Bronze fever

When the glass Pyramid was erected in the courtyard of the Louvre, a joke was born in Paris: “Now our favorite place is inside the Glass. You just can't see it from there." Moscow's jokes are not so innocent. Mikhail Shemyakin's scandalous sculptural group "Children - Victims of Adult Vices", standing between the Moscow River and the Obvodny Canal on Bolotnaya Square, is called "a visual aid to all types of pedophilia." The monument to pedophiles, frozen in bronze, is guarded around the clock by the police. At night, the metal grate enclosing the monument is locked, but all sorts of rubbish still flies into Shemyakin's creation. “I carry shards of beer bottles and cola cans out of here in sacks, wash off the paint from bronze,” complains the janitor Ildar Khusnutdinov. “And the cops, the parasites, pretend not to notice the hooligans.” An elderly Muscovite, Khusnutdinov, who has been sweeping the lanes around GUM all his life, was very surprised to learn from a Newsweek correspondent that the monument was a gift to Muscovites from a famous artist. When he heard that Moscow was going to accept about 300 more such gifts and that the mayor’s office had already allocated 225 places for them, he said in puzzlement: “Where are you going to get so many janitors and policemen?”

However, the commission on monumental art at the Moscow City Duma, which is supposed to keep records of monuments and give an opinion on new projects, is concerned about another problem. The capital was covered by a new wave of monumental sculpture, and no one is able to stop it. At the same time, how many already existing monuments are in the capital is unknown; Recently, the commission tried to count them and as a result admitted: it is possible to say only approximately, more than 1,000. The fact is that monuments in the city grow like mushrooms, and about a quarter of them are squatters.

“European cities install three to five monuments a year,” says Nina Moleva, a member of the monumental art commission at the Moscow City Duma, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Nina Moleva. “We consider up to 10 projects a month, and approve up to 60 a year. I walk through the streets and don't know who they set up. This is because Mayor Luzhkov's team has come up with a mechanism by which the sculptures can be placed around our conclusions."

Molyeva, like most of the commission's experts, who reject an average of eight projects out of ten, has not been surprised for a long time if rejected creations still end up in the city. According to the law, the commission, created in 1998 after the scandal with the monument to Peter I, against which the townspeople actively protested, acts as a filter - assesses whether the name (or historical event) is worthy of perpetuation, understands how justified the installation in Moscow is, at a specific point cities. For example, the commission rejected a proposal to erect a monument to Galina Starovoitova, noting that it would be more appropriate in Chelyabinsk, where she was born, or in St. Petersburg, where she studied and worked. Stepan Razin was refused due to "the ambiguity of this historical figure." Regarding the project of the monument to St. George the Victorious, the commission noted that "the sculpture of the saint is contrary to Orthodox traditions." And to numerous initiatives regarding monuments to famous people of our time, he usually answers: “Intravital perpetuation of persons is not accepted in a healthy society.”

However, the commission's conclusions are advisory in nature. The Moscow City Duma has the right to ignore them, and the mayor can, by his order, install any monument anywhere, without looking back either at the commission or at the thought. Is it true. Yuri Luzhkov, unlike François Mitterrand, who imposed the "Glass" on the Parisians, formally never used this right. The mayor chose the path of accepting "gifts"—when artists, businesses, cities, and countries make Moscow proposals for the erection of monuments that it cannot refuse.

The first gifts - monuments to Dante, Hugo, Yuri Nikulin, Mikhail Sholokhov, Baron Munchausen, aviator Valentina Grizodubova, as well as to the victims of the terrorist attack at the National Hotel, which were actually installed arbitrarily - opened the way for sculptural unauthorized construction. In total, according to various sources, the capital accepted more than 150 such "gifts". 65 of them are in the last two and a half years. In particular, during this time, Alisher Navoi (a gift from Tashkent) stood up on Serpukhovskaya Square, and Fyodor Chaliapin (a gift from Novinsky Boulevard, 31) half-crouched on Novinsky Boulevard, instantly nicknamed "alkanaut in search of a fifth point." “These monuments should be demolished,” believes Sergey Petrov, chairman of the monumental art commission. The commission insisted that the monument to Chaliapin should stand in front of the Bolshoi Theater, and Navoi in front of the Uzbek embassy. “I conducted an experiment: I recorded the time—no one stopped at Chaliapin’s in 40 minutes!” says People’s Artist of the USSR Vyacheslav Innocent. (Back in 2003, when the monument had just been erected, he became one of the authors of an indignant letter from the actors of the Moscow Art Theater and the Musical Theater named after Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko to the Moscow City Duma.— Newsweek .)—Not only was he mutilated beyond recognition, he was also walled up in an opening between cramped buildings. Is it really incomprehensible that the place for the great Fyodor Chaliapin is in front of the Bolshoi Theater?

