Remembering a Beloved Patron of Moscow Theater

It is next to impossible to imagine Moscow as we know it without Margarita Eskina. Eskina, who ran the Actors House in Moscow from the late 1980s until her death at age 75 on Feb. 11, was someone out of a fairy-tale, a 1930s Hollywood musical that ends happily and you believe it. Margarita Alexandrovna was the epitome of the cultured Muscovite, and I’m not talking about stiff collars or pointed pinkies at tea gatherings. I’m talking about the people who make Moscow what it is: a place filled with generosity amidst all of the hostility; a place graced with beauty despite the unending attacks of real estate hoods; a place steeped in the riches of art regardless of the creeping wasteland created by a cloying and jaded pop culture. Eskina was dedicated to helping give meaning to people’s lives. As the head of the Actors House, she was nearly a one-woman battering ram against the onslaught of cynicism. And over the years she was forced into more battles than I’m sure she ever imagined she would have to fight. Her first big confrontation came in 1990 when the old Actors House was damaged badly in a fire. You may know parts of this structure as the so-called Galereya Aktyor, the “Actor’s Gallery” shopping center on the corner of Tverskaya Ulitsa and Strastnoi Bulvar. This building, a place of age-old Russian theater and film tradition that dated back to the old VTO, or All-Russian Theater Society, obviously was too big a lure for some moneybags not to set it on fire so as to shove the rightful tenants out. It was a scandal that wouldn’t go away – until, as these things happen, it went away. Eskina was not about to give up, though. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the outgoing Soviet Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko (http://www.gubenko.mos.ru/) turned the building of his now-defunct ministry over to her to use as a new Actors House. Everyone complained at first that the new building at 35 Arbat was not as warm, as homey, as pleasant as the old one on Tverskaya, but Eskina breathed life into it almost instantly.