Back in London for one of my periodic visits, I notice I’m starting to acquire the ability to see London with Muscovite eyes.

I see, certainly, the famous ‘multiculturalism’ of London. This is what many Muscovites report back to me after visits. Here. ‘How did you like it?’ I ask anxiously. One of my neighbours, a polite man, sums up the prevailing impression many have: ‘I had this idea of England as the land of tradition and class…I didn’t realize there were so many dirty blacks and Asians here.’

I noticed this as well, the sheer amount of blacks and Asians here. Sometimes this struck me negatively. I got onto the tube in West London at around 10.30 pm on Friday, on a train heading into the centre. There was a party of about eight Anglo-Caribbeans making merry on their way to the centre for a night out – seven girls and one man. The girls were all very overweight, but the guy, wearing sunglasses and sitting in the middle of them like some kind of sheikh, seemed to like that. One of the women was standing up and dancing, holding the pole of the carriage like she was on stage, her large posterior sticking out, her platted hair whirling about. The others laughed and egged her on.

‘Ah man, I need to piss’, one of the girls complained, taking a swig of her alco-pop. ‘Why don’ you just stick your arse out the train and take a piss on the platform?’ suggested the dancing lady, to general hilarity. Her suggestion was greeted with icy silence by the four white people on the carriage. ‘Ha ha! Look at the white people sitting there looking all shocked’ said the woman. We sat there, looking all shocked, too chicken to tell her to sit down and stop making a scene.

Our disapproving stares and accusatory silences had no effect on the girl – she was shameless. And shame is precisely what you need to be ‘civil’, to live in a civilized community. That’s what the Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote, 2500 years ago –aidos, or modesty, was given to humans by Zeus, to enable them to live together in communities. If a human was locking in aidos, Protagoras said, then he was not civilized, but a wild beast, and deserved to be thrown out of the city.

Some such thoughts were going through my head. I was thinking racist thoughts. I felt like saying ‘you’re really doing your race a service, you know, acting so shamelessly. You’re really a walking advert for the success of black integration into European civilization’. But to say that, out loud, would be unforgivable. But that’s what the four white people were thinking.

You saw other aspects of London’s multiculturalism on the tube. The stations were lined with posters for a new opera, a collaboration between the English National Opera and the Asian Dub Foundation, called ‘Colonel Quadaffi, a living myth’. This is a man whose government has been linked to the bombing of a Pan-Am flight in 1988, in which 270 people died, many of them British. And now the ENO is making an opera about him, using government funding. Can you imagine the Kremlin using state money to fund a new musical, ‘Basayev!'

London is one of the gay capitals of the world, too. There’s a new radio station, ‘Gaydar’, playing disco and house just for London’s gay community. There are adverts put up for a new TV station too, called ‘Trade TV’ (trade is gay slang for casual sex). Its slogan is ‘Fulfilment without commitment’. Another poster on the tube says ‘Homophobic discrimination at work, it’s so over’. It’s a clever poster – it makes being a homophobic look uncool, like wearing flares. What would those hairy Orthodox priests and their skinhead cohorts in Moscow say?

It’s easy to take the piss out of London’s tolerance and hyper-pluralism. I switched on the TV on Sunday night, and Channel 4 was showing a drama about a Somali refugee trying to assimilate with a community of London Caribbeans. A white middle class woman stood in the left of the screen, translating the lyrics of a Caribbean rap song into sign language, for any Somali immigrants who are hard of hearing.

But at other times, you marvel at how well this city of foreigners works, at how it somehow retains its identity even in the midst of such overwhelming multiculturalism, precisely because its identity is this very openness and multiculturalism. That is the city’s ‘Idea’, in the Russian sense.

Couldn’t that be Russia’s Idea too, considering how well cities like Kazan work, with its amazing mixture of different ethnic groups? But London and Kazan work as multicultural centres partly because they are affluent. Money is the oil that stops the cogs of different ethnicities from grinding against each other. When there is wealth, there is a large middle class, with its sense of decency and politeness (however phony) that stops people from, say, attacking drunk Caribbean women on the tube. In poorer areas – the British midlands, or the south of Russia, say – there is less money, and more of a grim struggle for survival. In those circumstances, multiculturalism comes unstuck.

Still, I marvelled at how well it seemed to work in London, on the whole, how little friction there seemed to be. I took a taxi back from north London to west London, and the driver was from Eritrea. He told me how he had been tortured in his homeland, how he was a political refugee. I initially didn’t believe him, I’m ashamed to say. I just thought he was a faking immigrant. But he’s been here for six years, that’s a long time to fake it. He really seemed to love London. ‘Everyone is accepted here’, he said.

Earlier, I’d been on the tube, and watched as two girls, one black one white, stepped into the carriage, deep in conversation. The black girl looked so intelligent, so lively and interesting, so self-possessed, and her friendship with the white girl, who seemed to be from a well-off and educated background, was clearly one of equals. And opposite me on the same tube sat a black man reading the Guardian, and he too looked so intelligent, and so middle class, in his shoes, clothes, posture and expression.

You can laugh at me, for being so bourgeois, and feeling so threatened earlier by the anarchic expression of black working class culture (the lady dancing on the tube), and so reassured by manifestations of a growing black middle class (the man reading the Guardian). Well, you’re absolutely right, I am encouraged, because the thought of a permanent black working class, unable to attain the civic or intellectual skills to join the white middle class, is depressing (unless you want to be confirmed in your racist prejudices), and evidence to the contrary is heartening.

