I mentioned in the last post that I lived off of Tverskaya. That street was lined with various office buildings and hotels, some home to snazzy shops on the bottom floor. While walking down the street one day, I noticed that many of the buildings were made of a very beautiful reddish-brown granite. I asked around and found out that the granite once belonged to the Nazis. After taking Poland, France, Belgium, and Holland, Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. In December of that year, the Nazis shipped granite to Moscow by rail to build a monument honoring the German soldiers. Russia intercepted the train, took the granite, and used it to build pretty buildings on Tverskaya.

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The Nazis ultimately failed to take Moscow. Their advance stopped just several kilometers from the capital. One of the places their troops were stopped lies on a road between Moscow’s airport and the city. On arriving at Moscow when I was 14, I remember a lot about the car ride to the city. I remember that everything was grey and drab; there was no color, no life. The sky was filled with grey clouds, the massive apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city looked like dilapidated government housing from the 40s, and everything seemed slathered in an ancient layer of mud and dirt. But I also remember something of a monument. The Russians marked the final steps of the Nazi advance with three enormous steel structures. They looked like gigantic three-dimensional asterisks. In retrospect, I think they were structures used in the war to stop tanks.

I managed to find a picture of these things. Pretend like the Ikea isn’t there, visualize more clouds, and make everything black & white. That’s basically what I saw.