Russia can’t build a decent car. But it can build the best rockets, incredible fighter planes, all kinds of technology, and the world’s best subway, the Moscow Metro. You’ve heard about them. They are works of art. In the main Metro ring and stations in Moscow they are filled with statuary and frescoes. The architecture is superb.

The Moscow Metro was built in 1935,  is 301.2 km (187.2 mi) of length, 12 lines, and 182 stations. The highest passenger traffic is highest on weekdays, when the Metro carries over 7 million passengers per day. Of course you know about the dogs that ride the Metro daily to visit their favorite dining grounds.

Ride the Moscow Metro. It is a treat. Get a guide book and top off at the most artistic stations. But do it on the weekend.

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April 25 was “Elbe Day,” when Russians and American soldiers met and shook hands over the Elbe River in Germany, marking a major step toward ending that bloody and wasteful war. The impact on the Russian memory of World War II must be understood—yes, even today. When you mention “The War” to an American, depending on his age, he thinks of Vietnam, Korea, or if over seventy, World War II. If under forty he may think you mean Iraq or Afghanistan.. But to a Russian “The War” can only be “The Great Patriotic War.”

The American public, far from the action and involved only in what the media brought us in those black and white newsreel days, still today do not understand what a cataclysmic happening World War II was for the Russian people and the sacrifices they made. Over twenty million Russians died to help turn the war into victory for us all. History is slowly setting this right. For them the color of the war was the color of the blood of their men, women and children.

I met a hero of that war on that Victory Day. It was May, 1995. Sitting proudly across from me on the Moscow Metro was a wrinkled veteran with a kindly face, his threadbare oversized suit coat burdened with medals, including the red-ribboned gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union. As we stood to leave, he asked, “Aren’t you Russian?”

 “No,” I answered, “I am an American.”

He stopped in the push of the departing crowd and faced me. With firm hands, he grasped mine and shook them hard. He looked directly into my eyes, said, “Americans brave soldiers. I meet—Elbe River.” He was at that historic meeting of the two allied armies fifty years before. We congratulated each other warmly for being allies fighting a common enemy and went our different ways—as did our countries after that time long ago. I felt small, and yet honored. I remember the feel of his hands, firm, smooth, and warm, friendly hands. He stood and walked straight as an arrow. There was a hero.

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Don’t take offense, Muscovites. The subway riding dogs have made Moscow famous. We have seen this canine phenomenon on TV. Moscow is a city of dogs. There are two classes. Much like the city’s underclass inhabitants, those affected by the need to move out of the modernizing city can still be seen in vagabond packs or stalking alone, scheming to sur­vive, begging,. But now they ride the metro.

They sleep in the suburbs and shop in the center. Russian scientists say that Moscow stray dogs became much smarter. Once they arrive to the downtown they demonstrate different new, previously unseen dog skills. They know how to scare people into dropping their hotdog.     They don’t miss their stop while going on the subway. Biologists say dogs have very keen sense of time which helps them not to miss their destination. Another skill they have is to cross the road on the green traffic light. “They don’t react on color, but on the picture they see on the traffic light”, Moscow scientist tells. Also they choose often the last or the first metro car–those are less crowded usually.

There is of course the upper class of dogs, the canine elite, who walk their masters, regardless of rank, in the parks each morning and evening. (In my book, see the essays Dogs and My Name is Dog in the Essay Collection.)

But then there is the big picture. Moscow is a masculine city. It has muscle. It is an explod­ing powerhouse of opportunity held together by threads of per­sonal energy and ambition. It is a beehive of lives stacked twenty stories high, living the happiness and sins of people anywhere—only at the extremes Moscow hardly sleeps. It has a burly aggressiveness unique in Europe. In time, Moscow is destined to be one of the great cit­ies of Europe. The one word that describes Moscow is power.

With an energy unmatched anywhere else in Russia, Mos­cow is a sprawling, brawling, dynamic throng of eleven million people embracing dozens of races, speaking scores of different tongues and struggling to make enough rubles to survive. Not only are there two Russias, there are two Moscows, one whose people thrive and one whose people strive to survive. Not far outside the latest Outer Ring, you might think in some ways it is still the 1930s. And then there are the dogs. Maybe there are three Moscows.

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 Moscow is a masculine city. It is an exploding powerhouse of opportunity held together by threads of personal energy and ambition. It is a cocoon of lives stacked seven stories high, living all the happiness and sins of people anywhere – only at the extremes Russians are so capable of.  Moscow hardly sleeps. It has a muscular aggressiveness unique in Europe and traffic jams that make Los Angeles look easy. The one word that describes Moscow is power.

 St. Petersburg is a feminine city. Her historic personality is as an elegant and noble woman sitting draped with the jewels of her youth waiting for her prince to return. This “Venice of the North” with its symmetry, architecture, statuary, art museums, performing art, palaces, gardens and languid summers with endless days make it a city never to be forgotten.  St. Petersburg is not Russia; it is the historical myth of Imperial Russia.

 Moscow is a city of dogs. There are two classes. One can be seen in vagabond packs or stalking alone, scheming to survive, begging, much like the city’s underclass inhabitants. The other is the canine elite, who walk their masters, regardless of rank, in the parks each morning and evening. The disenfranchised class lurks around the apartment blocks sniffing the garbage for anything to swallow.

