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“This is where the fire was,” he said, peering up through the windshield.

He maneuvered through traffic, turned down a side street, and pulled up to a fourteen-story prefab building indistinguishable from its neighbors. We met on a rainy afternoon in the south of the city. Two months ago, for example, Victor Ermolaev, a foreman who has worked for Moslift since 1979, averted a tragedy. And, if a hazardous situation does come up, it can be a bonus to have so many mechanics on hand. And maybe this chance is the only one, for many people.”īoth Moslift and MOS Otis say that serious elevator accidents and injuries are rare in the Russian capital. “But when you stuck in an elevator, you get a wonderful chance to talk and listen yourself. “We have an opportunity for frankly speaking with very rarely,” wrote Vladimir Shakhrin, Chaif’s lead singer, in an e-mail. As it happened, the musicians were in possession of some “flaming water,” or vodka, so the experience was a cheerful one, and the incident inspired a line in the 1996 song, “Rock’n’roll Tonight”: “Yesterday I was stuck in an elevator for the first time / It was a great opportunity to talk with myself.” In the late nineteen-eighties, the Russian rock band Chaif was stuck in a hotel elevator with the Russian rock band Kino. Indeed, some see getting stuck in the elevator as a blessing in disguise. Meanwhile, the rescue team is coming.” The goal is to get people out within thirty minutes, and both Moslift and MOS Otis say they regularly achieve this, rendering the Muscovite elevator-entrapment experience more of a workaday inconvenience than a newsworthy event. We call to his relatives, we can call to his job. Then, we help so that he won’t be nervous. “The most important thing is to use a kind voice. “We work with the whole person,” explained Valentine Kazakova, who has been a Moslift dispatcher for ten years. There is more to the art of elevator rescue than just sending a team out. “If it is not our elevator, we try to transfer the call,” he said. Calling Moslift, said Titarenko, is still the default for many a Muscovite. These buttons don’t always work, so these days people use their cell phones. Every elevator in Moscow is supposed to be equipped with a button to connect passengers with the responsible company’s dispatchers.

An address popped up, highlighted in red: someone had just gotten trapped. Three dispatchers sat at their desks taking calls as data blinked from the screens. The Moslift director then gestured around the “Situation Room,” where a wall of modern screens offered a contrast to the rest of the building’s brown-toned Soviet décor. “You are lucky if you get stuck in our elevator,” said Titarenko, a jovial, energetic man who smelled like cigarettes. (Some two hundred and fifty small, largely unregulated companies handle the city’s remaining lifts). Today, Moslift is still in charge of about half the elevators in Moscow, while MOS Otis is responsible for just under half. In 1992, Moscow’s government decided to take part of Moslift and create a joint company with the American company Otis. “If anything happens, we come and save you.” During the Soviet era, state-owned Moslift oversaw every elevator in Moscow. “We are like Batman,” said Evgeniy Titarenko, general director of Moslift, on a recent morning. That’s why teams of specially-trained elevator rescue mechanics roam the city day and night, freeing people. (In Chicago, which has a just under a quarter as many lifts as Moscow, the number of yearly entrapment incidents reported to the city is closer to a hundred). And a lot of people get stuck in them-depending on whom you ask, anywhere from an estimated hundred and twenty thousand to more than two hundred thousand people get stuck in a Moscow elevator each year. Many are old-every fifth elevator in the Russian capital has exceeded its lifespan. Moscow has a lot of elevators-upward of a hundred and twenty thousand, which is more than twice as many as New York City.