Church of the Holy Fool

Tuesday April 15 - Thursday April 17, Moscow, Russia
I arrive in Moscow after a four hour flight from London in the late afternoon. It is 3 degrees, raining, and very very grey, which somehow seems appropriate. At that time of day the 40 km journey by cab into central Moscow takes three hours. I learn on arrival at the hotel (my cab driver speaks no English and I realise I have no more than six words of Russian) that this is completely normal. Rush hour traffic in Moscow is now completely out of hand with the growing population and swelling numbers who choose to travel by car.

The next morning I walk to Red Square to meet our crew outside St Basil’s Cathedral – camerman Sasha, soundman Dmitri and – equally invaluably – fixer and translator Anna.
St Basil’s, built between 1555 and 1561 to commemorate Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the Tartar Mongols in Kazan, is actually an exuberant cluster of churches, with one in the centre surrounded by eight auxiliary churches each topped with a unique onion dome. A ninth was consecrated to Moscow’s “holy fool” St Basil and built to house his grave some twenty five years later. Since then the cathedral has been popularly known by his name.

The powerfully Eastern design, with its swirling extravagant array of rainbow colours and red brick towers is completely unique. “There is nothing like it, not just in Moscow, but in all of Russia,” Anna tells me. For her, Red Square is “like stepping back in time into the old Russia. It’s one of the few places where not very much has changed.”
We go inside the cathedral and are met by our interviewee, chief curator of St Basil’s, Liubov Uspenskaya. She graduated in art history in 1964 and has worked there ever since. She is serious and direct, “a typical old-style Soviet woman” Sasha observes. Certainly she has little time for the legend that Ivan the Terrible, on seeing how beautiful the cathedral was, had its architect blinded to prevent him from building anything of comparable magnificence for anyone else. She is equally dismissive of the tale that Stalin wanted it knocked down to facilitate troop movements out of Red Square. There is, however, more substance to Napoleon reputedly ordering its destruction on discovering that he couldn’t have it taken back to Paris with him.
Inside the cathedral is small and intimate, the separate dimly-lit churches connected by narrow passageways. A highlight is the beautiful blue and gold iconostasis -- a wall of icons and religious paintings separating the nave from the altar and a distinguishing feature of all Russian orthodox churches.
Mrs Uspenskaya laments that most Muscovites see only the outside of St Basil’s. Very few bother to look inside. They have a marvel on their doorstep and yet they travel miles to visit churches in Rome and Paris.

After the interview, we go back outside for some more exterior filming under the watchful eye of a man from the Kremlin. We are being charged a staggering £450 per hour for permission to film in Red Square. Even though we paid upfront for two hours, he seems restless after ninety minutes and suddenly orders us to stop. I protest at the obvious unfairness, but Anna says we must accept it. “You cannot argue with these people. They are very difficult.”
Time then for an extremely late lunch. I ask the Russian crew, out of curiosity, what they make of the Litvinenko poisoning in London. Dmitri, the sound recordist, tells me he has recently spent two weeks filming Andrei Lugovoi (wanted by British police on suspicion of the murder) at close quarters for a documentary. “What kind of man did he strike you as?” I ask. “Very clever, very successful, very well connected and utterly insistent that he is innocent,” Dmitri replies. Hmmm. It seems then as though we’ll never know. (Linda Zuck)