Moscow Inc. by John Weich

Once a model of Social Realist sterility, Moscow’s sweeping Tverskaya Boulevard is now cluttered with kiosks, traffic congestion, personal billboards and tasteless banners stretching across its eight lanes. Chinchilla-draped prostitutes, no longer sequestered to dark corners of the Shalyapin Bar at the Metropole, loiter about the curbs waving passing Ladas into dimly lit alleyways. Lenin’s granite profile etched into the façade of the Izvestia building on Pushkin Square now shares space with neon KIA Motors and Martini ads. There is a troupe of casino chintz on Novy Arbat and Prada and Tod’s boutiques on the sybaritic Tretyakovsky Proyezd, both attesting to the city’s new role as one of the world’s foremost capitals of showy affluence and maldistribution. One thing is certain: Moscow is no longer a destination of lousy options (that epithet has since been reapplied to Pyongyang), but a kinetic, 24/7 metropolis: it’s a state circus of constantly oscillating restaurants, brothels, milk bars and nightclubs. The city even boasts Starbucks-style coffee shops, a chimera before 1994, with prosaic names like Zen Coffee, Coffee House and Coffee Mania.

M-O-S-C-O-W. In 2003 that name, with its single hard consonant nestled between two rolling vowels, hardly musters the effigy of that sinister Soviet spectre which haunted much of Europe for a greater part of the 20th century. Throughout the city’s heavily charred history, it has burned, been bombed, revolted, entertained tsar pretenders, exiled Nobel laureates and cow-towed to some of the most charismatic egoists of our time, but few characters can quite compare to the rabble-rousers that crawled out from under the potbelly of communism in 1989. What followed was fifteen years of free-market freefall riddled with a melee of tenebrous post-Cold War tales involving cigarette riots, sauna raids, automobile wars, privatisation voucher schemes, TV scams, kingpins, rogue traders and state-sponsored auctions of the country’s Ural resources (in 1994 the Economist dubbed this latter preposterousness ‘The Sale of the Century’). Most western middle-class households with access to CNN will agree that post-Soviet Moscow can stake serious claim to being the first televised reality soap. Each passing year brought with it a cataclysmic event: the winter food crises in 1990, the toppling of the bronze Dzerzhinsky statue in front of Lubyanka and a failed military coup in 1991, shock-therapy economics in 1992, the storming of the White house in 1993...The emerging market bonanza that marked the inebriated Yeltsin years transformed Moscow from the peoples’ paladin to mere shtick.

The no-goodniks have since come clean and are, today, marching to the beat of Putin patriotism. Under a charismatic mayor, Moscow is undergoing its third drastic overhaul in 75 years. Unlike the two preceding master plans, in 1935 (‘the Stalin plan’) and 1971, Moscow’s newest directive eschews outspoken ideology, which in a nostalgic sort of way, is sad. This is because Moscow, unlike its dainty prom queen sister St. Petersburg, failed to deliver the socialist utopian model city the Bolsheviks, then Stalin, promised. For a few years in the 1920s Moscow was the epicentre of radical architectural theory. The paper trail of deliberately planned cities left behind is a long one, and their inchoate blueprints for redefining the city as we know it predates the West’s own new towns, instant cities, open societies, practical utopias, metapolises and continent cities. Russia’s ideological avatars broached themes and definitions that are as provocative today as then. Perusing sketches by Soviet architects like Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Melnikov, Moses Ginzburg and the Vesnin Brothers you encounter machine age icons like airplanes and dirigibles landing atop communal houses and workers’ clubs, the two most prominent monuments of proletarian ingenuity. They envisioned dormitory megastructures where orchestras would drown out the collective snoring and induce collective sleep. Their organic garden cities boasted moving sidewalks and subways that whisked residents into town at Formula 1 speeds. Their euphoric planning and manifesto waving infected, and indelibly influenced, some of the most influential architects of the day, including Ernst May, Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, the latter seamlessly echoing Soviet deurbanisation mainstays like electrification and mechanical transport for his own anti-urban Broadacre City. It was phantasmagoria without kinks; after all, private property had been abolished and with it individualist, proprietary opposition. Moreover, the one-party rule wielded absolute power over city planning and central organs could guarantee, however dubiously, mass consent. Rocket tracts, flying cities, atomic powered aircraft, dust-free factories in residential quarters, nuclear power plants on the Red Square; nothing could damp Homo Sovieticus’ revolutionary spirit – nothing, that is, except a prevalent lack of cash and know-how.

