Moscow for Flaneurs: Pedestrian Bridges, Europe Square, and Moskva-City
On a sunny afternoon in early September 2001, having recently returned to Moscow, I stepped out of Kiev Station to find myself stunned by the sight of an enormous glass and steel object. Whatever it was, this had definitely not been there the year before. A postmodern extravaganza of angled shapes in glass and painted steel, it seemed to have taken its inspiration from a pile of irregularly shaped blocks left by some gigantic child (fig. 1). What on earth was that? I walked up to the mystery, entered through a door in its tall glass portal and, amid faint echoes of Paris and the Centre Beaubourg, let myself be carried up by an escalator. The mystery was a bridge, a glassed-in pedestrian bridge with yellow steel frames and white support beams, shiny wood floors, and two riveted blue steel arches, all contained under a glass roof. By now, the impression of irregularity and chaos had vanished completely: I found myself inside an elegant glass tunnel flooded with warm September light and populated by parents and grandparents with children, couples sitting on benches conversing, and the occasional solitary flaneur (fig. 2). To the left opened a spectacular view of the river, Borodinskii Bridge, the Stalinist steeple of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID), the city government building, and the federal government building — more commonly referred to as the White House. To the right there was another view of the river, the twin smokestacks of a nearby factory, and Moscow State University in the distance. Doors on each side led onto open-air walkways. From a passerby, I learned that the bridge had been opened only a couple of days earlier on September 1, the Day of the City, Moscow’s annual self-celebration, and that employees of the hotel next door had dubbed it the “crystal bridge.” (Much later, it was to be officially named Khmel’nitsky Bridge.) Yet, as I was to find out, this was not an entirely new bridge. It was half old and half new, a suggestive piece of architecture, linking Moscow’s past and future, an attractive hieroglyph situated at the center of a larger zone of redevelopment in the rapidly changing Russian capital.
This essay will engage the current transformation of Moscow by taking a closer look at two recent and highly visible projects. One of these is a rather bold historic preservation project in which two prerevolutionary railroad bridges —— Andreevskii Bridge and Krasnoluzhskii Bridge — were floated along the river on barges to new locations, where they were fitted with glass walkways and turned into pedestrian bridges. One of these was the bridge I had stumbled upon that day in early September. Completed in 2000 and 2001, respectively, these new pedestrian bridges have quickly become places where Muscovites and tourists like to hang out and where spectacular (and often expensive) events are held.1 The second project I will be discussing is the ambitious development of an International Business Center known as Moskva-City. Between them, these two projects are beginning to rewrite and redesign the area west and southwest of the city’s historic center in the name of a new, post-Soviet, and globalized Moscow. In my discussion, I will not approach Russia’s capital from the perspective of a historian, an architect, an urban planner, a political scientist, or an economist. I will approach it, rather, as a literary critic and a regular visitor who became intrigued by the symbolic suggestiveness and allegorical density of a particular constellation of these urban development projects. A rewarding object for informed interpretive play, this configuration speaks to the current complex and fascinating moment in the city’s history.
Post-Soviet Moscow
Like London, Paris, and Rome, Moscow is a city on a river. It grew from a fortified trading post on the Moscow River, and one of the speculations about the origin of the city’s name associates it with the Russian word for bridge, most. The city’s very name and history are thus intimately associated with the river and with the bridges that stretch across the Moscow and its smaller tributaries, such as the Iauza.2 Although the river still winds its way through the center of town and past one of the three walls of the Kremlin’s triangle, times have changed, and it is no longer the artery of trade it once was. Trade barges still occasionally use it, but its main function now seems to be to serve as a route for sightseeing boats. At rare moments, one can catch sight of a single fancy speedboat, and one cannot help but speculate that it must belong to Iuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s powerful mayor, enjoying a privileged excursion through “his” city.
