March 01, 2007

Vanishing Act

“With the beginning of the new century,
as if someone waved a magic wand,
everything changed.
Moscow is overwhelmed with
the manic haste of any world capital.
Fast money is creating tall buildings,
which have sprung up
overnight on every street.”

These words, which could well have been written by a modern Muscovite, were in fact written by Boris Pasternak about the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, pre-revolutionary Russia was in the midst of an economic boom and Moscow merchants responded with the frenzied construction of factories, multilevel homes and offices, overwhelming the capital’s quiet central neighborhoods.

One hundred years later, the seams of Old Moscow are again splitting from the economic pressure of new construction.

Since 1990, some 640 buildings in Moscow that were officially designated as having architectural and cultural value have been razed. At least 150 others currently have “emergency status,” due to their advanced state of disrepair, according to the website Moscow Under Threat (sos.archi.ru). This equals about one-third of all the city’s remaining historical landmarks.

At this pace, Moscow will be totally rebuilt in a quarter century, forever losing the wooden homes of Pushkin and Lermontov, to say nothing of the capital’s many baroque estates, and its constructivist and classical gems.

Andrei Batalov, art historian and deputy director of the Moscow Kremlin Museums, made an apocalyptic forecast: “Even before the end of the current Moscow mayor’s term, our historical environment is likely to be totally destroyed.”

Voentorg, a military supply store built in 1913 and one of the capital’s best examples of modernist architecture, stood empty in central Moscow for nearly 10 years while it was owned by the city. Almost immediately after the building changed hands in 2002, it was knocked down. It is a classic story of New Moscow overtaking Old Moscow. A new shopping center will soon open in its place.

Last October, an 18th-century foundry disappeared overnight. A small landmark under federal protection, it was taken apart despite federal authorities’ prohibitions.

Tyopliye Ryadi, Moscow’s first covered central marketplace, dated to the 19th century. It was partially dismantled in the late 1990s to make way for a multilevel garage. Ironically, the marketplace was under “municipal protection” throughout the course of its demise (see page 34).

Quite often, architectural monuments are destroyed behind large panels advertising their restoration. When the panels are removed, passersby see a concrete replica of the landmark, often with added stories and usually constructed of completely different materials. The current “reconstruction” of the Moskva Hotel is the poster-child of this trend. Yet lovers of Old Moscow, outraged at the cynicism with which their city is being remade, are starting to fight back, educating their fellow citizens about the architecture that is being lost.

MKN, Moskva Kotoroy Net (“Moscow That Is No More”), was established in 2003 after the razing of Voentorg. At a spontaneous candlelight vigil in front of the beloved landmark, it became clear how rapidly and how tragically irreversible are current construction plans. Today, MKN’s website (moskva.kotoroy.net) overflows with graphics and text chronicling the rampant destruction of ancient Moscow buildings. This virtual hub of citizen activism has built a broad network of individuals, united in their desire to exchange information rapidly and take quick action.

In mid-December, a passerby saw construction workers knocking down a fence that stands outside the former clinic of psychiatrist Professor Usoltsev. The Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel was a once a patient there and during that period, in addition to his paintings, he designed a fence for the institution. The wooden fence was built by the art nouveau architect Fyodor Shekhtel and was listed in old travel guides as the “Whimsical Fence.” Yet it never made it onto Moscow’s list of landmarks and hospital administrators for some reason decided to dismantle the fence and replace it with a new, decidedly less artistic one.

The alarm was sounded on MKN’s blog: “The fence (supposedly designed by M. Vrubel, architect F. Shekhtel) is being destroyed in an orderly, rapid manner. The wooden parts are simply being hacked to pieces, the stone columns ruthlessly turned into plaster, damaging the majolica inserts, replacing the wooden fence with a low barrier made of red-brown corrugated iron.”

Coordinating via the Internet and by phone, MKN activists got the evening news to cover the deconstruction, faxed the city architectural preservation committee an emergency request to add the fence to its list of cultural heritage sites, and managed to stop demolition the next day, saving half of the fence. Dubbed “another small victory,” the campaign is documented on the MKN website, along with other victories (and many unfortunate failures).

“We are not a politically-oriented group, despite having attracted so much attention from the media and Moscow authorities,” said Konstantin Sumarokov, one of MKN’s core members. “I agree that people get the government they deserve, and merely waving political slogans only perpetuates the cycle that we are in. Our mission is cultural education.”

Indeed, the public’s fear of waking up and seeing favorite nooks and crannies of Old Moscow forever disappeared is manifest in the sudden popularity of books about Old Moscow. MKN’s book, From Prechistensky to Arbat Gates sold out all 5,000 copies of its print run in two months. “According to our business plan,” Sumarokov said, “the book would sell out in 18 months under the most optimistic scenario.” A second volume is already in the works.

Other books published last fall include: Chronicle of the Demolition of Old Moscow, 1990-2006, compiled by a group of journalists; 1890-2000: A Guide to Moscow’s Modern Architecture, by an Italian researcher Alessandra Latur; Alexei Mitrofanov’s Walks Around Old Moscow: Arbat; A Photoguide From Tverskaya to Gorky Street and Back Through Old Moscow.

MKN’s book takes the reader around central Moscow, describing buildings that no longer exist, telling of their long-dead residents’ contribution to Russian culture and to the identity of the city. The chapter “Master’s Home,” for example, tells of the house where Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his novel, The Master and Margarita. It weaves together reminiscences of Bulgakov’s friends with the unique history of the house itself. At a reading, Bulgakov noted that this house, specifically the basement workplace, served as the prototype for the Master’s home.

