Travel Notes

Russian Versailles

Theatrical institution returns

Moscow is reopening its famous Green Theater, an open-air venue on the territory of the VDNKh exhibition grounds.

The theater was built in 1939 and recently rebuilt (VDNKh is undergoing major renovations) to restore its 1954 appearance. In its heyday, some called the venue the Soviet Versailles.

Some of the Soviet Union’s most famous entertainers, like jazz singer Leonid Utyosov and the Pyatnitsky Choir, sang there, and the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble performed on its stage before a sellout crowd of 5,000.

Since the 1990s, the theater has fallen into disrepair, its green facade increasingly overgrown by the surrounding park’s unkempt flora, giving rise to urban legends like that of a giant dog guarding its premises.

Camp Closed

Former labor camp an Enemy of the State?

Perm-36, one of the USSR’s last functioning labor camps, was turned into a museum in the mid-1990s. The camp, located in the small village of Kuchino, was where many political prisoners, including Sergei Kovalyov and Vladimir Bukovsky, were interned.

Volunteers and historians, including members of the Memorial human rights organization, painstakingly assembled exhibits from the remaining prison infrastructure, while the government waived all land and utilities fees. For nearly 20 years it was Russia’s only museum recreating the atmosphere of the Soviet Gulag on the site of an actual former camp. In recent years Perm-36 hosted various educational and cultural events, with visitors from across the country.

Recently, however, regional authorities suddenly stopped paying the museum’s utility bills. The museum was closed to visitors, and a new director was appointed, who began demolishing the barracks and other structures. A film airing on a popular national channel accused the museum of being part of a “fifth column.”

Dovlatov Feted

A street and a museum

Sergei Dovlatov, a Soviet writer who was forced into emigration and settled in the United States in the 1980s, has been commemorated… in New York.

A small street in Queens, near the place where Dovlatov lived, and where his widow Yelena Dovlatova lives to this day, has been renamed Dovlatov Way.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, a small Dovlatov Museum has opened its doors in Pskov Oblast’s Pushkin Hills as part of a larger museum complex dedicated to Russia’s beloved poet. The modest house where Dovlatov lived in 1976 and 1977, when he worked as a guide at the Pushkin Museum and wrote his novel Zapovednik, has been repaired, hung with photographs, and furnished by his friends to evoke the time he was living there.

Moscow Luxury

Historic hotel will not be for the 99 percent

In October, the famous Hotel Moscow, just a cobblestone’s throw from the Kremlin, will reopen as a Four Seasons hotel. Although the city government initially promised to make the reconstructed, historic hotel a mid-priced property, the five-star Four Seasons replica will instead feature 180 luxury rooms.

Four Seasons already has one hotel in Russia, located in St. Petersburg. The Four Seasons Hotel Lion Palace opened last year in what used to be the Lobanova-Rostovskaya palace. Rooms there start at around $500 per night and go up to $2500 a night or more for a suite.

Street Art

Bringing art to the factory floor

A plastics factory in St. Petersburg has branched out and opened a museum of street art.

Located in an industrial quarter in the east of the city, the museum is the brainchild of the factory’s chairman, Dmitry Zaitsev, who said he was fed up with working in a dusty facility and wanted to “build his own Hermitage,” where workers could be more inspired.

Various factory halls have also been painted and otherwise decorated by well-known street artists including Pasha 183 and Tim Radya. The venue has also hosted concerts and cinema viewings.

streetartmuseum.ru/museum

Fort Museum

Past returned through Polish firm

A well-preserved German fort in Kaliningrad known as Friedrich von Doenhoff (also, less interestingly, as No. 11) was selected by local authorities and a Polish investor to be a public museum.

Built in 1882, the fortification in the city’s southeast is a hexagonal structure surrounded by water. The fort was a part of the second belt of fortifications in Königsberg, as the fortress city was called during its Prussian era.

Until this year, the fort housed a Russian army facility. The army gave it back to the local government, which is giving it to a Polish company to create a vast museum on the 17,000 hectare base. It will include a WWI museum, a park with hotels and restaurants, and a special area for battle reenactments.