Yet trade continues to be at the heart of this city. People at street corners and subway stations are still selling everything imaginable, from fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers to cigarettes, dishes, dresses, and toys, just as they were when Walter Benjamin visited the city in 1926. Needless to say, trade is also (and more than ever) a central concern of the city government, which strives to position Moscow firmly on international business and financial markets. In the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow is refashioning itself as an international metropolis in order to take on a new role in today’s global economy.3
At a time shot through with tensions, oppositions, rivalries, and contradictions, Moscow is changing at a speed with which no planning or interpretive process can keep pace.4 The age-old uncertainty about whether Russia belongs to the East or to the West is posed with renewed force and is doubled by an analogous question regarding the country’s pasts and futures.5 In the turbulent flow of Russia’s history, its pasts and futures have been redefined so often and so dramatically that no clear directions seem to be left. The future is as likely to lie in the past as anywhere else — confirming the quip that “in Russia, even the past is unpredictable.” Even as Russia appears to be leaving behind the Soviet era to seek its future elsewhere, then, the closest analogue of the current reshaping of its capital, in terms of ambition, impact, and scope, is probably Stalin’s reconstruction of Moscow in the 1930s, which aimed to turn Moscow into a model Socialist city.6
On the map of popular affections and iconographies, the Soviet period persists in countless ways as an object of ambivalent nostalgia for many. The modernist (and capitalist) early 1900s command intense interest, but the czarist past also yields some aristocratic glamour, as the two-headed eagle has returned to coins, emblems, gates, and plaques all over the city, more or less peacefully coexisting with many remaining hammers and sickles. The officer in the czar’s uniform and the woman in traditional Russian dress on a vodka advertisement share their visual space with a Socialist-Realist hero who, on a neighboring ad, emphatically offers the viewer a jar of mayonnaise. On the innumerable billboards that now dominate the streets of the city, the latest and wildest computer graphics advertise cellular phones and Internet access, while patriotic themes materialize in panels of beer and cigarette ads (for brands called “Russian Style,” “Peter I,” or “Stepan Razin”). A volatile mix of styles pervades the city, in which various histories seem to coexist — both patriotically Russian and decidedly Western and cosmopolitan, both self-consciously historicizing and hypermodern. Marketing companies can (on the basis of thorough research, no doubt) dip into a rich and contradictory palette of codes to cater to the desires and emotions of this expanding new market.7
The Russian capital city has also been undergoing truly momentous changes in its architecture and urban landscape. Awash in very large sums of cash, which are all the larger for being extremely unevenly distributed, the whole city is being gutted, rebuilt, and reenvisioned. The historic center especially — the most desirable and privileged location in the whole country — is one huge, noisy construction site where whatever rules exist have a hard time asserting themselves against money’s capacity to buy its way around them. Cafés, expensive restaurants, and luxury stores are appearing everywhere, while affordable markets, neighborhood grocery stores, and bakeries succumb one by one to the invasion of yet more liquor stores, supermarkets, beauty centers, and bars. So-called elite apartment buildings sprout all over the center — postmodern, surreal, fantastic, and eclectic, citing the many architectural styles found in Moscow, such as neoclassicism, constructivism, or art nouveau, often curvilinear, and necessarily monumental.8
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Notes
- Iuri Pavlovich Platonov, in an interview by Ol’ga Nikol’skaia, explains, “Nikita Mikhalkov opened and closed the Moscow Film Festival here [on Andreevskii Bridge]. Requests by fashion designers, showmen, and organizers of exhibitions are being booked a year in advance.” “Moskva tantsuet ot Moskvy-Reki: Raznoobrazie maner i pluralizm stilei — vot chto delaet stolitsu nepovtorimoi” (“Moscow Takes Its Cue from the Moscow River: The Variety and Pluralism of Styles — That Is What Makes the Capital Inimitable”), Vecherniaia Moskva, January 14, 2002.
- Writing in 1979, Nadezhin noted that there were over two hundred bridges in Moscow: twentyfour were built across the Moscow River, thirty-six (including pedestrian ones) across the Iauza River and the Vodootvodnyi Kanal, nine across other artificial waterways, and many more across smaller streams such as the Setun’, Khimka, Skhodnia, Chermianka, Likhoborka, Serebrianka, and others. See Boris Mikhailovich Nadezhin, Mosty Moskvy (Moscow’s Bridges) (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1979), 108.
- See for instance, Alexander Kuz’min, “Razvitie Moskvy kak Global’nogo Goroda” (“The Development of Moscow as a Global City”), Arkhitektura. Stroitel’stvo. Dizain (Architecture. Construction. Design) 4, no. 14 (1999): 4 – 7. (This is a special issue of the journal, dedicated to the new master plan for the development of Moscow, edited by the general architect of the City of Moscow, Alexander Kuz’min.) 4. The new “General Plan for the Development of Moscow for the Period until 2020” makes a valiant effort to respond to the enormous challenges of reenvisioning the city for the twenty-first century, and even a cursory look at it gives a sense of the scope and vast complexity of that task. These are just some of the issues: road construction to deal with the explosively expanded automobile traffic; constructing new metro lines and additional alternative means of public transportation, including a monorail, to take pressure off the overburdened metro system; pollution and other environmental issues; preserving green zones; regulating the growth of industrial zones; preserving the historic architectural heritage of the area; developing tourism; engineering infrastructure (heat, gas, electricity); and many others. See Arkhitektura. Stroitel’stvo. Dizain 4, no. 14 (1999).
