Cruise control

摘要

There's a passage in Francis Wheen's biography of MP Tom Driberg describing a trip the latter made to visit Guy Burgess in 1956. Driberg arrived in Moscow to find his exiled comrade starved of male company, so with a practised nose he sniffed out the city's busiest cottage - a public lav 'frequented by hundreds of questing Slav homosexuals -standing there in rigid exhibitionist rows, motionless save for the hasty grope and the anxious or beckoning glance over the shoulder', as Driberg put it. It was here that Burgess met an electrician named Tolya, and years later he wrote to Driberg 'I continue to be very happy with [Tolya]... I don't know what saint in your calendar to thank. Perhaps only Greek Church, or Armenian, has such a saint.' This heartwarming tale came to mind when I was flicking through the pages of Yevgeniy Fiks' photobook Moscow, a collection of images showing desolate former cruising grounds of the Soviet era - pleshkas in Russian slang. These hauntingly depopulated spots are captured in that numinous idiom of cityscape photography inaugurated in the mid-19th century by Charles Marville, who was likewise documenting a vanishing world. Bach shot is subtitled with the location - Kazan station, masterpiece of Alexey Shchusev (AR April 2014), is here, as are leafy parks, public lavatories, riverside embankments, public baths, university dorms, and assorted socialist realist sculptures depicting revolutionary heroes.