In 21st century Moscow, money is not a problem. Under the tutelage of builder-king Yuri Luzhkov, who has treated the city as his personal fiefdom since being elected mayor in 1992, Moscow attracts more investment than the rest of Russia combined. As a result, President Putin, like Yeltsin before him, controls the medieval citadel but rarely dirties his hands in Luzhkov’s municipal empire. Nor does he pay much attention to the mayor’s lucrative enterprise, Moscow Inc., which owns or co-owns 1,500 local companies, give or take. With a leather cap in hand and a Prince Igor Moskvitch stretch parked in the garage – he’s since upgraded to a Mercedes sedan, which is still much humbler than Putin’s twice daily trundle into town in souped-up SUVs –, the former apparatchik Luzhkov enjoys pre-fall Saddam-like approval ratings and a working class hero status that rivals Bruce Springstein in his prime. Admittedly, it is not entirely unmerited; Luzhkov rose to the occasion during some of the darkest hours of democratisation, standing by Yeltsin to thwart the 1991 coup attempt. Yeltsin, never parsimonious with his largesse, returned the favour by granting Luzhkov hypermayoral powers. Mayor Luzhkov has earned a reputation for giving back to the city as much as he takes from it, an unusual characteristic among Soviet-era bureaucrats. His bartering with bankers in real-estate-for-nepotism schemes has helped alleviate Moscow’s chronic housing shortage and repaired once-proud playgrounds and kindergartens. Most Muscovites attribute their free heating, free parking and free local telephone calls to Luzhkov, which is why they so easily forgive both his teetotalism – a vehement nyet-nyet in Russian etiquette – and his expensive follies, which include a new 10-lane superhighway with costs so exorbitant that some say it should be paved in five centimetres of sterling silver.

Luzhkov is an autocrat with an odd sense of the aesthetic. His pyramid-topped Gilded Age tendencies are gradually suffocating the five-high Khrushchevian cityscape and becoming as characteristic of New Moscow as Stalin’s Seven Sisters are of Old. His almost fetish devotion to pop-sculptor Zurab Tsereteli has produced some of Russia’s most significant atrocities to date, pre- or post-Soviet. The worst is undoubtedly the Peter the Great monstrosity on the shores of the Moskva River. It’s common knowledge, even in the West, that Peter the Great’s Moscophobia was so acute that he preferred to erect an entirely new capital on the marshes of the Gulf of Finland than hang around the Kremlin. Similarly, one can only hope that Luzhkov’s plans to supplant one of Soviet Moscow’s most romantic sculptures, ‘Worker and Farmer’, from its current pedestal on Prospect Mira to a crown atop a new shopping mall fail miserably. Glossy cubist pedestrian bridges yawning across Moskva like the 217-meter eyesore Mall Pedestrian bridge (the name says it all) and the exquisitely kitsch $300 million Okhotny Ryad shopping mall can be forgiven for their functionality, but what to make of the limp Christ figure of Nike pinned to the needle of a 140-meter high bronze obelisk in front of the Memorial to the Great Patriotic War? Clearly, New Moscow’s icons are gratuitous when set against Soviet-era sculptures like the dramatic Monument to the Conquerors of Space draped in titanium sheets and the ode to first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, whose stance is suspiciously similar to Disney’s Buzz Lightyear.

Luzhkov is, however, a man of action, and he has used his powers to expedite progress and remould Moscow into a frenetic, contemporary metropolis. His most touted triumph is the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, the bulky mass of piety torn down by Stalin for an even bulkier mass of socialist realist fetishism, rebuilt in just three year’s flat. This in a city that has historically prided itself on stonewalling and lethargy. The expansion of the Tretyakov Gallery, for example, took 20 years to plan and another 20 to complete. The Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War, the largest monument undertaking since Stalin, took 12. And then there’s the fabled neverbuilts like the Palace of Labour, whose significance for mankind ‘would exceed both Mecca and Jerusalem’, and the gargantuan Palace of Soviets (topped by a 90 meter statue of Lenin), a project that didn’t die until Stalin finally did. It seems that Luzhkov has taken his cue from Khrushchev, who in his day kept the masses happy with housing, leisure zones and department stores. Luzhkov’s palliatives have been shopping malls and a crash-course in monument revisionism. He has also tackled issues that were nonexistent before the 1990s, namely traffic congestion. As late as 1986, there were only about half a million privately owned cars in Moscow. Today, Russia is one of the few countries in the world where new car sales exceed a million units annually, and Moscow’s streets are choking with a heady mix of Moskvitches, Ladas, Chevy’s, Mercedes sedans and Fords. In addition to costly new freeways, Luzhkov is drastically facilitating Moscow traffic flow by tunnelling under arterial roads and junctions, like ploshchad Gagarina, and erecting parking garages and, exhaustively, more shopping malls underneath them.

Not everyone likes Luzhkov. To avoid dealing with the mayor’s dubious terms developers are building their IKEAS, hypermarkets and electronic worlds in satellite communities just beyond the mayor’s jurisdiction, which ends at the dreary, 109 kilometre-long ring freeway. Here in the fringelands you’ll also encounter skyscraping Soviet suburbs like ‘Marino’ that house the bulk of the city’s 10 million-plus population. Erected in the industrial stench of the southeast, Marino is a methamphetamine-induced Corbusierian landscape of the Philip K. Dick variety and a middle class mecca for Russians of not-so modest means, many of whom have been coerced out of their central 28 square meter flats (standard Soviet fare) by avaricious real-estate agents. For Russians, the spacious apartments on the outskirts with underground parking garages – the true symbol of progress – and accessibility to nearby shopping centres are tantamount to the beatific suburban living of mid-century America. With a wry nod towards their bulky antecessors, they come closer to the apotheosis of the communal housing ideal initiated in the 1920s then their poorly rehashed counterparts of the 1960s and 1970s. These mega-neighbourhoods are chock-full of monotonous twelve-story blocks for as far as the eye can see, disappearing into the glassy-eyed sunset in a blanket of haze from the nearby oil refinery. And go figure: developers can’t erect enough of them.

