Moscow Guide
Red Square
GUM
Opening time: Daily 10am–10pm
GUM is to Moscow what Harrods is to London, a flagship emporium that every tourist wants to visit, patronized by rich locals when they're not shopping somewhere more exclusive. But that isn't its stereotypical image: for anyone who recalls Soviet times, GUM (pronounced "Goom": the initials stand for "State Department Store") evokes memories of shelves of unsold brak (junk) and queues for "deficit" items like tampons (imported from Hungary, since the USSR never got around to manufacturing them). The difference between then and now is a measure of how much Russia has changed.
Architecturally, GUM makes a perfect foil for the Kremlin. Its ornate neo-Russian facade – drawing on motifs from the medieval churches of Borisoglebsk and Rostov Veliky in the Volga region of Russia – conceals an elegantly utilitarian interior, employing the same steel-frame and glass construction techniques as the great train stations of London and Paris.
Nationalized and renamed GUM after the 1917 Revolution, it continued to function as a shop until bureaucrats overseeing the First Five-Year Plan took over the building. In 1932 it was used for the lying-in-state of Stalin's wife, Nadezhda, after her suicide; Stalin stayed there for days, silently noting who came to pay their respects. Not until 1952 was GUM reopened as an emporium famed throughout the world. With the advent of perestroika, GUM received an infusion of investments from Western firms keen to get a prestigious foothold on the Russian market, and is now privately owned and more akin to a luxury mall.
GUM is laid out in three parallel arcades or "lines" (designated 1-ya liniya, 2-ya liniya, 3-ya liniya), which meet at a central fountain, overlooked by galleries. Glass canopy roofs flood the whole complex with light, or give a startling view of the stars on winter nights. The first and second floors have been entirely colonized by the likes of Estée Lauder and Body Shop, but a few old, Soviet-style shops survive on the third floor. You can enter GUM at either end of lines 1 and 3, from the street behind the store, or from Red Square itself.