Two last shots of Sunday’s unofficial commemoration, “Restoring the Names”. Someone took these and many other photos from the viewing platform of the toy shop Detsky Mir across Lubyanka Square (see https://www.facebook.com/Memorial.International/?hc_ref=ARRrH5pwXB-ynweSTfLoh5aK8Fk6QbY_9HGh–pFEZODZ3krh5kAP4Sstx-Ym4P7-oY)

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Behind the hoardings stands the pre-Revolutionary Polytechnical Museum, where lectures were read and poetry recitals were given — by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam among others.

The building across the road to the left is yet another part of the FSB / KGB. Lubyanka Square itself is being given a make-over — for the return of the statue of Dzerzhinsky, as former Mayor Yury Luzhkov proposed some years ago?

This is in the heart of Moscow, so it is relatively clean and tidy. And yet to this observer it still radiates something of the chaotic unfinished, endlessly uncompleted construction work of the Soviet era (the “building site / rubbish dump” vision, that стройка-помойка).

JC