Moscow, 2013, in an Underground Bar in Lviv
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 15 November 2026
There are places in the world where history seems temporarily to have forgotten to exercise its jurisdiction. They are usually underground, poorly ventilated and illuminated by lighting arrangements that would horrify an interior designer but delight an anthropologist. One such place exists in the centre of Lviv, where young people congregate in a basement beneath the ancient streets of this most European of Ukrainian cities, drinking, flirting, arguing, dancing and generally conducting themselves as though the world above them were not engaged in one of the most consequential wars of the twenty-first century. The walls are covered in geometric patterns, violet lights illuminate the faces of strangers and the music is sufficiently loud to render philosophical conversation both impossible and irresistible.
There is something about this establishment that reminds me irresistibly of Moscow in 2013. This is an observation that requires considerable explanation, because to compare anything in contemporary Ukraine favourably with the Russian capital risks appearing either politically obtuse or morally deranged. Nevertheless the comparison is not intended as an endorsement of Russia, still less of the catastrophic imperial ambitions of its present leadership. Rather it is a recollection of a particular form of urban energy that existed in Moscow before Russia completed its descent into authoritarian militarism, before the seizure of Crimea, before the trenches of Donbas and before the Kremlin turned its murderous attention to the wholesale destruction of its neighbour.
Moscow in 2013 was an extraordinary city, notwithstanding the gathering shadows of political repression. It possessed a peculiar combination of immense wealth, youthful recklessness, intellectual excitement, sexual opportunity and a pervasive conviction that tomorrow might somehow prove even more interesting than today. Its nightlife was famously excessive, but beneath the expensive restaurants and ostentatious nightclubs existed another Moscow, a subterranean society of students, artists, disillusioned professionals, expatriates, musicians and wandering intellectuals who came together in obscure drinking establishments to discuss everything from the latest philosophical fashions to the deplorable state of Russian politics. The conversations were often absurd, the alcohol was frequently dreadful and the romantic entanglements were invariably more complicated than anybody had anticipated.
Yet there was a sense of possibility. Russia, although already travelling in an ominous political direction, had not entirely extinguished the cultural energies released by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow retained a cosmopolitan character. Its young inhabitants travelled abroad, learned foreign languages, consumed European literature, experimented with artistic identities and imagined futures in which their country might eventually become something approximating a normal European state. There was a fundamental contradiction between the growing authoritarianism of the Kremlin and the anarchic freedom of the capital's younger generations. In retrospect, the contradiction was never likely to be resolved in favour of liberty.
One must not romanticise that period unduly. By 2013 Vladimir Putin had already returned to the presidency, opposition demonstrations had been suppressed, independent political activity was increasingly dangerous and Russia's war against Georgia in 2008 had demonstrated the imperial instincts of the ruling elite. The imprisonment of dissidents and the prosecution of political opponents were hardly concealed. Nevertheless, for those who occupied the little bars and underground clubs of Moscow, a kind of private freedom survived. It was possible to believe that the political world and the personal world could remain permanently separate. History was about to demonstrate the foolishness of that assumption.
What is remarkable about this little bar in Lviv is that it recreates the atmosphere of that vanished Moscow, but in the service of an entirely different national destiny. Here there is no imperial arrogance, no expectation that neighbouring peoples must submit to the dictates of a great power and no complacent assumption that geopolitical catastrophes happen only to other people. The young Ukrainians drinking beneath the streets of Lviv know perfectly well what war means. Many have friends or relatives serving in the Armed Forces. Some have lost people they loved. Others have fled cities that no longer exist in any recognisable form. They have experienced air raid warnings, electricity shortages, mobilisation anxieties and the peculiar emotional exhaustion of living in a country whose future is perpetually being decided by artillery.
And yet they dance.
This may be the most politically significant thing about them. The Kremlin has sought not merely to conquer Ukrainian territory but to extinguish the independent cultural and political existence of Ukraine. It has attempted to persuade Ukrainians that their national aspirations are futile, that their European ambitions are artificial and that their proper destiny lies in submission to Moscow. Against this programme of national annihilation stands the apparently trivial spectacle of a young woman dancing beneath purple lights while her friends drink cocktails and exchange messages on their mobile telephones. These ordinary human pleasures represent precisely the kind of independent existence that Russian imperialism is attempting to destroy.
There is a profound difference between the underground nightlife of Moscow in 2013 and that of Lviv today. In Moscow, youthful hedonism often operated as an escape from political reality. The implicit bargain was that the state could conduct its affairs, however unpleasantly, provided that ordinary people retained sufficient private pleasures to make life tolerable. In Lviv, by contrast, nightlife exists in conscious defiance of political reality. Nobody can pretend that the war is somebody else's problem. The apparent frivolity of the scene is therefore deceptive. It is a declaration that Ukrainian society will not surrender the ordinary privileges of civilisation merely because its enemies have acquired an appetite for destroying them.
The atmosphere has other similarities with that lost world. There is the same curious intimacy between strangers, facilitated by alcohol and the temporary suspension of social conventions. Conversations begin without introductions and terminate without conclusions. Attractive women appear from the darkness with expressions that may indicate romantic interest, intellectual curiosity or merely the desire for another drink. Men of uncertain employment and questionable sobriety make extravagant declarations of friendship. There is the constant sensation that something extraordinary might happen before the evening is over, although experience suggests that the extraordinary event will probably be an argument about the queue for the lavatory.