Bulgakov’s home, along with other homes described in the book, sits between Ostozhenka and Prechistenka streets, in the geographic triangle that has arguably seen the most change since the 1990s. Unofficially called the Golden Mile, this is where countless “elite” apartment buildings first appeared. Some of these luxury apartments sell for $33,000 per square meter. Such prices are an incentive to “restore” centrally-located landmarks and to maximize available space by adding upper floors or basements.

From Prechistensky to Arbat Gates is scathing in its criticism of such development: “The significance of our heritage is sacrificed for the ambitions of wealthy people, who have not learned to value our national treasures. Instead, they remake old estates and houses, thereby destroying the spirit of Ostozhenka.”

An important catalyst sparking the current preservationist wave was the 2002 exhibit, “Protiv Loma” (“Against Wrecking”), organized by journalist Konstantin Mikhailov and targeting Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s “politics of destruction.” For architectural activists, Luzhkov has come to personify the wanton razing of important landmarks to make room for new construction.

It is a common trend for property owners (including the city) to let historic buildings sit abandoned for years, until they begin to crumble. Repairs are delayed and owners shrug, saying they don’t have money to properly renovate the property. Then along comes a buyer, who does have the money, yet does not want to spend it on costly restorations, but on “more cost-effective” new construction.

Pozharsky House on Bolshaya Lubyanka street is a beautiful baroque ensemble that has been covered by a shameful green net for three years without seeing any actual restoration. Similarly, the majestic Razumovsky Palace, built in 1803 by count Alexei Razumovsky, was part of a glorious estate that had four ponds and a kilometer-long greenhouse where, among other things, the count grew Seville oranges. Today trees grow inside Razumovsky Castle, its roof long destroyed by fire.

The future of these two buildings, and hundreds of others like them, is bleak: after reaching the point of no return, they are likely to be leveled on the pretext of “reconstruction.”

Another possible outcome is a pompous unveiling of a shining copy of the original landmark – as done with Christ the Savior Cathedral, the Moskva Hotel and others. These are derided as “Luzhkov molds” by preservationists, as they are made to look like the original from the outside, replacing bricks with concrete and adding floors or an underground garage for the investor’s needs. Moscow, the architectural activists say, is becoming a stage set full of life-size models.

Part of the problem is with the development model. City rules do not give investors sufficient incentive to undertake proper restoration. They are required to fully finance the remodeling, but then give back half of the historic property’s space to the city. “Nobody is interested in restoration,” said Sumarokov, “there is no incentive for an investor to buy a dilapidated estate house and restore it. It’s much more cost effective to wait until it’s a dangerous eyesore and remove it from the valuable piece of land.”

The other half of the problem is that conservation laws are ambiguous and poorly enforced. For example, in 2002, the legal term “Object of Protection” was created to describe that which is valuable about a particular heritage site – what exactly needs to be preserved during restoration. Yet this concept is incredibly vague and often makes it legally possible to physically alter the monument. In the case of the Bolshoi Theater, which is currently being renovated, its “Object of Protection” is its “unique acoustics.” Thus, the Bolshoi could potentially be rebuilt in an entirely new form, assuming its acoustics – which have no physical manifestation – are kept intact.

The Kremlin Museums’ Batalov said that the Luzhkov era has been the most destructive on record for Moscow’s architectural landscape. Historical buildings that survived fires, wars and Bolsheviks, ended up being helpless in the face of wanton development. “We live in an era of war against monuments,” Batalov said in an interview with Regnum. “Even under the Bolsheviks, there was not such a systematic destruction of monuments.”

”We are very good at destroying and mold-making,” added Alexei Komech, Director of the Moscow Art Institute and a well-known critic of Luzhkov, in a 2004 interview with Noviye Izvestiya. “We take some perverse pleasure in leveling old buildings, erecting architectural corpses, and pretending they are alive.” Komech’s The Black Book (2003) lists architectural landmarks destroyed since 1990.

One of the monuments on Komech’s list is the wooden “Herzen’s House,” where the author of My Past and Thoughts lived and was arrested in 1834. The building was torn down in 1998 and recast in concrete. The estate house of the powerful Trubetskoy princes, the oldest wooden building in Moscow – dating from before the fire of the 1812 – met the same fate in 2002.

As some critics have pointed out, it is ironic that historical Moscow is threatened today, when capital is plentiful and the destructiveness of war is a distant memory, as is state atheism, which called for systematic demolition of churches. Indeed, wealth has turned out to be the greatest enemy of historical preservation.

In fact, what this wealth is creating in place of classic architecture is something approaching fantasy: “Our city is being turned into Disneyland.,” said Margarita Lekomtseva, who has lived in Moscow since the 1930s. “The shapes, and especially the mismatched colors of the new buildings are completely tasteless, sometimes I feel like I have to walk around with my eyes closed.”

Such Disneyfication is manifest in Tsaritsyno, an Imperial summer palace ensemble left unfinished after Catherine II died in 1796 – a picturesque ruin on Moscow’s periphery that starkly illustrated the follies of tsarist diktat. But now, 200 years later, the estate is being “finished” by Mayor Luzhkov. He wants to add an exhibition hall and a hotel on the territory of this federally-protected monument, and has already topped one of the structures, the Bread House, with a glass dome.

In the very center of the city, the Manezh, a one-of-a-kind structure built in 1817 without interior weight-bearing columns, was horribly damaged by fire in 2004. Within two years, the building was rebuilt “larger and better” than the original.

“Most people have basically lost their sense of history,” Batalov said in his Regnum interview. “They don’t mind non-authenticity. And the mayor is representative of this mass culture. Can you imagine a situation where people dictate to the professional medical community how to do their job?”

“Sometimes rebuilding is the most effective way to preserve the past,” Mayor Luzhkov said in 2004. “For some idiots, keeping old bricks is an end unto itself. What is so terrible about leveling an old building that is falling apart?” RL

March 01, 2007

Vanishing Act

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Moscow That Is No More

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