“Moscow is a city of slow historical growth, and down to the present time its different parts have wonderfully well retained the features which have been stamped upon them in the slow course of history…Each quarter is a little world in itself”.
That was Prince Peter Kropotkin, writing his Memoirs of a Revolutionist in the 1890s. Things have changed a bit since then as Moscow feels the impact of new money that has flowed in following the end of the Soviet Union, coupled with the ‘hyper-mayoral’ powers of Mayor Yury Luzhkov who appears able to command or condemn buildings in a way BoJo could only envy.
Last week in a talk at Pushkin House, centre of all things Russian in London, Clementine Cecil spoke about the perfect architectural storm being experienced by Moscow and other Russian cities. Cecil, sometime Times correspondent in Moscow, helped to set up the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS) in 2004 following demolition of the Hotel Moskva (pictured above), famous as the image on the Stolichnaya Vodka label. The hotel has now been replaced by a not-very-accurate ‘replica’.
Of course, all great cities are in a constant state of architectural flux; they build and demolish, make mistakes, squabble and recriminate, try again. But current developments in Moscow do often seem to involve the demolition of buildings which express the city’s history and culture in distinctive ways, only for them to be replaced by copies that show little respect for the original. Luzhkov has said he believes replicas are as good as, or better than, originals.
Cecil’s talk presented the struggle to save at least part of Moscow’s historic fabric through the lives of several “heroes of Russian conservation”. Prominent amongst these campaigners was David Sarkisyan, Director of Moscow Shchusev State Architecture Museum, who died aged 62 just weeks ago.
Sarkisyan, previously a pharmacologist and film director, became Director of the Shchusev Museum on 1st January 2000 and immediately plunged what had been a rather sedate institution into a whirlwind of exhibitions and conservation campaigns. An Armenian who had spent most of his life in Russia Sarkisyan was a classic insider/outsider and a compulsive communicator – it’s probably no accident that a picture of him amongst the books and artifacts in his extraordinary office shows him clutching a mobile phone. These characteristics and his flair for eye-catching artistic gestures – he wore a red boiler suit to the opening of Tate Modern’s Constructivist exhibition as his own personal homage to Constructivist style – helped Sarksiyan bring together anyone, Russian or non-Russian, with an interest in protecting the country’s heritage.
Cecil pointed out the fact that conservation in Russia is often seen as a “dissident activity” by those in power. This is a thread that links Sarkisyan’s tussles with property developers and Moscow’s city authorities to figures like Pyotr Baranovsky, an architect who was sent to Siberia for three years in the 1930s for protesting against the demolition of Kazan Cathedral in Red Square. Interestingly Kazan Cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s following measurements taken by Baranovsky and could be seen as one of Moscow’s more successful ‘replicas’.
Opposition from some official quarters has encouraged MAPS to come up with creative protest strategies – I was taken with a photo of a demonstration of snowmen, each with his own placard. As Cecil says – “You can’t arrest a snowman.”
A rather sad postscript to Sarkisyan’s life demonstrates the passions roused by the struggle over what sort of architectural face Moscow presents to the world. Despite being presented with a petition by the Minister of Culture requesting that Sarkisyan be buried in the city’s Armenian cemetery Luzkhov refused permission. It seems Sarkisyan had crossed swords once too often with the Mayor to be permitted to rest in peace in Moscow.
Pushkin House has a regular lecture programme and a talk about St Petersburg’s architecture by Anton Glikin will take place at 7.30pm on 17 March 2010.
Image: Hotel Moskva 1940s © Centre for Historical Urban Studies, Moscow.