However, at the Bolshoi Theater after the reconstruction, most likely, it will not be the eminent singer, but the nameless "Ballerinas", because this composition is another gift to the mayor from Naftasib OJSC. Seeing its layout, the commission's experts unanimously voted against the presentation. On the sidelines, they joked intelligently that they did not understand "how these creatures are able to dance." But it is not so easy to return Chaliapin to the Bolshoi and rid him of the corps de ballet of donuts. How to demolish an already erected monument (unlike, say, a house) is not prescribed in the law, so the dismantling of even an illegal monument is also illegal.

Therefore, experts shrug their shoulders, watching how the capital is flooded with new “gifts”, which ultimately cost taxpayers dearly: the cheapest pedestal costs 20 million rubles. For example, the gift of Mikhail Shemyakin, according to the expert of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography Alexander Zavolokin and a member of the commission at the Moscow City Duma Nina Moleva, cost $ 6 million. That is why the authorities of European capitals consider such gifts to be too expensive. Paris did not consider it possible to accept even a monument to General de Gaulle, a gift from Zurab Tsereteli. Prior to this, however, the monument was not accepted by the descendants of de Gaulle, not finding in it any portrait resemblance to the great ancestor. As a result, in order not to offend the donor, the monument was designed as a gift from Paris to Moscow, where they gladly accepted the work of dear Zurab Konstantinovich, forked out on a pedestal and placed it near the Cosmos Hotel, on de Gaulle Square.

A flood of gifts threatens to flood Moscow: a monument to Heydar Aliyev, Alexei Kosygin, Aram Khachaturian, Princess Olga, the symbolic Yeltsin Zagogulin, Stepan Razin, front-line horses and dogs, Ivan III. The commission has ceased to cope with it. Yes, no one asked her. “The competence of the commission does not include an assessment of the artistic quality of works,” explains the author of the law “On the procedure for erecting works of monumental art in Moscow,” Moscow City Duma deputy Alexander Krutov. “Its task is to assess the feasibility of installing a monument. Gifts are a delicate and political issue. No one offers them to perpetuate Michael Jackson, a baby elephant or a hamster. It is not clear to me why individual members of the commission are trying to take on more powers than prescribed by law.”

Nina Moleva objects to Krutov: gifts "turn into a channel for pumping and spending budget funds." And he recalls indignantly how in May 2005 the commissions proposed to consider a plan for installing a monument to the director of OAO Domostroitelny Kombinat No. 1 Kopelev V.E. influential leaders of the Moscow construction complex. And he promised to pay any amount of the cost of the monument. The Commission, of course, rejected the proposal, but today even more powerful donors are besieging it. The Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, the Pension Fund, the Council for the Promotion and Development of Civil Society under the President of the Russian Federation, all of them turned to Mayor Luzhkov with a proposal to arrange an Alley of Honor on Manezhnaya Square, where signs-busts of "outstanding people of our time" will be installed. Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Iosif Kobzon have already been proposed. And at the beginning of the alley there will be a monument to Luzhkov, also a gift, from the head of the department of Moscow University of consumer cooperation, Eduard Arustamov. This proposal will be considered in the fall, but on the sidelines of the Moscow City Duma they say that "an attempt to bend before the authorities" will most likely not be supported.

“Society is experiencing a fundamentally new phenomenon—monuments are treated as a means of PR,” notes Aleksey Komech, director of the State Institute of Art Studies, member of the Commission on Monumental Art. “In the individualistic West, such PR leads to the creation of a monument to your beloved cat, your girlfriend and even the loss of innocence. In our country the roots of communality are strong, therefore recurrences of honor boards make themselves felt. In both cases, the understanding of the meaning of the monument is lost, which turns it into a bargaining chip for vanity and careerism. As an example, Komech cites a proposal to place Luzhkov in front of the Alley of Honor.

“The phenomenon of Moscow is that the boom in the construction of monuments, striking in scale, creates a negative attitude towards them,” says Moscow City Duma deputy Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov. “People in principle have nothing against Peter I, Chaliapin or Zhukov. The negative social background that arises after the creation of their sculptures is not associated with them, but with a rude intrusion into the existing urban environment, which people perceive as living, and not advertising and PR.

Moskvin-Tarkhanov shares the opinion of many architects and art historians that until the capital is completely littered with monumental debris, it is necessary to reconsider the attitude towards gifts, unauthorized construction, and the legislation on monuments itself. The author of this legislation, of course, is against it. “The enlightened tyrant Giuliano Medici would never have built Florence and opened Michelangelo to the world if he had followed public opinion in everything, which, by the way, he appreciated!” Alexander Krutov argues. “Mayor Luzhkov takes into account public opinion, but he makes the final decision himself.”

Commission member Nina Moleva is not going to give up. She is sure that history will judge everyone. Her criterion is simple—will people make appointments near the new monument?