These are not insignificant matters. A city reveals itself most authentically not in its official monuments or municipal ceremonies but in the places where its inhabitants behave without the inhibitions imposed by public respectability. An underground bar can tell us more about a society's aspirations than a government ministry. Here we discover what people find amusing, what they consider attractive, how they negotiate social boundaries and whether they retain the ability to imagine a future beyond the circumstances in which they presently find themselves. The sociology of drunkenness is an underrated discipline, and its fieldwork is considerably more agreeable than most forms of academic inquiry.
In Lviv the results are encouraging. The young people who inhabit these establishments are unmistakably European in their cultural assumptions. Their clothes, music, language, romantic expectations and forms of social interaction belong to the same broad civilisation as those of Berlin, Warsaw, Prague or London. This does not mean that Ukrainian identity is somehow dependent upon imitation of Western Europe. On the contrary, Ukrainians have developed their own distinctive synthesis of traditional social relations, contemporary individualism, political patriotism and a deeply ingrained suspicion of excessive governmental authority. The result is an unusually resilient form of social freedom, capable of surviving circumstances that would have shattered the morale of many wealthier societies.
There is also something poignant about the comparison with Moscow because it reminds us of the alternative future that Russia destroyed for itself. Had the Russian Federation continued along a path of political liberalisation, respect for international borders and cultural openness, Moscow might today have been one of the great centres of European intellectual and artistic life. Its universities, theatres, musicians, writers and extraordinary capacity for collective enthusiasm might have contributed enormously to a continent stretching peacefully from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Instead its rulers chose militarism, repression and imperial nostalgia. The cultural vitality of Moscow was not sufficient to prevent the destruction of its political freedom, and many of the people who embodied that vitality have since emigrated, fallen silent or been persecuted.
Ukraine has chosen the opposite direction. Its European aspirations have been purchased at a terrible price, and nobody can confidently predict how many more sacrifices will be required before the country secures a durable peace. Nevertheless there is an important moral distinction between a society in which young people are encouraged to forget politics because politics is dangerous and a society in which young people embrace ordinary pleasures because their political independence is worth defending. The first is a symptom of resignation. The second is an expression of hope.
The underground bars of Lviv also remind us that the war has not suspended human nature. People still want to fall in love, or at least to experience the temporary approximation of falling in love that can be achieved after midnight in the company of an attractive stranger. They still experience jealousy, embarrassment, sexual curiosity, romantic disappointment and the faintly ridiculous conviction that the next person they meet may transform their lives. They remain capable of cruelty, kindness, vanity and generosity, often within the space of a single evening. War does not make people morally superior. It merely places their familiar human imperfections against a background of vastly greater seriousness.
Perhaps this is why such places attract the middle-aged observer as well as the young. For the young, an underground bar offers the possibility of an unfolding future. For the middle-aged, it offers the opportunity to revisit the emotional geography of earlier decades, when the world seemed inexhaustibly full of possibilities and the consequences of one's decisions were not yet entirely apparent. In Lviv today there is an additional dimension to this melancholy. One is reminded not only of one's own vanished youth but also of a vanished European historical moment, when Moscow itself appeared capable of becoming something other than the capital of an aggressive imperial power.
There is no reason why nostalgia for the energy of Moscow in 2013 should entail nostalgia for the Russian state. Cities and governments are different things, and the tragedy of Russia is precisely that its government has betrayed so much of what was admirable in its urban civilisation. The pleasure of finding something of that lost energy in Lviv is therefore accompanied by a curious sense of historical justice. The cultural vitality that authoritarian Russia has progressively suffocated survives, in a different and distinctly Ukrainian form, in a country that Russia has attempted to subjugate.
Eventually the evening ends. The music continues behind the basement door, but the visitor must return to the streets above, where the November air is cold and the architecture carries the accumulated memories of several vanished empires. There may be an air raid warning before dawn. Electricity may fail. Somewhere in eastern Ukraine, soldiers will be maintaining their positions in freezing trenches while the inhabitants of Lviv sleep off their excesses. These realities cannot be reconciled by any simple philosophical formula, and it would be an insult to those fighting to suggest that an entertaining evening in a bar constitutes some grand act of military resistance.
Nevertheless the connection between the two worlds is real. Soldiers do not fight merely for territory or for the abstract sovereignty of a state. They fight so that ordinary life may continue, so that young people may dance without permission, so that strangers may meet and fall foolishly in love, so that intellectuals may argue without fear and so that the peculiar, beautiful and occasionally absurd freedoms of urban civilisation may survive.
Moscow in 2013 possessed much of this energy, but its political institutions ultimately betrayed it. Lviv in 2026 possesses the same restless vitality, but its people are fighting to ensure that it has a future.
And that, perhaps, is the deepest significance of a crowded underground bar illuminated by purple lights. The resemblance to Moscow is unmistakable, but the historical direction is reversed. What was once the fading promise of a society approaching political darkness has become the stubborn exuberance of a society struggling towards freedom.
The dancers may not be thinking about any of this. They are probably thinking about the next drink, the next embrace or whether somebody has finally vacated the lavatory. But that is precisely the point. A free country is one in which people are permitted to think about such things, even while history rages around them.
The tragedy of Moscow is that it lost this freedom. The achievement of Ukraine is that, against almost unimaginable odds, it refuses to surrender it.
