I retreat to the back streets with good results, pedaling past just-raked parks of pointy spruce and broad linden, where grannies in black talk to the pigeons. My bicycle frame seems made of rubber, but does not crack anew. The weld is holding, and so is the weather, a scatter of innocent clouds. On the walkway of a stone bridge over the Moscow River, kids eating cotton candy point with sticky fingers to the dome of Christ Our Savior Cathedral. Three hundred feet high, it’s a just-completed replica of the cathedral that once stood on the same site: Tsar Alexander’s gilded thanks to God for the 1812 defeat of Napoleon. The tsar desired the grandest church in Russia, and so it was sheathed with granite, marble, and bronze. The interior dazzled with nearly a half-ton of gold leaf. Like Notre Dame and St. Peter’s Basilica, the cathedral was an extravagance and a masterpiece. For two centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had bestowed its blessings on the tsars, and in return the tsars had made the church a branch of the government.
