Rewards, or punishments, could be grand. Even more was built, including granite office buildings and the marble metro, which contained top-secret lines linking the Kremlin to the outlying dacha compounds. Monumental apartment complexes sprang up for the ever-expanding nomenklatura, as well as for writers, film makers, dancers, musicians and polar explorers. By the 1950's near saturation was attained up and down fashionable Gorky Street, the Arbat and General Kutuzov Prospect, so new areas were staked out for gentrification in the 1960's and 70's. Mr. Colton notes the dislocations, and intermittently gestures toward the populous proletarian districts, then resumes the tour of elite enclaves.
Startling revelations fall thickly and accumulate.
Mr. Colton draws on the writings and recollections of Communist Moscow's intelligentsia, some of whose members perilously lobbied Stalin and others in defense of the city's architectural heritage. He applauds their success during the Brezhnev years, when surviving churches were spared, despite the inconvenience of building around them, and some demolished monuments were rebuilt. Nicely integrated with the two principal subjects in the first parts of the text, the national story abruptly takes over in the period after 1985, and the book's momentum dwindles. Even the anticipated climax proves elusive. But the results were promptly overturned in subsequent elections, also subject to minute analysis.