On the left bank of the Moscow River, a mile or so downstream from the Kremlin, is to be found a most unusual structure - a huge convention complex called the Sovincentr. On the residential side of the center is the 13-story Mezhdunarodnaya (Mezh) Hotel and on the business side, though slightly taller, stands the World Trade Center office building.
All of this was built between 1975 and 1980, at a cost of about $150 million, at the suggestion of Armand Hammer. He went further and suggested to the Russian architects that they use as models for the design three big trade centers in the United States.Never satisfied with mere suggestions, Hammer proceeded to arrange for two-thirds of the financing for the project from the United States Export-Import Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank. Is it any wonder that American travelers to Moscow feel right at home in the Mezh?
As I entered the lobby and viewed the massive, hyper-modern pyramidal space above me, I was reminded of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco. To my right, natural light poured in through a high, terraced slant of glass. To my left were the exposed glass cages of Otis elevators beetling up and down the inner face of the room bank.
Directly in front of me stood a group of young Russian girls from Kiev. They appeared to be in their mid-teens and on their first tour of the Soviet capitol. I am sure the lobby of Mezh Hotel was the high point of the trip for them, even though they would state in their classroom reports of the tour that Lenin's Tomb made the whole trip memorable.
I watched them later ride up and down the elevators and giggle and nearly faint and hold one another's hands as though their young lives depended on it. It was a delightful scene to observe. Remembrances of riding the escalator in ZCMI for the first time came into my mind. My mother let me do it for hours while she shopped. There were no escalators in my Kiev, which at the time was La Verkin, Utah.
There was amid all of this Western design and technology in the Mezh lobby a vivid Russian declaration of place. It was a 50-foot-high ornate clock tower made of bronze. Its unmistakable message was, "Friends, you are not in a new world. You have come to an ancient and watchful Russia. Welcome."
I was informed later that this clock tower had not been in the original plan for the hotel. In early 1980, when two American supervising engineers were helping to rush the building to completion in time for that year's Olympic Games, several high Russian officials came to the Mezh to inspect the work. They were outraged at what they saw and exclaimed that this center was in Moscow, not Milwaukee. They ordered the planting in the atrium of a strong Russian statement. They got one.
The clock itself, built under orders of the All-Union Scientific Research of the Clock Industry (only in Soviet Russia could you get away with a name like this), has three faces and is housed in a big, globular swelling about two-thirds of the way up the tower. On each hour, as the time is struck, three portals in the column below the clock open, and on three small carousels clockwork figures from Russian folk tales can be seen going round and round.
Above the clock is a slender spire and perched atop that is the crux of the message - a huge rooster, the creature from Pushkin's "Tale of the Golden Cockerel." In Pushkin's poem Czar Dadon is given a golden cockerel by a magician to warn him when invaders were near.
Every hour of every day and night, the cock on the spire in this lobby crows and a mechanical larynx in the tower sings out orchestral strains from Rinsky-Korsakov's "Le Coq d' Or."
The clock tower celebrates a historic Russian obsession. This country has no natural defenses - no oceans, no mountains, no English Channel. Flat Russia has been invaded during her long history by Genghis Khan, the Tartars, the Swedes, the Finns, Napoleon, and finally Hitler.
Mother Russia needs the metaphor of this alert bird which will point to every danger and crow.
(To be continued)