When Moscow smelled like chocolate

A Moscow memory:

Walking around Red Square in May, in a good mood. Six days of travel, six days on the train, from Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Now here I was, I’d made it to Moscow. Moscow! The dream of every Chekhov character. Soon I would meet a friend.

This was 2007, post Cold War, post post Cold War. Moscow boomed, exploding with wealth and energy. At least it seemed to me. Eurasian beauties stepping out of chaffeured cars and into Prada. Certainly Moscow seems to boom when you arrive from the east, where what you see out of the train windows is bleak. True log cabins, shells of abandoned buildings, stark forests, vast cold rivers.

Now here were the towers, the mazes of the ancient and modern city. The city that stopped Hitler and Napoleon! Deep intense people inside Café Pushkin eating smoked goose borscht (the waitress there, I can still picture her, like a movie star from a movie too intense to ever film). Soulful men sweating naked inside the the Sanduny Baths. Chandeliers in the metro stations.

That morning I’d waited in line to see the waxy candle mummy of Lenin. The wall of memorials to the revolutionary heroes (“German Jews,” I heard the tour guide say. “We have a joke that the Russian Revolution was started by German Jews”).

There were the spires of Saint Basil’s, the image most often used to represent Russia in video games. Here was Red Square, and then there was the Kremlin, right there, can you imagine? I was just strolling past the place that stood as symbol for the calculating minds of the Evil Empire. Now, walking towards the river, there was a smell I kept noticing, An alluring smell, a tempting smell. A sweet smell, a smell I recognized but it couldn’t be that. Is that… the smell of chocolate?

It can’t be.  Is that fantastical, enormous building just across the river, on the island… is that a chocolate factory?

Why did it seem surprising? I never thought of Russia as a great producer of sweets, but why not? There were massive constructions everywhere, products of enormous, empire-sized energy and direction. Take the giant Moscow State University building for example. Why wouldn’t they put some of that force and power into chocolate?

Sad to learn they’ve since closed the Krasny Oktyabr factory and turned into like mixed use condos. Too bad. I still feel my marvel. The idea that all this time, outside the Kremlin, Moscow smelled like chocolate.

(source on that photo, cheers to Hans-Jürgen Neubert)