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Joseph Stalin issued a birthday proclamation: "[Moscow represents] the liberation movement of toiling mankind from capitalist slavery. . . . Agents of imperialism are trying, in this way and that, to provoke a new war. [But] it is known that peace-loving peoples are looking to Moscow with hope as the capital of a great peace-loving power and as a mighty pillar of peace. . . ."
The fact was that the world saw in Moscow's domes of power, in her old & new shadows of violence, the capital and nerve center of an international conspiracy which prods and stabs into the world's remotest hearts. In its 800th year, Moscow the holy and the loved threatened to unleash a conflagration compared to which the city's earlier catastrophes would be like gentle tremors on a sleeping face, and which would terribly verify the ancient prophesy of a Russian churchman: "The third Rome, Moscow, stands. A fourth there will not be."
*Even in those days, the British got around. Long-Arm's mother was an English girl called Gyda, who was the daughter of King Harold. † When it grew too narrow, an outer wall was built around the merchants' quarters, known as Kitai Gorod (or Chinatown), a name picked up from the Tartars. Later, two even larger walls were built—one of white stone (which gave its lame to Bely Gorod, or White Town, where the Czar's servants lived) and a wooden wall (which gave its name to Zemlyanoi Gorod, Wooden Town, for workmen and soldiers).