Travel Notes

Minsk to Fall

Moscow’s Minsk hotel will become the city’s second major hotel, after the Intourist, to be razed. Metalloinvest, owner of the shabby, Soviet-style hotel near Pushkin Square, next December intends to hold a tender for the hotel’s deconstruction and rebuilding. The two star hotel was built in 1964 and has 336 rooms.

Moscow Too?

Meanwhile, Moscow City Hall announced plans to reconstruct the Hotel Moskva on Manezhnaya square. The hotel will be torn down and a five-star hotel will rise up in its place, complete with a four-story underground office and trade complex. The city is looking for the right developer for the project. Interestingly, the plan is to reproduce the hotel’s façade as built in 1935 by architect Aleksei Shchusev—including the two famously asymmetric facades. The project is estimated to cost $300-400 million and the city has yet to find the money. Meanwhile, several local experts have voiced strong objections to the move as the destruction of yet another architectural monument.

In 1998, the city floated a similar plan to redevelop the hotel into a 5-star facility, but the plan went nowhere.

Akhmatova Museum

St. Petersburg’s Museum dedicated to poet Anna Akhmatova announced it will close for capital renovation. Work is scheduled to be completed by May 2003, when the city’s main tercentennial festivities will take place. By early 2003, the museum also intends to unveil the museum-apartment of Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, which will become an affiliate of the Akhmatova museum.

Hot Museum

The world’s first-ever Car Theft Museum opened in Moscow on July 9. It was the brainchild of the Lada Favorit car company and the Russian Book of Records, published by PARI agency.

PARI President Alexei Svistunov (see profile, Russian Life Jan/Feb 2002) said the museum’s main goal is to help drivers with “visual case studies,” in order to better protect their cars from theft. The museum features a rare display of fake documents, license plates and tools used to steal and protect automobiles. The collection now sits next to Lada Favorit’s showroom at the company’s sales outlet on Koptievskaya ulitsa, near metro station Voykovskaya.

“We simply intended to put the simple truth on display,” Svistunov said. “We got together simple things like fake documents and security devices so that people could learn more about how best to protect their cars.” Yet Lada Favorit President Vladimir Popov has a personal “vested interest” in the museum. He has his own account to settle with car thieves, as he revealed at the opening ceremony. His own car, a devyatka (Lada-9), was stolen in 1991 (when such Russian cars were a luxury).

Anti-theft devices on display range from modern car alarms to simple homemade methods, like a wooden baseball bat, or the large fishhooks used by a pensioner to entangle would-be-crooks (the elderly man presented his device to the museum after catching his fourth thief red-handed).

The Ministry of Interior donated to the museum a collection of fake documents and false license plates, gathered while tracking car thieves. It also provided a map of the most likely places in Moscow for car thefts to occur. Meanwhile, Svistunov’s Russian Book of Records came up with a list of auto theft statistics: according to their data, the most popular car to steal is the devyatka (Lada-9), while the Audi A6 is the most frequently stolen foreign-made automobile, followed by the Volkswagen Passat. Approximately 40 cars are stolen in Moscow every day, and the most popular day of the week to steal them is Friday.

Museum address and coordinates: Koptievskaya ulitsa, 71, telephone: 786-2525, nearest metro station: Voykovskaya (green line).

You Can Get There

Passengers flying in and out of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport can now ride a high-speed train between the airport and Paveletsky railway station. The new train has a travel time of just 40 minutes and leaves every hour between 6 am and 11 pm. The commute is all the more convenient because the train station is on both Moscow’s circular and green metro lines. The train wagons were manufactured by the Moscow based Car Factory EM2I and boast some 150 innovations, including a sleekly modern shape and a special “recuperative” brake system.

Rail Boom

The Railways Ministry generated R200 billion ($6.33 billion) in revenues in the first half of 2002, up 34% versus the same period last year, railway Minister Gennady Fadeyev announced. Fadeyev, speaking during a conference call with 16,000 employees on the eve of national Railroad Workers Day, lauded the figure, adding that the trend of shrinking cargo and passenger traffic has been reversed.