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# Ilf and Petrov on the closed doors of Moscow circuses, theatres and cinemas
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-moskve-liubiat-zapirat-dveri/
- Published: 2018-03-27T20:13:28.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:00:03.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Moscow, Observations, Mores, Humour

Muscovites love to lock their doors. Thousands of grand front entrances are boarded up from the inside, and hundreds of thousands of citizens creep into their flats by the back stairs. The year 1918 is long past, the very notion of a "raid on a flat" has grown hazy, the house guards organised by tenants for their safety have vanished, the problem of street traffic is being solved, vast power stations are going up, and the greatest scientific discoveries are being made, yet there is no man who would devote his life to solving the problem of locked doors.

Who is the man who will solve the riddle of the cinemas, theatres and circuses?

Three thousand people must enter the circus within ten minutes through a single door, open on one leaf only. The other ten doors, specially designed to admit great crowds, are locked. Who knows why they are locked? Perhaps some twenty years ago a learned donkey was stolen from the circus stables, and ever since the management has been walling up its convenient entrances and exits in terror. Or perhaps a draught once caught the celebrated King of the Air, and the locked doors are merely an echo of the scandal the king kicked up.

In theatres and cinemas the public is let out in small batches, supposedly to avoid a crush. Avoiding a crush is very easy: one need only open the exits, of which there is an abundance. But instead the management resorts to force. The ushers link hands to form a living barrier and so hold the audience under siege for no less than half an hour. And the doors, the cherished doors, locked back in the reign of Paul I, remain locked to this day.

Fifteen thousand football enthusiasts, excited by the gallant play of the Moscow team, are obliged to fight their way to the tram through a gap so narrow that a single lightly armed warrior could hold off forty thousand barbarians, reinforced by two siege towers.

The sports stadium has no roof, but it has several gates. Only the wicket is open. One can get out only by smashing the gates down. After every big fixture they are smashed down. But, careful to uphold a sacred tradition, each time they are neatly rebuilt and firmly locked.

*The Twelve Chairs*, Ilf and Petrov, 1927\. So little has changed