The city center, where native Muscovites live, is most attractive to builders

From a European city, the Russian capital is increasingly turning into an oriental bazaar

Alexander SHATALOV, TV presenter

I’m probably not the most native Muscovite among all the possible ones, although if you walk around the city, one or another of my relatives lived almost everywhere. In the Kremlin - this sounds a little pretentious, but let me remind you that in the 1920s the Kremlin was residential - so, my grandparents lived there. My grandfather was an instructor in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and my grandmother worked in the library of the Council of People's Commissars. My parents already lived in a hostel on Patriarch’s Ponds, and on Tverskoy Boulevard there was an apartment of my wife’s grandfather, an architect - he restored the Kremlin after the revolutionary battles and he even had a security document from Lenin so that it would not be compacted. I took a baby stroller to the Patriarch's Ponds in the mornings, and on Tishinka in our yard a neighbor - God's dandelion - grew lilies of the valley in the yard every spring... Of course, we can also remember our very distant ancestors - the Pashkovs, who built their famous house as a pandan to the Kremlin, but it was all too long ago.

THIRD ROME

Moscow - Third Rome. This simple thesis has sweetly amused Muscovites since the 16th century - even when the capital was transferred to St. Petersburg. It seems that similar theses fascinate the current city authorities - a city on seven hills, forty forties, the Third Rome... “Moscow is not a silent mass of cold stones arranged in a symmetrical order... no! she has her own soul, her own life. Like in an ancient Roman cemetery, each stone contains an inscription inscribed by time and fate, an inscription incomprehensible to the crowd, but rich, abundant in thoughts, feelings and inspiration...” - these words of Lermontov sound today like an attack by an ardent dissident against the ongoing policy of reconstruction of Moscow . The gilded domes of churches, destroyed under Soviet rule, are lovingly reproduced today in the form of turrets on modern buildings, later called the Moscow architectural style (“spitting in the sky,” as architectural critic Nikolai Malinin called them, not without grace).

And what remains of the magnificent Constantinople, which was for a number of centuries the Second Rome? This airy and gilded city (remember that the Hagia Sophia was lined with gold sheets from the inside) has turned into a multifaceted Istanbul. Captured by the Ottomans, it was destroyed, the mosaics in Christian churches were painted over, and the city itself turned into a colorful city bazaar with a crowd of traders and various goods. A bazaar city—that’s what Istanbul is, and the further you go, the more Moscow becomes like that.

MARKET LOGIC

As they say, if “A” said, “B” should also speak. The mayor of Moscow, truly like Yuri Dolgoruky standing under the windows of the city hall, gathers under his wing Turkish companies operating in the city, naturally projecting their national mentality onto Moscow, slowly but surely turning the city into a small Turkey. In the end, what is more important - successful Turkish trade or Russian Oblomovism? A classic example is the story of the upcoming reconstruction of Pushkin Square, which for centuries was the heart of Moscow. First, the press discusses the need to build a tunnel under it, which will lead to a reduction in the length and width of Tverskoy Boulevard, then Turkish investors are invited, who are asked to build shopping arcades under the entire square, and even later, investors insist that instead of a fountain and a monument to Pushkin, build an entrance to the underground complex , which will rise 15 meters above the level of the square, and install a monument to Pushkin on top of it, turning it into the same city tower. But why doesn’t the city have its own funds to reconstruct the square at the expense of the city budget? The question hangs in the air.

This indifference of city authorities and parliamentarians is surprising only if we think from the point of view of native Muscovites, otherwise there is nothing surprising. Moscow without Muscovites - what could be more tempting for any investor and developer. The logic of the market is simple: bring goods and sell them. Without the opportunity to return unsuitable goods back, without any responsibility for quality - then look for the seller's fistulas. This is what makes a market different from a store. So Moscow is being built not for Muscovites, but for investors - so that the new building can be quickly valued higher and sold at a higher price.

Muscovites are in the way here because they are not even potential buyers of apartments in new buildings, the prices of which are beyond their reach. But it is these same Muscovites who live in those areas that are most attractive for construction. The first wave of getting rid of Muscovites was due to the fact that their houses were declared unsafe and, under the pretext of “saving,” Muscovites were evicted from the center to the outskirts. This stage has been studied and analyzed at all levels - from the prosecutor’s office to journalism. However, all new construction in the city center is still carried out at the expense of its indigenous residents.

The second stage of getting rid of Muscovites is the establishment of markets in place of stadiums and parks, the destruction of public gardens, the densification of buildings, and the construction of office centers instead of residential buildings. The same idea of transforming Moscow into an all-Russian bazaar. A sharp increase of almost a third in the urban population was precisely due to newcomers. That is, there was a replacement of the urban intelligentsia, who had their own ideas about the city, with newcomers, whose idea of life is connected primarily with the market.

