Escalators

The escalator at Kurskaya radial line takes 57 seconds to get you from one end to the other. That’s 57 seconds of duty free observation of live Russians, like a conveyor belt full of prizes on a 70’s quiz show; they glide past at a stately pace and you can get a really good look at them without having to explain just what the hell you are looking at. They do the same too. Or at least the ones who are not glowering, posing or lost in thought.

You can spend a lot of time on the metro: when I lived in the south and worked in the north of Moscow I used to spend over 25 hours on there in the working week. This means you spend a lot of time gliding up or down on escalators looking to your right at people gliding the other way. People build rituals around escalators: a friend once told me he used to figure that seeing three pretty girls on an escalator ride meant he was guaranteed a good day. I find myself making up back stories for them: where they are going, why, what they will do there. The more insane the story the better.

 The rule used to be that you stood on the right and people wishing to move faster passed you on the left. A good system, but on that falls down because of the tendency of every one to queue jump at the bottom and then dive for a place on the right when they hit the steps. If they don’t get that place they will stand on the right and hope nobody pushes them out of the way. If enough people do it inertia takes over and both sides end up filled.

It may be this that led to a change in rush hour policy whereby we are now encouraged to stand whichever side we happen to be on, as this will move more human. People ignore this system as they ignored the last.

At the bottom of each escalator is a glass and aluminium kiosk containing a uniformed escalator attendant. Most of them sit there half asleep hoping that no tangle of gears and torn flesh forces them to do anything. Others, particularly the babushkas, seem enraged by existence and sit shouting into their microphones at real or imagined transgressions of the rules. Angry people should not be given microphones and powerful public address systems. Of late they have started to play blaring adverts through those systems too, urging people to buy insurance or cures for ailments. These are dome in the style of cheap local radio adverts with shitty music and men’s voices shouting telephone numbers at you: it’s seriously annoying, but chto dyelat?

 So you just watch the parade of Russians, tired and distracted, young and old, beautiful or foul and wish they could just install these conveyors in parks and streets so you could do your Russian viewing in the daylight.