Only 20 years ago, the area between the National Hotel and the outer wall of the Kremlin, Manezhnaya Ploshchad, Manege Square, was completely empty. Stalin's city planners cleared it out in the 1930s; no one cleared out a place better than Stalin.
Big black Party cars raced across the cobbles, spraying water from the puddles over people who were trying to cross on foot. Policemen patrolled it day and night, glaring suspiciously at anyone in Western clothes. Russia was an innocent place in those days. Everybody dressed like everyone else, and although there were gangsters and thieves, they were pretty much under control.
If you were an artist or a writer, you had to choose between your conscience and your career. The arts mattered in Russia then, in a way they don't now. They were a battleground, fiercely contested. And now? There are no battles to fight, no dangers to face; it's Russian journalists who are on the front line today.
I've been back to Manege Square plenty of times since the fall of Marxism-Leninism, but it's never been without a faint pang of regret for the old days. Now much of it is filled by an open-air shopping centre selling expensive Western things. The buildings have been cleaned and restored. The people you pass are mostly well dressed, sometimes spectacularly so. Twenty years ago, did the mothers of these gorgeous, willowy young women look like this? Surely I would have remembered if they had.
At the far end of this enormous square is the charming early 19th-century Manège which gives it its name: the training school for the Tsars' horses. One afternoon in 1979, I saw the Manège ringed by a queue running three times around its great quadrilateral. A gigantic notice over the entrance read 'An Exhibition of Modern Bulgarian Art'.
'Why on earth are all those people interested in Bulgarian art?' I asked my companion. 'They aren't,' he said. For some inexplicable reason, he explained, the Moscow authorities had allowed a highly un-Marxist artist with a taste for Tsarist history to hold an exhibition there at the same time. The word had gone round, and people in their thousands came to see it. The artist's name was Ilya Glazunov.
I met Glazunov three times altogether. The first was at his exhibition, when people were crowding to catch a glimpse of his painting of the Tsarevich, the last Tsar's only son, lying murdered in the snow. At one time it would have been appallingly dangerous for the people who queued up to see a picture like that — let alone for the artist who painted it. The rumour was that he had painted a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev's own daughter; even the rumour would have been enough to protect him.
The second time was nine years later. By this time glasnost was thoroughly underway. Glazunov's flat was sensational, its ceilings 20ft high and every wall covered from floor to ceiling with icons and crosses. An entire pair of church doors hung on one wall. He had bought them illegally from the workmen who were knocking down a church.
Glazunov was charming and warm, but as he talked it was quickly clear that his life had been a terrible one. He was born in 1931, the son of an historian, in Leningrad. When he was 11, the city was besieged by the Germans, and he was smuggled across the ice to safety. His entire family had to stay behind, and died of starvation. In later years, Glazunov was persecuted by the Communists. His son had been stabbed in the street, and he hinted at suspicions about his wife's death.
But by the time I met him his future was secure. The police no longer came round to check out his work and confiscate it, and he wasn't short of money. I found him interesting, and liked him. When I left, he gave me a book of his paintings: haunting portraits, landscapes, illustrations from Dostoevsky. He wrote a long, affectionate message to me in it, in Russian and English.
Years later, I bumped into him again by chance. By this time the far right was growing in strength in Russia, and Glazunov was a leading light in the Pamyat movement, which had some pretty hair-raising political views. A Pamyat group was holding a meeting in the street, and some nasty-looking thugs hung round on the fringes. When it was over I went up and shook hands with Glazunov, but he didn't remember me.
'I'm not surprised,' said Olga, my producer, whom I had come to trust and admire, as we walked away across Manege Square. My earlier praise of Glazunov had irritated her, and she took a certain pleasure in my embarrassment. She too was an artist, but she had always been an outsider: a friend of dissidents, a freethinker. In the Communist time there was never a hope of exhibiting her work.
And now the Communist time was over, Olga remained an outsider. She found it hard to get work as a television producer. All the good jobs seemed to be taken by the kind of people who had held them before. There would have been no problem exhibiting her art works now, but she wasn't doing them any more: somehow the inspiration had gone. People like Olga had drawn a creative energy from the fact that the state was against them. Somehow, that had vanished.
I've never seen Glazunov since. He has prospered: Vladimir Putin, when he was president, decorated him for service to the motherland. As for Olga, she died young, of a heart condition. Walking across Manege Square ties all these memories together. Like everything else, it has changed out of all recognition.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