In 2002, during the population census, it turned out that the actual number of citizens living in Moscow was 20 percent more than the official one. At that time it amounted to 10,360 thousand inhabitants. And about 3 million more constantly come to Moscow. Thus, the “successes” of Muscovites, not based on 8.6 million people (as was officially believed), but based on the new figure, were perceived as catastrophic. Over the past 5 years the situation has become much more complicated. The increase in urban construction leads to an unregulated influx of residents of other cities for permanent residence in the capital. Moreover, this is happening against the backdrop of the virtual absence of a program for the construction of rental housing, which is used by the majority of European residents (in 2008, only two apartment buildings are planned to be commissioned in all of Moscow).

The mechanism of transforming a European city, which, despite its patriarchal nature, Moscow remained until the Brezhnev era, into an eastern city, has become irreversible. Along its entire perimeter, it is not the parking lots that were hotly discussed just recently, but shopping centers that are being built; the stations have not been moved closer to the ring road (as promised), but are still taking potential buyers to the city center; they are “intercepted” at the station squares by shopping centers - “European” at the Kievsky station, the same at Kursky, Kazansky, under construction now on Paveletsky and Belorussky. In the city itself, the role of oil towers for “pumping out” money is played by five-star hotels that surround the Kremlin with a palisade. The begun process of “showdown” with Muscovites is coming to its logical conclusion.

CLEAN OUT OLD JACK

All over the world, tourism brings the main income to cities and countries. The United Arab Emirates, for example, receives a third of its income from it - the same as from oil. But tourists are not ready to live in five-star hotels, as well as in those located outside the ring road. Money from tourism is a long-term investment. By engaging in tourism, Moscow could receive income comparable to the income from this industry in Paris or London. But this is all pie in the sky, and the profit from the sale of land to investors for construction is a bird in the hand.

A recent report by the Moscow Society for the Preservation of Architectural Heritage, “Moscow Architectural Heritage: Point of No Return,” records: in the last 5 years alone, more than a thousand buildings have been demolished in the city, of which about 200 were either objects of cultural heritage or were awaiting receipt of this status. “Today in Moscow, monuments of all historical eras are under threat. Nothing can be considered inviolable,” writes SAVE Europe’s Heritage President Marcus Binnie in the foreword to the report. “Moscow risks turning into a dummy city, a mockery of its own great past.” This bilingual report was compiled by experts from Russia, the USA, Germany and the UK and was distributed to all senior government officials, including the President of the Russian Federation. Under the threat of destruction are such monuments as St. Basil's Cathedral, Tsaritsyno, the Detsky Mir department store, the Mayakovskaya metro station, the Narkomfin house, the Melnikov house (the head of the Trust Oil construction company Andrei Tikhonov proposed this house - an architectural monument located in list of UNESCO sites that are in danger of destruction... move from the center to the city!). There is no longer any need to talk about the tourist attractiveness of Moscow...

Moreover, the destruction of urban individuality is the conscious position of the builders and the urban structures that support them. Leonid Kazinets, first vice-president of the Russian Builders Association and head of a large construction company, in an interview with Ogonyok, insists that Moscow is an expensive city, only well-off people have the right to live in it; according to his calculations, 40 million Russian residents are ready to buy apartments in Moscow cost 100 thousand dollars, and only an inflated price per square meter can save the city from this invasion. Mr. Kazinets is a straightforward lobbyist for the construction complex: “In the center, 70 percent of the buildings are of no interest. Why support these huts? With what funds? I am in favor of cleaning out all the old things in the city.” “Cleaning out the junk” means putting billions of dollars into the pockets of Mr. Kazinets and his construction company, giving up tourism, depriving Russians of that historical memory, without which they will cease to be a nation with a common culture, language and history. Good prospect.

The Old Arbat can be called a mirror of the transformation of Moscow into a second Istanbul. The very idea of creating a pedestrian zone here was wrong. Typically, such zones in Europe are set up in places where shopping centers are located, so that it is convenient for customers to move from one store to another. But Arbat is an area of antique and second-hand bookstores, which have now practically disappeared from here. Today, the main visitor comes to Arbat for beer and shawarma, and not for expensive goods. The thriving street trade on Arbat—industrial glasses, tableware, products from the Leningrad Porcelain Factory and Dulevo—is very far from what is sold in Montmartre, which was what Arbat was called.

“I am a Muscovite! How happy is the one who can pronounce this word, putting all of himself into it. I am a Muscovite! - the beginning of the famous book by Vladimir Gilyarovsky “Moscow and Muscovites”. These words now sound like ridicule, a curiosity, and their meaning and content are not clear. Soon they themselves will be erased from our memory. “Moscow without Muscovites” is much clearer in modern economic conditions.