'A Gentleman in Moscow' Is More than Mere Entertainment

When Vladimir Lenin seized control of Russia in 1917, his Bolshevik government ended centuries of autocratic rule, replacing it with an all-consuming tyranny of its own. Within half a century, over 18 million Russians would pass through forced-labor camps and more than 25 million would be dead.

The Soviets would spend years trying to control and contort the country’s moral and social norms for the cause of communism. But civilization doesn’t just vanish over night, and after decades of death and destruction, Marx’s utopian “end of history” was still nowhere in sight.

That dreary march of despotism is at the center of Showtime’s A Gentleman in Moscow, a new limited TV series based on Amor Towles’ novel of the same name. Set within a Moscow hotel over the course of 30 years, the series offers an unusual glimpse into the human costs of collectivism amid the decline of post-revolutionary Russia.

The story focuses on Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (Ewan McGregor), a landed aristocrat who loses everything during the October Revolution—his property, title, servants, an entire way of life. Although he narrowly escapes execution, Rostov is sentenced to spend the remainder of his days in the Metropol Hotel, a bustling hub of culture, entertainment, and intraparty mischief.

By placing Rostov’s character here—amid the best that Soviet society has to offer—the series invites us to attempt an escapism of our own. Rostov is not being sent to the gulags of Siberia. He is not being forced to work in the fields or face a firing squad. He is simply a man without his castle, destined to sleep in a cold, damp attic, but with plenty of blankets, not to mention round-the-clock access to the hotel kitchen and bar.

Indeed, when trapped within the confines of the Metropol Hotel, the supposed Marxian crisis of history can often feel rather quaint. It takes years for Rostov to shake off his aristocratic lifestyle. He holds fast to old habits and struggles to overcome a range of petty prejudices about art, etiquette, education, and the merits of nobility.

At first these clashes are played mostly for laughs, so much so that I expected the series to be a light and playful tale about the dance between bourgeois virtues and proletariat values. Sure, the Leninists are abolishing Christmas and destroying art and architecture, but Rostov is clinging to blind spots and bigotries of his own. If the anachronisms of the ruling class were to die their proper death, perhaps some collateral damage was necessary.

But that’s the thing about totalitarianism: It can’t really quit until it’s gotten its paws on every last little thing. It isn’t content to seize your property or strip away your status or micromanage your manners or cuisine or the musical genres of the day. It has exiled God himself, so you better believe your spirit and soul are somewhere on somebody’s list of unaffordable luxuries.

It isn’t long before that darker reality begins to unfold and Rostov is forced to shift his attention from the minor quirks of cultural revolution to the complete desolation of man.

Rostov is excited when he bumps into his old friend Nikolai Petrov, a former prince who has since been reduced to a traveling violinist. Yet Petrov is clearly paranoid of spies and secret. Speaking of the demise of many of their mutual friends, Petrov soon tells Rostov of his plans to eventually escape the country.

Later, in an emotional performance at the hotel lounge, Petrov plays Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” on violin, bringing Rostov and many others to tears. Yet before Petrov can finish, soldiers storm the room and drag him away, promptly executing him in the street.

It is here that Rostov begins to see what’s actually at stake. This is not a simple struggle for mere material equality, and the Soviets are not just after cultural artifacts of ages past. This is a conspiracy against the freedom and dignity of the human person.

Petrov is so quickly and thoughtlessly discarded, just moments after we see the beauty and anguish of his humanity. Petrov’s music is not mere music, and his art is not mere art. His instrument is giving voice not to the privilege of a lofty elite but to his own human experience and—with help from Rachmaninoff—the hearts and minds of an entire generation.

When Petrov plays his violin, we witness the beauty of human community. When Petrov is murdered, we see the true colors of the cult of conformity.

From here Rostov begins to see even the most mundane Soviet initiatives in a new light. When the Commissar of Food orders the hotel to de-label, claiming that a wine list “runs counter to the ideals of the Revolution,” Rostov is enraged. Yet he is finally humble and wise enough to know this is not just about wine but the deeper human cost. “They won’t stop until they destroy everything that came before,” he laments.

When Nina, Rostov’s young friend and confidante, shrugs the whole thing off, saying, “It’s only wine,” Rostov counters with prescient awareness that hearkens back to the death of Petrov.

“A bottle of wine, it captures a moment in history,” Rostov says. “Its flavor tells a story of place of time of the ground beneath the winemaker’s feet—whether the season was wet or dry. But now we have to accept that none of that matters. …The absurdity of it all!”

Gripping a bottle of Chateauneuf–du–Pape, Rostov’s mind races through memories of his time in France, of his late sister, of the dirt, the vineyard, the workers. To erase this bottle is to erase a human story—and that story is plenty proletarian.

Years later, Nina finds her own passion for the communist cause, leaving the safety of the hotel and the comforts of Moscow to bolster the country’s agriculture. Yet now, with only the slightest details of Nina’s activism, Rostov somehow knows that her mission to “feed the starving masses” is bound to end with a fresh trail of corpses and despair. Why wouldn’t it?

It all has a certain logic, and Rostov is routinely reminded of the arc of such reasoning. But as Whittaker Chambers famously observed, communism ultimately lacks a “logic of the soul.”

Writing about an ex-Communist, whose daughter was embarrassed by her father’s defection, Chambers notes the moment she finally understood his change of heart:

“He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then—you will laugh at me—but you must not laugh at my father—and then—one night—in Moscow—he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”

For Rostov, the hotel walls are able to mute and muffle those screams—until they can no longer.

Amid the crescendo of civilizational madness, even from Rostov’s humble perch, it gets harder and harder to have patience with complaints about cultural excess. Stalin has replaced Lenin, and with him a new sadistic purge has ensued. The revolution has indeed come for the Metropol Hotel, but not for its manners and menus, wall art and wine cellars. It has come for Petrov, for Nina, and for Rostov himself.

The series reminds us that communism’s “logic of the mind” can only go so far before it butts against the human spirit and soul. Only when that happens can true progress begin.

By Joseph Sunde