Today my friend Taylor and I went to an exhibit called “Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his times in photos.” On the exterior walls were historical photos from their archives that documented major events that occurred in Russia during Solzhenitsyn’s lifetime. The interior walls had Solzhenitsyn family photos, portraits of the writer, and photographs he himself had taken.

Maybe I had been primed by all the seasonal decorations lining Tverskaya while we walked to the exhibit, but when we came to the photograph above, I immediately thought it was a faded Christmas card from a few decades back and was ready to move on to the next image before I realized that in the place where jingle bells or a poinsettia should be featured was none other than Josef Stalin. Dead, no less.

Life here is full of such double-takes. The exhibit we went to today, for example, is in the same room as a huge fur coat bazaar (there is a wall, but it functions like a cubicle divider and one can see over the top of it). I simply don’t expect the height of consumerism and a celebration of the arts to exist in the same space just as I don’t expect Josef Stalin’s dead body to appear in the middle of a tired floral arrangement.