Luzhkov’s newest pet project is the Moscow International Business Centre, or Moscow City, 2.5 million square meters of business, retail and entertainment complexes rising on the Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment. Already 20 years in the planning, Moscow City is modelled, at least in theory, after London City, and when finished is pegged to further underscore, visually and economically, the city’s rightful place among global capitals. To Western eyes, the gallimaufry of glass-façade skyscrapers resembles a ‘Worst Of’ postmodernist structures in our own capitals. Architecturally, there is nothing truly avant-garde about Moscow City. The plethora of banking and apartment towers and themed restaurants mushrooming across the city welcome similar critique; they are all much of a muchness, the philistine ersatz of the nouveau riche, decisively dated and ostentatious. But it is easy to criticize the Moscow Style of architecture, only a decade old and dictated by overt commercial interests. After all, there was a 70-year hiatus between the Vkhutemas’s socialist utopian drawings and today’s emerging market infrastructure. In the 1920s it was all ideology and no money or know-how; today it is all money and know-how without ideology. Moscow is still searching for the right expression, its own identity (see sidebar); a boisterous generation of New Radicals and theorists to match our own Koolhaas’s and Gehry’s has yet to present itself in a significant way. Besides, as powerful as Mayor Luzhkov is, he’s not dictating alone; he is simply facilitating the wants and needs of the city’s architects, developers, shoppers and homeowners. Up to now, there’s been no need to identify the need for anything else than what they’ve got.

But because 20th century Moscow was erected on ideological foundations, it is difficult not to measure the Russian capital against its utopian braggadocio. Despite inspiring the most resplendent paper architecture of its day, 1920s Russia lacked the means to escort modernism into the 20th century. By the time Stalin decided to turn Moscow into a showcase of socialism in 1935, the Russian architectural avant-garde was dead, replaced with a dictatorial fascination for megalomaniacal gestures and the spewing monuments of industrialisation, which still very much clutter the southeast today. Stalin’s other legacies - the unkinked boulevards wide enough to accommodate aircraft, his monumental Seven Sisters, the opulent metro – are, together with the medieval Kremlin, the city’s most popular attractions. More ubiquitous but less arresting are the five-high prefab housing blocks, pejoratively called Khrushcheby, marching towards the outskirts and designed to tackle the city’s chronic housing shortage in the 1950s. (Five was maximum height that didn’t require trash chutes or elevators. They were also easy to evacuate in the case of a nuclear war and too indistinguishable in their monotony for American bombers to use as navigational guides). The Khrushcheby’s progeniture came under Brezhnev in the form of catalogue housing complexes. The chintzy shopping malls and vertical banks that have since emerged are hardly visceral socialist edifices and have effectively killed off whatever Soviet pretense remained. Yet as drab as the city sometimes seems, it will unlikely deteriorate into an unregulated, relentless Houston; things are still too centrally controlled for that. In its defence, Moscow’s forward leap has been formidable. In 1917, the city was built almost entirely of wood, sewers were rare and 80% of the population was agrarian. It was the most backwards capital in Europe. Today, it proudly ranks number 36 on the Economist Intelligence Unit's bi-annual cost of living survey. Which is to say, it scores low on credo but high on evolution, the latter being the more important of the two for survival.

Less easy to change than Moscow’s cityscape is the bevy of Russian anachronisms, chauvinisms and rigmarole that continue frustrate the casual observer as much as Amnesty International human rights scorekeeping irritates Russian bureaucrats. Each summer Moscow suffers a phenomenon called Profilaktika, a one-month ‘repair period’ in which warm water rationing obliges afflicted residents to shower across town (luxury hotels are spared this ignominy). The city’s highest officials also have yet to come to terms with the nascent mediacracy where neigh a week goes by that another publication, often a Western clone but not always, hits the kiosk shelves. The number of incidents involving Kremlin henchmen strafing recalcitrant journalists have decreased, but the city’s newspapers often swing collectively to a pro-Kremlin pendulum set in motion by something as trivial as Putin’s threatening grunt. The good news is that the aspirant middle-class is re-emerging after Black Tuesday, the 1998 rouble crash that instantly pauperised paper billionaires and further marginalized the already impecunious relics and preferred poster children of the Soviet Experiment, the babushkas, who have been the ballast of Communist Party comeback revivals ever since. Yet it is the anachronisms coupled with the lawless rollick of an emerging market that make Moscow the most exciting city in the near-Western hemisphere. And because Moscow will be M-O-S-C-O-W, it’s hard to say quite how long it will last.