Before reading A Gentleman in Moscow, walking through the doors of the Metropol seemed like the most elegant way to escape the noise of the big city. After enjoying the successful novel by the American Amor Towles – now also a series, with Ewan Mc Gregor and Alexa Goodall, in a series that will arrive in Spain on April 18, on SkyShowtime – and returning to this emblematic hotel in Moscow, I know which is the most pleasant and painless way to escape the cruelty of history.
The fantastic story of Count Alexander Rostov, sentenced by a Bolshevik court not to leave the Metropol Hotel under penalty of death, has nothing to do with the painful lives and real stories of those who, by their own will and vicissitudes of the Soviet era, became This emblematic building made his home for a time.
“During the time of the USSR, the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was studied. Well, through the Metropol Hotel this same history could be studied: not through the party leaders, but through their relatives. Their names have not gone down in history, but in those years they were well-known people,” explains historian Yekaterina Yegórova, head of Metropol's historical heritage.
After the October Revolution, the new Bolshevik government occupied the Metropol Hotel, where it set up the headquarters of the Central Executive Committee and some of whose prominent members, such as Nikolai Bukharin, Georgy Chicherin and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko (consul in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War ), they had their quarters here.
Then the Metropol was nationalized, it stopped functioning as a hotel and received the significant name of Second House of the Soviets (the first was its contemporary and nearby Hotel Nacional).
That is one of the elements that make A Gentleman in Moscow a novel outside of history and the result of the author's incredible fantasy. In a Soviet reality, it would be impossible for a person outside the party, much less an enemy of the people like a noble, to live in this Garden of Eden.
Entire families settled in a single room and, if one was alone, as is the case, they were assigned a bunk bed in the common area. “Part of the rooms were used as offices, the Foreign Affairs Committee (ministry) was located in our building. And part of the rooms were used as apartments for party members. But not for everyone, because it was very difficult for them to let you live here,” says historian Yegorova.
The Bolsheviks converted many rooms into small shared apartments and the Baiarski Room, where the protagonist of the novel ends up working, “was transformed into a residence and filled with 70 bunk beds for officials and workers of the Bolshevik government,” explains Pável Cherepovetski, head of Marketing. and Public Relations of Metropol.
Among the tenants of this particular komunalki (communal apartments) building “lived the children of Bukharin (the main communist ideologue in the 1920s), who was later reprisalized and executed in 1938. The family of his second wife, Anna Lárina, lived next door. which was later also sent to the Gulag, a victim of repression,” recalls the historian.
Also alive was a friend of Stalin, Vasili Ulrij, the judge “in charge of signing the death sentences” during the Great Purge. He presided over many of the trials of that era. And at one point, “relatives of Nadezhda Aliluyeva, Stalin's second wife” also lived there.
We owe this paradise of charming modernist curves to Savva Mamontov, who at the end of the 19th century was called “the Medici of Moscow”.
The Metropol, opened in 1905 after overcoming a fire four years earlier, is the symbol of a time of commercial and industrial expansion, which coincided with the end of tsarism and which transformed Moscow thanks to the impulse of industrialists such as the aforementioned patron or companies of insurance companies like Petersburg Insurance, which financed this wonderful dream.
“At first Mamontov's idea was not to build a large hotel, but a cultural center that included hotels, restaurants, boutiques, libraries. That is, everything that was considered a luxury for travelers at the beginning of the 20th century. But the most interesting thing of all is that the center of the entire building had to be an opera house,” says Cherepovetski.
The ruin of the industrialist, due to what today we would call unforeseen expenses in the budget allocated by the Government for the construction of the railway, made the new owner of the complex finally decide on a large hotel, the first luxury hotel of the 20th century in Moscow. .
The first establishment in Moscow to make hot water, a telephone and an elevator available to its guests, it is an artistic paradise. The columns of all possible colors (malachite green, terracotta oranges and all ranges from white to black) continue to support the modernism (Art Nouveau) left by architects such as the British William Walcot or the Russians Lev Kékushev, Adolf Erijson, Fiódor Schechtel and many others from the Abramtsevo community, gathered by Mamontov on his estate on the outskirts of Moscow.
On the façade facing the Bolshoi Theater there is a bas-relief with the following inscription: “Here in November 1917 the members of the Red Guard and the revolutionary soldiers under the leadership of M.V. Frunze waged fierce battles against the cadets who defended access to the Kremlin.”
On that same façade is room 307, renumbered as 3307 after the renovations in recent years. It is in that room where Amor Towles places Count Rostov at the beginning of his novel. Composed of a bedroom and a small exquisitely furnished living room, the jewel of the suite is the impressive view of the Bolshoi, as La Vanguardia can see accompanied by hotel representatives. The guests who have occupied it throughout history have also enjoyed such a panorama. Among the most famous, remember in establishment, the singers Patricia Kaas and Fanny Ardant, Ryutaro Hashimoto (former Prime Minister of Japan) and Amor Towles himself when he visited the hotel in 2018.
