told me later that I was supposed to pick up the money and give it back to the owner. He would then count it, but claim there were some notes missing. By this stage, one or more accomplices would have appeared and proceed to probe and search my pockets for the "missing" cash. In the process I would lose my wallet, passport, credit card, watch probably, and anything else that wasn't chained to my waist or stitched into the lining of my jacket. The trick works best where there are large crowds and the target has a limited capacity to move.
But all this was happening a stone's throw from the spot where some of the most authoritarian individuals ever generated by history used to review the tanks and troops of the Red Army on May Day. That era is mercifully over, but nevertheless I would be slow to advise anyone to visit Red Square as a tourist without taking particular care and I cannot understand why the authorities do not take appropriate measures against such behaviour.
Moscow is an exciting place but can be quite trying and a visit there is best approached as an adventure. In that spirit, everything bad that happens to you can be regarded as an exciting challenge to be overcome.
My flight into the city's Sheremetyevo Airport had been diverted to St Petersburg because of weather conditions and finally arrived in Moscow, almost nine hours late, at 1.20 a.m. I was travelling from Tbilisi where I was reporting on the inauguration of the new head of state, President Mikhail Saakashvili. As I emerged through customs, a burly fellow with a badge around his neck approached me, offering the hire of an "official taxi". He wanted the princely sum of $127 for the 35-minute journey to my hotel. He had several associates with him and they hustled me to a taxi-stand where I was shown a list of prices for various distances, ranging as high as $256.
I had been told you could get a taxi for $20 but the office for hiring these particular vehicles was closed for the night. I offered the fellow $20 but it fell on stony ground. In polite but direct terms, I informed him I would rather walk, or sleep in the airport, than pay the amount he was seeking. Eventually a chap from another taxi firm sidled up and we cut a deal for $45, which given the hour and the state of the roads did not seem unreasonable.
But further adventures were in store involving Russian visa regulations, aspects of which would test the imagination of Kafka himself. Indeed, there were times on my brief visit when I felt it had all been a mistake and that I had unwittingly landed in some urban jungle. But when the curtain lifted on Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre and the world's greatest ballet dancers flitted across the stage to the strains of Tchaikovsky's music, I knew I was right to come back.