Vladimir and Nikolai had always been close, even as their careers took different directions. Nikolai stayed at home in Volgograd, where he runs a small business supplying spare parts to local industry. Vladimir went to work in Moscow as a consultant to major foreign companies.

Twenty years ago, I’d joined the cousins in their search for their grandmother’s village near Saratov. Out of a population of 3,000 in the 1980s, barely a dozen people remained on the former collective farm. Though vegetation was slowly reclaiming the village, it still had a mayor, who every morning swept the old Soviet ‘red corner’, a former assembly hall with a parquet floor and a stage where the locals once put on plays.

Every two weeks, a post van made its way up a dirt track to deliver the mail and basic supplies. On our trip, the cousins had reminisced about their Soviet childhood as though it were a lost country. As we drank and laughed, their bond seemed unbreakable.

This spring I heard they’d fallen out, though from phone conversations I couldn’t tell why. Perhaps seeing them in person would change that, I thought. So I flew to Moscow, despite the threat of Ukrainian missiles and drones.

The city didn’t look like the capital of a country brought to its knees by Western sanctions. There was a time when you would hurry through its streets, head down. Now you could linger on its newly widened pavements, admiring the art nouveau façades of buildings you had barely noticed before.

Between 2015 and 2023, the city authorities renovated 14,000 residential blocks and 380 historic buildings. Since 2022 the redeveloped banks of the Moskva have been part of a 15km pedestrian route that goes from the new Moscow City business district past the Kremlin to Sokolniki Park in the northeast.

The war comes closer

A few weeks after my visit, in mid-June, a Ukrainian drone caused an explosion at the Kapotnya oil refinery, some 30km from central Moscow. (…)

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