Towles was not interested in the literality of the story for his novel. Proof of this is that there are episodes of the 20th century, such as the Second World War, that pass like a pleasant breeze when it was perhaps the most shocking tragedy of that century. “Nor would it be unlikely that, returning from abroad, the nobleman could go to his estate in Nizhny Novgorod, pick up his furniture and move to his favorite hotel. 90% of the estates had been looted and traveling by train would be hell, since they did not work or you had to cross the battle front. At that time the Russian civil war was underway,” Yegorova recalls.
The life he enjoys does not correspond to the time either. The count, although locked up, lives wonderfully, although no restaurant operated in the Second House of Soviets. In fact, the historian points out, there was a year when they gave food with a special card and in the building “there was a dining room in which in those years they served horse meat, potatoes that had been frozen, horrible, rotten. There are documents where all this is explained, memoirs....” In addition, in those years there was prohibition and a royal Rostov count could not have enjoyed the good broths from it.
But A Gentleman in Moscow is not a historical novel. It is more of a wonderful allegory about man's ability to improve himself by creating his own universe, even without being free. And this is recognized by the Metropol Hotel, which maintains a photo of the American writer on the fourth floor, a souvenir of his visit and perhaps in gratitude for the publicity that he has given to the establishment. In the Shaliapin Café, which did not exist at the time of the novel although the opera singer Fyodor Shaliapin was a prominent guest before emigrating in 1922, a special menu has been added to the drinks menu with the cocktails that Count Rostov used to drink. take in his novelistic prison nights. “The core is made up of drinks created based on the life of Shaliapin. But the classics that Amor Towles writes about have been added in a supplementary letter. Thus, any guest who has read the novel has the opportunity to try them,” explains Cherepovetski.
Some events and characters that appear in this fiction actually happened. Lenin himself, as another plaque under the modernist curves of the façade recalls, addressed his comrades under the roof of the hotel's main restaurant, converted into a conference room for those new times.
In Towles' fiction, the restaurant is called Piazza and its beautiful glass vault protects Count Rostov every day while he has breakfast.
It is also true that Yakov Sverdlov, head of the Russian State after the Revolution until his death, was in a hurry and locked part of the delegation in a room for two days to draft the country's new constitution.
The Metropol functioned as a hotel again in the early 1930s, “but it did so as an Inturist hotel, that is, a special hotel from the time of the USSR. Some of the tenants who were already there stayed, because there was no other place to house them. And some stayed until the 1960s. Of course, these apartments were state property,” explains Yegorova.
The establishment was a place to accommodate distinguished visitors, before and after the Revolution. From here, John Reed writes Ten Days That Shook the World (possibly at a restaurant table), and here the American dancer Isadora Duncan listens to Russian poet Sergei Yesenin's declarations of love. In Soviet times, Bernard Shaw or Bertolt Brecht, or entertainment stars like David Bowie, lived here.
Of all of them, some could star in a novel as real as life itself.
In 1959, the Metropol welcomed Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of assassinating United States President John F. Kennedy in 1963, as a guest. He first lived in the Savoy Hotel. He then asked for Soviet citizenship, was denied and attempted suicide. After that, they changed their minds and granted it.
Thanks to a subsequent interview, it is known that his room was 233, in the current number 2219. How would the main suspect in the most relevant assassination of the 20th century occupy his time? Would he visit the hidden stairs and corners like Count Rostov? more hotel secrets? It is a mystery that could well be unraveled by a fictional story, because, as the hotel historian says, “during his stay he hardly left the room.”
In 1955, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich met the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. “I raise my eyes, and the goddess approaches me from the stairs... I have even lost my speech. And at that moment I decided that this woman would be mine,” he wrote. In 2005, in the same restaurant, the couple celebrated a golden wedding in the company of friends such as Queen Sofia of Spain, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, the wife of the French president Bernadette Chirac and the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his wife. Naina.
More recent guests are still remembered with a smile. In 1993, a security problem arose when Michael Jackson came, because the hotel was surrounded by a crowd of fans, especially girls who followed the artist and shouted 'Michael, we love you!' To get around the crowd, he had to use the entrance and the service elevator. “During his stay in Moscow, he always wore a mask and dark glasses. Then other guests also decided to put on a mask and sunglasses and showed themselves in the windows, so the girls began to scream. It was a funny situation,” says the historian.
From that visit, a lamp remains as a souvenir that the American artist became fond of. He wanted to buy it, but it is a work of art and is not for sale. It's still here.
In 2001, Kim Jong-Il, father of the current leader of North Korea, stayed at the hotel, arriving in Moscow from Pyongyang on his legendary armored train. He ordered Russian food that he had known in his youth and, they say, he loved the Finnish sauna in his room.
And among Spanish personalities, the list includes Kings Juan Carlos and Sofía, the presidents of Government Aznar and Rodríguez Zapatero, and artists such as Enrique Iglesias or Montserrat Caballé.