 St. Petersburg is a city of cats. From the streets at night, you can see their shining eyes, peering through the arches from the inner decay of “Dostoevsky‘s St. Petersburg,” the faceless blocks of communal flats. The cats hang comfortably in the dead trees, dine elegantly in the overflowing garbage, sit regally on the broken steps. For some reason, the cats always look healthy and fat.

 But Moscow is not just a city of power, politics, and one of the world’s best Metro lines. It also is a city of great art. In addition to the Bolshoi, there are new orchestras, ballet troupes, playhouses, and opera houses giving the cultured Muscovites an endless choice. There are concerts by the big orchestras and the excitement of smaller ones, like the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, on whose board I have the honor and fun to serve.

 Petersburg is a proud city which keeps itself as different from Moscow as possible. On one hand it disdains the crass commercialism, the naked power of Moscow and on the other is jealous for some of it. The palaces are more flamboyant than Versailles and more numerous than anywhere in the world. The heart of the city is the theater. The Mariinsky Theater with its ballet, opera, and orchestra is the standard by which all others are judged. Once you see such perfection, nothing else will do. The St. Petersburg Symphony in the famed Shostakovich Grand Hall on Art Square, guarded by its statue of Pushkin, cannot be matched, especially in it powerful performances of Russian classics. I have the honor of serving on the Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee.

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In the shadow of the Ministry of Foreign affairs, one of those seven giant Stalin buildings that punctuate the Moscow skyline, is a shell of a building that was once an Orthodox church. Under the sagging wooden gate with a sign from that Russian church that someday hopes to return, came the dogs, all mutts. First, a dog sired by a German Shepherd, then a cross between a sheep dog and a cocker spaniel, next a black and white short hair with a limp, and others, all nondescript, eight in all. They hung around the hole under the gate, like gang members waiting for the boss. And then he appeared, slipping under the gate and shaking himself with his authoritative nose in the air. He was the smallest of them all.

He had a square face and a cocky air that reminded me of James Cagney as a Chicago gangster. They all fell in behind Jimmy and wrestled for the favored spot downwind just behind his tail. Within a block they were in the right order, and spreading out on their scavenger hunt. It was not a game, it was survival.

They lived in my neighborhood and were not unfriendly. Like any group of unruly Russians, they made lots of noise, but give them something to eat and drink and they will love you forever. I had nothing to give them, but they didn’t shy from asking. Neither did they take offense, but headed on for more likely targets.

Resourcefulness is a valued Russian trait. Nearby was a building under confused reconstruction, the mess of timbers looking like a pile of pick-up sticks, Mud was everywhere. The workmen, sloshing around in the mud and spilled cement from the hand-cranked mixer, wore knee-length rubber boots. One day, on my way to work, I noticed one of the dogs from Jimmy’s gang, furtively running away from the building site with a leather boot in his mouth, looking side to side over his shoulder like a boy with a stolen candy bar. The thief squiggled under the chain-link fence with his catch and into a neighboring yard of guarded BMWs and Lincolns where his buddies were applauding and laughing the way dogs do. I could only imagine the boot owner, at the end of the day, wearily doffing his rubber boots, but finding only one of his leather ones, and exclaiming to his exhausted buddies, “Which one of you bastards hid my boot?” Surely he had only one pair of boots. Meanwhile the dogs were smiling sickly across the street at having devoured the delicious morsel.

These dogs are the underworld, the bumsh, the homeless, those on their own, having been turned out of warm homes for lack of enough food even for their masters. They are victims of the wrenching change affecting Russian society, like many in this country of promise. But, also like amongst the people, there are others who live in another world of limitless luxury, the Novo Russki dogs.

Even back when there were bread lines, these pampered pets led a life of noble luxury. Every morning and evening, rain, snow or sun, their owners take the pedigreed pooches for a walk in the parks that abound in Moscow. There are not only the common breeds like Cockers and Labradors, but silky Afghans, Great Danes, Dalmatians, Malamutes, Beagles, Chihuahuas, Shih Tzus, and rare Borzois, the hunting dogs of the Czars.

The dogs sniff each other like celebrities at a party and proudly prance around while the owners stand with folded arms or wearily drag on a cigarette and discuss the sorry state of things or maybe how, in their individual case, things have improved for now. The dogs have the park to themselves. But through the bushes they are watched by the “peasants.”

One dog, I called him just “Dog” for I assumed no one gave him a proper name, was one of the peasant dogs watching the nobility from a distance. He lived somewhere within a decrepit building of flats next to the park, but always stood in the doorway that hung ajar twelve months a year. He looked like a cross between a terrier and hedgehog. His head was too big and the hair on his chin dripped water in the rain or turned to ice in the winter. His eyes spoke of eternal disappointment. “Dog” looked with drooping eyes through the broken bushes from the edge of his building.

Sometimes he would inch toward the barricade, there are always barricades in Russia, of scrubby trees that he accepted as the line between those who owned masters and those who did not. When I tried to talk to him, he would cross to the other side of the dead-end street and look at me strangely and surely thought, “What does he want from me?” A typical Russian question.

Almost all of the noble dogs were from the New Russia age; many never knew the great leveling of classes under Socialism in earlier times. But, I am sure this caste system of canine society did not start yesterday. The truth in this land of great equality of the masses is that some were always more equal than others.

Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”