English men are ‘blokes’, very down to earth, no nonsense, their lives are delineated by simple poles – the cup of tea, the football match on Saturday, the Sunday fried breakfast, etc. They are funny, with a deflating humour of under-statement, which makes everything small. The Englishman staggers out of the jungle, his arms scratched, his eyes red, his hair a scraggly mess, and says ‘How about a nice cup of tea?’ That is Englishness – an ability to comprehend the full horrors and ecstasies of human existence (that’s why we are so in love with Russian writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Bulgakov), yet also able, absurdly, surreally, to observe the civil niceties of human existence, because somehow that cool humour, that appreciation of the small things in life like a cup of tea, makes the horror and the mystery more manageable.

It’s been a pleasure to be back here. I am struck above all by the creativity of London – it’s really the most, or the second most, creative city in the world. I am back here to do a course in electronic music, and the school where I’m studying, in Old Street, is a marvel. It’s dedicated to teaching young people how to make dance music, and it does this to a very professional standard. How amazing, that people can be trained to make drum & bass, or acid trance, with the same professionalism as one could be trained to be a dentist or an accountant!

And yet Londoners seem numbed by the variety of creative options at their disposal. Every day, hundreds of different plays, gigs, club nights, exhibitions, readings, shows, concerts and happenings are lined up for their amusement and distraction. But their nerve endings have become burnt out, it takes ever bigger or more shocking spectacles to jolt them out of their apathy. The greatest cultural scene in the world is laid out before them, and they stay home and watch reality TV.

England is obsessed with reality TV, and has been for the last six years or so. About 30% of the public attention is permanently devoted to reality TV. Big Brother 6 has just finished here, it was won by a guy with Tourette’s syndrome. The finale attracted a massive live crowd, tens of thousands of people, gathered to cheer or boo these complete nobodies as they emerged blinking from the house. It was like something from the future, from some fucked-up future where millions of people don’t care about politics anymore and are only interested in the circus, in the dream of celebrity, punctuated by the occasional bomb.

Others try to keep up with the cultural scene in London. But it moves so quickly, its exhausting. In Moscow, in the live music scene for example, you have about 30 bands in endless rotation – Billy’s Band, Jah Division, Blast, B2, etc etc etc. The same rubbish bands playing every week, for the last 15 years. And if occasionally some foreign act, long since past their prime, are so desperate for a come-back that they come to Moscow, they are greeted with spastic gratitude by the crowd. It’s because it’s a closed scene, cut-off from the rest of the world, going round in the same bored circles. If Muscovites don’t like it, they should lobby Luzhkov to pay less attention to his bees and more to making Moscow a more open, vibrant and culturally-connected city. Moscow even manages to screw up the few big acts that deign to play there – Eric Clapton was booked to play, and the license for the Red Square concert was abruptly revoked, two days before the gig, for no obvious reason. Someone wasn’t bribed sufficiently, I suppose.

London, by contrast, has an exceptionally open, globally connected and competitive cultural market. New bands become cool for about two weeks before they are forgotten, before they totally disappear, and are replaced by the next cool band. There’s an insane, unremitting search for the Next Cool Thing – Mali guitar, Tamil Tiger rap, grime, breakbeats, tech house, electro punk. Londoners are literally spoilt for choice, and it is intimidating, trying to keep up with all the different things going on. I suppose one could say that it’s totally fragmented, the cultural scene. There isn’t an ‘English cultural scene’ as such. There’s not even a ‘dance scene’– there’s the breakbeat scene, and the drum & bass scene, and the grime scene, etc etc.

You could find that variety exhilarating…or mourn the loss of an artistic scene that could unite a city into one, like tragedy did for Athens, like Pushkin did for St Petersburg, like Shakespeare once did for London. But London is too big to be a single, unified city now…it’s hundreds of villages – Islington, Kensington, Notting Hill, Hoxton, Brixton, the West End, Chinatown, Kings Cross, West Ham, Shepherds Bush, each with its own scene, its own restaurants and pubs, clubs and theatres, its own identity.

And Russia is here too, in the cultural mix. This week, Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky theatre are the guests of honour at the London Proms. I saw their performance of Shostakovich’s Babi Yar opus on TV on Saturday night. I rang up my grandparents to check they were watching – they are such big fans of the Mariinsky, they flew to St Petersburg last year, at the age of 80, just to watch Gergiev conduct. ‘Yes, we’re watching, dear’, said my grandmother. ‘Did you see the violinist, Repin, play in the last section? No? What a pity. He was marvellous…probably the best violinist I’ve ever seen.’

I’m not a great lover of classical music, but the Babi Yar symphony was truly riveting. There on the stage, in the middle of London’s polite cultural scene, was a stage full of Russians, singing of “the stench of vodka and onions”. They looked like aliens, like elves visiting the land of humans as a gesture of inter-species friendship. There was Gergiev, feted by London as a great genius, dressed in black tie and tails but still looking like a wild Caucasian, twitching, shaking, dripping with sweat. There was the lead bassist, Mikhail Petrenko, eyes wide, big lips and curly blond hair like a child, singing Yevtushenko’s poetry with such earnestness and passion. The audience was absolutely transfixed, lost in wonder at the sufferings of the Russian people, particularly when the poetry sang of ‘the fear of the knock on the door, the fear of speaking to strangers’, lost in reverie at the depth of Russian feeling, compared to our own English mildness. We have to import our suffering. And there, in Yevtushenko’s words, was a plea for multiculturalism and tolerance, a plea for an open Russia. ‘Let the Internationale ring out, only when the last anti-Semite is buried under the ground.’ Truly, Russia looked attractive from these shores.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

London, August 21, 2006