‘Hipster Stalinism’: populist renewal projects come to Moscow

Russian planners are abandoning the urban experiments of recent years and embracing a new approach

A worker climbs up to the Soviet Union state emblem during the restoration work atop the Central Pavilion at the VDNKh (AFP)

One of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s pet projects is a multi-billion-dollar revamp of the “Soviet Versailles”: an enormous ensemble of extravagant, mainly Stalin-era pavilions, fountains and statuary in Moscow’s north-east. Sobyanin accompanied President Vladimir Putin last year on a visit to the site, known as VDNKh, to open a new oceanarium for 8,000 sea creatures, including killer whales.

The regeneration of the sprawling park-cum-exhibition space is one of several large regeneration projects under way in the city of 12 million as planners and officials put behind them the urban experiments, embraced by Moscow’s creative middle class, that flourished before the 2014 confrontation with the West over Ukraine.

The new approach is well funded, populist and in tune with a resurgent Russian nationalism, with some dubbing it “hipster Stalinism”. Its scale has led some to draw parallels with the transformation of Moscow into the imperial capital of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Most of the buildings at VDNKh, built as a paean to communism and visited by millions every year, are high Stalinist, and Sobyanin’s team is working to adapt their totalitarianism to modern Russia – creating some bizarre juxtapositions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Moskvarium Centre the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (VDNKh), (Getty)

Near the new oceanarium is a huge, glass-domed building that once contained Soviet space rockets – but recently housed an exhibition of objects used in the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. In winter, paths are flooded to create Europe’s biggest ice rink. There is a new museum of bombastic nationalist history, and an aging Soviet Yakovlev Yak-42 plane was rigged up by a Moscow electronic musician last year to “play” her songs.

“Architecture shouldn’t be the hostage of the ideology that created it,” says Sergei Kuznetsov, Moscow’s chief architect. “During the Soviet Union’s twilight years, its collapse, and the emergence of the new Russia as an extreme rejection of everything linked to the Soviet Union was very popular… the Vandals took Rome and defiled even the holy places. But now people are sobering up: it’s not a time not to throw stones but to collect them.”

Another major part of Sobyanin’s regeneration of Moscow is a project called “My Street:” A $1.9bn (£1.5bn) programme to make the city more pedestrian-friendly. The hundreds of streets to be revamped include Moscow’s Garden Ring, a traffic-clogged eight-lane highway circling the city centre, and Tverskaya, Moscow’s main thoroughfare, which will both see their sidewalks widened and thousands of new trees. The changes will return Tverskaya to how it looked under the Soviet Union.

“If you want to make a Muscovite happy, plant a tree,” says Mikhail Alekseevsky, an anthropologist working for Strelka KB, the design bureau hired by the city to oversee “My Street”. Alekseevsky says the project was the most ambitious of its kind since Stalin ordered the bulldozing of large swathes of old Moscow and the construction of a new, Communist capital in the 1930s.

Moscow is also expanding its transport network, with 16 new metro stations expected to open this year and the relaunch of a 34-mile circular passenger railway. Dozens of municipal parks across the city have been revamped, and a huge abandoned site by Red Square in the heart of Moscow is due to be greened over.

“The mayor is concerned about his voters and wants to be loved by them,” says Grigory Revzin, a prominent architecture critic and partner at Strelka KB. “We are building the infrastructure of public spaces,” he says. “It is the infrastructure of a new economy.”

A girl runs under blossoming apple trees in Moscow's Kolomenskoye park (AFP/Getty)

While Western architectural bureaus remain heavily involved in Moscow’s reconstruction, there is little left of a once-strong appetite for Western urbanism.

Moscow official Sergei Kapkov was the figure most associated with an earlier period of innovation and improvement in urban design epitomized by the successful remodeling of a dilapidated Gorky Park. He was credited with channeling the energies of a new generation of Western-orientated Russians into improving their city. But many of those associated with Kapkov joined anti-Putin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012, and he resigned last year after apparently having his ideas blocked in the new political climate of falling oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine.

Critics of the current direction allege the methods are authoritarian, that large-scale projects are riddled with corruption and that Sobyanin lacks a vision for the city. Many Muscovites are angered when the centre is transformed into a huge building site in the summer months, and take delight in pointing out numerous design flaws – including inadequate drains that see fashionable Moscow streets turned into rivers during rainstorms.

“When you start looking closer there are a load of details that haven’t been thought through and are hurried. Decisions are taken behind closed doors,” says Yaroslav Kovalchuk, a prominent architect. One of the reasons, he says, is politically driven timeframes. “The planning horizon is 2018,” Kovalchuk says, referring to the year of the next presidential elections when Putin could stand for a fourth term.

Many also worry about a general lack of public consultation, which echoes a Soviet management style of bestowing gifts on the population – rather than trying to understand what is needed, or wanted, by ordinary people.

Sergey Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow (Getty)

One February morning this year, Muscovites woke up to discover bulldozers had overnight destroyed hundreds of kiosks, mostly around metro stations, selling goods such as snacks, cigarettes and newspapers. City Hall said the kiosks were illegal. Street entertainers on Moscow’s iconic Arbat Street have been removed in recent months, and small shops nestled in the city’s ubiquitous underpasses have mostly been stripped out, leaving the tunnels bare and sometimes forbidding.

“A lot of good things are being done but the methods are repulsive,” says Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, who set up the Strelka Institute in Moscow as an urbanism hub in 2009 and worked on the redesign of VDNKh in its early stages.

“It’s a very strange sensation when people are made happy against their wishes – but it’s actually characteristic of the general political situation. Public spaces are a wonderful symbol of society, and they are being changed with minimal participation or by overcoming resistance from the public itself,” Oskolkov-Tsentsiper says.

© 2016 IBT Media Inc