Moscow Dairies: My Favourite Metro Station

The station named after the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is aesthetically pleasing, unique and futuristic like his poems.

Way back in 2014 when I was in Moscow for some meetings and wanted to stay back in the city for a few extra days, I chose a hotel in the heart of the city, built in the style of the Stalinist skyscrapers and opened in 1949. One of the main advantages of the Hotel Peking, was that it was just a short hop away from a metro station on the green line.

For some reason, until that 2014 trip I never got off at that station- the Mayakovskaya, named in honour of the great poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky. I was in awe of some of the other stations in the Moscow Metro, some of which looked like underground palaces and museums.

From 2014, the first of my nine stays at the Peking, I absolutely fell for the Mayakovskaya metro station.

Opened in 1938, the station was designed by architect Alexey Dushkin and is a work of genius. It combined Stalinist Classicism with Art Deco. With its stainless steel columns, pink rhodonite flooring and granite and marble walls, it is too beautiful to be just a metro station. These are aesthetic attributes that I noticed during my frequent visits to the station from 2014, but it was only last week when I actually looked up at the ceiling and saw mosaics that were the work of Aleksandr Deyneka a painter, graphic artist and sculptor, a genius of modernist figurative art.

The design of the station won it the Grand Prize at the World’s Fair in New York. I was completely unaware of this history or the fact that the station served as a bomb shelter during the Second World War. It was from here that Joseph Stalin made a speech at the time the USSR was attacked by Nazi Germany.

Mayakovskaya means more to me than its aesthetic beauty and history. It’s from this station that I started feeling like a proper Muscovite, hoping on and off the metro to rush for meetings with friends and colleagues.

Oh the joy of going up the long escalator and leaving the station and seeing a large statue of Mayakovsky in a public square! The happiness of looking at the Peking after a long working day and knowing that I can just wind up. Exiting the station and walking on Tverskaya street or up to the Patriarch’s Pond, the starting point of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita!

There have also been other associations and memories I have with the station and its surroundings. Taking a 60-year old Indian business associate and friend on a late night walk to the square for a surprise. She expected me to take her to a cafe on that still pleasant autumn evening, but instead ended up sitting on one of the public swings that were installed at the square.

Another happy feeling is waiting next to the poet’s statue in anticipation of friends coming out for an evening or afternoon meeting. If I ever end up living in Moscow, I would definitely look for an apartment within walking distance of this station. In many ways, this is my own Moscow neighbourhood.