The Moscow subway is the busiest one in the world. Every day about 8 million people use it. It's an enormous complex of richly decorated arcades, subterranean palaces with mural paintings representing the Communist Ideals. They are a feat of Stalin, who had the subway built in the 1930’s as a showpiece of his empire. Stations with names like Barricade, Revolution and The Red Way, showed the Soviet people how they should live. This proletarian paradise reflecting the spirit of Marx and Lenin now forms a sharp contrast with the reality of everyday life in Moscow, where greed is not only good but the only way to survive.
Nowadays the subway is facing terrorist attacks and the old materials - the system was built in the thirties - need replacing. The ‘diggers’, a group of men who, at the risk of their lives, expose the weak spots in the system. They also descend into the network of corridors below the subway to look for ‘Metro-2’, the highly secret metro system that Stalin had constructed even deeper under Moscow.
Armed with their knowledge of this underground labyrinth, the diggers played a crucial role in the storming of the musical-theatre ‘Nord-Ost’ where the audience had been taken hostage in October 2002.
