There is a blind woman in the Metro. When I say Metro, I want you to read between the lines. Don’t worry so much about the magisterial architecture and the famous Art Deco embellishments. Don’t think about Stalin in 1941, as the German Army was getting dangerously close, gathering his generals at Mayakovskaya Station to commemorate the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. What you should imagine is a collection of people in an enclosed space, who by virtue of their sheer numbers, their intersecting trajectories, and their readiness to squash and be squashed, have merged into a cyclonic wave, Category 5 or higher. Sometimes the wave just throbs, sometimes it crashes and breaks, but only one thing happens to those in its way.
 
The Moscow Times tells us that the city has some 35,000 residents for every kilometre of rail track, a figure equalled only in Tokyo. This is three times the number of people per kilometre of track in Paris and close to double the figures for London and New York. In Tokyo attendants have to push people onto the trains. In Moscow people do it for themselves. It is amazing just how quickly you abandon your genteel manners and start throwing your elbows and chest around. I thought I might have to give Billie a talk about how there is no shame in pushing, how in fact the whole system is held together by everyone agreeing tacitly to push and, yes, there is a certain etiquette to it, like asking ‘Are you getting off at the next?’ before forcing your way to the doors, but how, in the end, it is all OK. But Billie has no need of this little motherly chat or for my permission. She just does it like a pro, totally unperturbed, and she has a natural advantage – that teenage facial expression in which boredom wrestles with contempt, and, by God, it makes her look right at home.
 
The blind woman wears dark sunglasses and has a stick in her hands. She is standing on the opposite platform to us, perilously close to the edge. How did she get inside the station past the violently flapping doors that slap you, the seeing one, straight in the face unless your outstretched arm is travelling well ahead of your body? Was she helped through the size-8 gap between the turnstiles by one of those invariably female attendants deep in middle age, the ones I have never seen do anything but emit shrill cries at the sight of young men jumping over the barriers? And what about those escalator journeys, the length of an average act of intercourse, how did she make it through one of them?
 
Our train departs; the last we see of the woman is her back turned towards the track. She is standing quite still; no one comes near her. It seems almost suicidal for her to be there all alone, as if she were standing at the edge of a cliff. There is a village not far from Moscow, purpose-built for the blind in the glory days of the USSR, but now in total decay, along with the great socialist dream of engineering self-sufficiency for the disabled. Living in the ruins of the empire is hard enough for people with eyes, legs or arms intact, but for those whose bodies have failed them in some way, recent history must feel like one day’s journey into night. A few stops later, a legless veteran of some no longer identifiable war is pushing his way through the crowd of legs on something resembling a cheap skateboard, his stumps wrapped tight in layers of plastic. In keeping with its survival of the fittest philosophy, Moscow Metro has virtually no lifts and no ramps for the disabled. This man, who was once a warrior – or at least a hired gun – is now a beggar, although no one is giving him anything, not on our watch anyway. Able-bodied Russia pretends she does not see the second Russia, even though the population of the latter is probably close to seventeen million. ‘The disabled are citizens of Russia’, says writer Anton Borisov (paralysed since childhood, he knows what he is talking about), ‘but not of the majestic oil-gas-nuclear-cosmic nation like the rest of the Russian population. No, the Russian disabled are citizens of another Russia – impoverished, worn-out, tear-stained and humiliated.’
 
In the underground interchanges, the kilometres of tunnels that connect the city’s train systems, women in long, bulky coats display wind-up toys. Cats chase their own tails. Squirrels and bunnies hop around. Plastic soldiers perform a commando crawl with their rifles at the ready. Selling toys here is like putting out a spread in the middle of a six-lane highway. This is not commerce, this is not doing the best with what you have, this is desperation. An old woman in a headscarf, an archetypal figure, Russia’s equivalent of a semi-naked African child covered in flies, re-sells newspapers a hundred metres from the official kiosks. Her profit margin must be in the domain of nanomathematics. I wonder whether she is doing this so as not to beg.
 
As we shuffle along the crowded corridors, Billie’s eyes almost pop out. Close to the exit, a woman is holding a hand-written sign ‘Diploma, Degrees, Certificates’, ready to fold her business at a moment’s notice. Forgery is rampant in Russia, but it is not legal. Not yet. You can buy anything here, I explain to Billie, a degree in Medicine, Architecture or Science, school diplomas, work history, medical certificates. In the West education is for sale too, more often than not through online virtual institutions, which promote their wares by urging us to ‘get a degree without those hundreds of hours wasted studying, attending lecturers, doing assignments’. In Russia, you still get direct-to-the-public forgery so, if you are lucky, you will deal with Syoma or Igor, not some world-class university registered to a PO box in Columbus, Ohio. How reassuring that there are still real people you can deal with.
 
←