There are basketball and tennis courts, and many Ping-Pong tables, but the park also embraces extreme sports in a way that would thrill personal injury lawyers in the West, with places for skating, bicycle jumping, skateboarding and the obstacle-course bounding of parkour and free-running. There is also beach volleyball (thanks to tons of trucked-in sand) and even pétanque, the French bocce, played nonstop outside a cafe that could have been imported directly from Provence.

The park is named for Maxim Gorky, the Bolshevik writer and political activist who died in 1936. And in transforming it from the surly and stressed-out Russian capital, the country’s contemporary leaders seem to be echoing a Soviet strategy of making public spaces as grand as possible — subway stations with chandeliers and mosaics, for instance — all to make people feel a bit better about constraints in other aspects of their lives.

These days in the park, no one asks if two women holding hands are sisters or lovers, if the family members eating ice cream are immigrants from Vietnam or tourists from Beijing.

In the park, away from the drone of state-controlled television and its reminders of how entrenched Russia often remains in its past, the possibility of living in a city where people feel as free and empowered as those in New York or London seems tantalizingly near.

The park has rules, of course, evidenced by signs like “No Swimming” near the ponds and fountains. But these are regarded by Russian parkgoers less as an edict than as someone’s opinion, much like the rules against parking on sidewalks.