Russian Metro in the Morning Hours

Russian Metro In The Morning Hours - Funny video clips are a click away

Apparently, the Russian Metro--historically, one of the most punctual marvels of public transportation, has become a nightmare in recent years. Moscow, in my year there, was almost synonymous with the idea of public transport--I could not imagine the city except as a series of concentric circles of roads and subways, a kind of Dantesque landscape where beauty and terror, opulence and pain, coexisted as prenatal twins. This video reminds me not just of the grimness of crowds, but also of the enormous inner fortitude of Russians not to go mad at the sight of such forbidding swarms of humanity; Russians are nothing if not tough. Sometimes, I find myself missing getting walloped by the bag of some strong babushka, pulling her way through the wilds of others.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Ilya Repin's famous agit-painting, "The Volga Boatmen," or "The Boat Haulers on the Volga." What is strange to me now, is that I once identified with Repin's rebellious young hauler when I was slogging through the muck of post-Soviet Russia. Now, I want to resist the camera-ready tourist's exploitation of the masses' navigation of that underground...