- In his recent book, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), Marshall T. Poe argues for a view that dispenses with the effort to assimilate Russia to either one of these poles, or, for that matter, to read its fate too exclusively in terms of the Soviet era. Poe argues instead for understanding the country in terms of the specificity of its history and location, which, with disarming simplicity, make it neither Asian nor European, but simply Russian.
- Inevitably, the authors of Moscow’s current general plan are very conscious of this lineage. Thus the general architect of the City of Moscow, Alexander Kuz’min, who is also the director of the collective of authors that developed the plan, contrasts the premise of the current plan with that of previous plans as follows: “The maxim of Moscow’s new General Plan until 2020 is ‘A city convenient for people’s lives.’ It simply and clearly discloses the purely humanitarian direction of this important document of urban planning. Probably for the first time in our country’s practice in the composition of a document of this type, its authors were neither subject to political dictation nor under ideological pressure. If we look back in history, we will remember that the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow of 1935 grew out of Stalin’s thesis about the construction of socialism in a separate country and the necessary reconstruction of ‘the first capital in the world of a proletarian state.’ In the General Plan for the Development of Moscow of 1971, the task was ‘to turn Moscow into a model communist city.’ Now, at the end of the 1990s, we are saying that we simply would like to see our capital city as a comfortable and convenient city.” Kuz’min, “Proekt novogo general’nogo plana razvitia Moskvy na period do 2020 goda” (“The Project of a New General Plan for the Development of Moscow for the Period Until the Year 2020”), Arkhitektura. Stroitel’stvo. Dizain 4, no.
- For a more detailed overview of that history, see Vladimir Korotaev’s article “Iz istorii razrabotki i realizatsii gradostroitel’nykh planov Moskvy do 90 – kh godov” (“From the History of the Development and Realization of the Plans for Moscow’s Urban Development Before the 1990s”), Arkhitektura. Stroitel’stvo. Dizain 4, no. 14 (1999): 8 – 11.
- I am referring to the advertisement landscape in Moscow from 2001 to 2002.
There are many voices lamenting the lack of an architecture that would deserve that name in Moscow today. According to one critic, Moscow’s new construction is guided above all by the desire to negate the drab Soviet “box” for living — and this, he argues, does not amount to a direction, nor does it necessarily lead to architecture. See Nikolai Malinin’s “Shestisotyi v Shesti sotkakh. Ne nado putat’ nedvizhimost’ s arkhitekturoi” (“A Fat Mercedes on a Skimpy Lot: One Should Not Confuse Real Estate with Architecture”), Kulisa 10 (2001): 69, www.curtain.ng.ru/arch/2000-04-28/ 6_6sotok.html (this is a culture journal published by Nezavisimaia Gazeta).
Robin Munro writes that “it is very difficult to get approval for a contemporary design in a project in the center of Moscow,” then quotes Darren Gorodkin, an architect working for a foreign architectural firm in Moscow, as saying, “The main problem I can see is that there seems to be a certain acceptable ‘Moscow style,’ which is heavily dependent upon excessive architectural detail and ornament. The exterior becomes the generating idea for the project. This tends to lead to a mismatch between interior and exterior, often to the detriment of efficiency and operation of the building” (“Foreign Architects Starting to Carve Out Niche,” Moscow Times, May 14, 2002). Yet another architect, Jewgenij Ass, writes, “To the ‘ideology of exclusiveness’ [characterizing contemporary commercialized Moscow] corresponds a special architectural ethics and aesthetics. It is hedonistic, narcissist, enormously self-satisfied, but — and this is actually a contradiction, devoid of optimism. The foundation of this aesthetic has three components: a historical inferiority complex, a perverse attachment to Stalinist pomp, and [an attachment] to the fetish of postmodernism that has found very fertile ground in Russia since the late 1970s. Since then it has blossomed magnificently, but has borne, until today, only extraordinarily tasteless fruit.” All the signs of architecture appear to be present, he concludes, and there are many pragmatic architects, but “there is no architecture” understood as a “cultural discourse dedicated to the problems of the existence of human beings and society in a modern world.” Jewgenij Ass, “Moskau — Geisel zweier Systeme” (“Moscow — Hostage to Two Systems”), in Metropolen im Wandel. Berlin — Moskau (Changing Metropolises: Berlin — Moscow), ed. Wolfgang Eichwede and Regine Kayser, published proceedings of the Deutsch-Russisches Forum e.V. (Berlin: Jovis, 2003), 37, 39. (My translation from the German.)
