this place was nice, safe and very clean. the staff is friendly and the hostel has a really good location. they can deal with your registration for 800 roubles.
good points : free breakfast, good location, nice common room and bars and restaurants nearby, free internet
bad points : no locker at all, and only 2 showers.

The Arbat Hotel was a pleasant surprise - very clean, plenty of hot water (after travelling on the Trans Siberian this was wonderful!) and in a great position. Just a few minutes from Arbat Street and all its restaurants and shops and walking distance (about 25 mins) to Red Square and the Kremlin. Unfriendly staff? Whilst we found the majority of Russians to be a dour lot, the staff were happy to assist us with our enquiries and one even joked with us! I would certainly return to this hotel.

I stayed there for a week beggining July 2008. Average experience, no service attitude at all except of the businness center guy. Good location but dated hotel. No black out in the rooms. It was bright allready at 04:00 so i couldn t sleep properly.

My wife and I stayed in early autumn for 6 nights. We would happily stay again. A corner "junior suite" with separate bedroom, lounge, study/alcove, bathroom and a kind of foyer where the wardrobe cupboards and fridge were located. Very quiet, light and airy and with a comfortable bed and a pleasant courtyard. Good location near Smolenskaya metro, supermarket and restaurants along Arbat Street and a quick metro trip to anywhere we wanted to go.

Breakfast was rather good: all the choice in the world including on most days a special omelette chef. Only negative is that the coffee is the rubbishy US-style brown water, but on the other hand that is common to many hotels.

In our room all very little touched since the 50s at a guess, giving a nice feel. Large bathroom recently jazzed up, but first caution: the shower module in our room was really quite tiny, despite the large room it was in, and was difficult for our small to average sizes - larger people would find it impossible!

The other caution is that internet access - in their "business centre" - is outrageously expensive, as others have noted. But maybe it is a market thing (like the outrageous cost of hotels in general in Moscow) due to the paucity of competition: we discovered it is extremely difficult to find an internet cafe in Moscow and we wasted too much time going to places listed in current edition travel guides or the local phone book to find they no longer exist. There is one half way along old Arbat Steet, but it's very seedy and very surly.

Also as commented, the reception staff are not very cheerful, but who cares and you will soon discover that is pretty standard for (at least) service occupations in Russia. You do start to get a knack for getting past that, however, especially if you have the courtesy to use a few basic Russian words or if you can share a little joke with them - being grinningly hopeless with the coins often works because so many are quite obsessed with being given exact change (is there a terrible shortage of small change - a bit like Italy in that respect?)