NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center (English)

NA RAJONE

Art and life beyond the center.

Cultural dynamics and artistic power

between the central districts

and peripheries of Moscow and Vienna

Supported by project partners:

AMBASSADE DE FRANCE EN RUSSIE

The publishing project “NA RAJONE” is supported

by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

NA RAJONE Art and life beyond the center.

Cultural dynamics and artistic power between the central districts and peripheries of Moscow and Vienna

Publisher Simon Mraz Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow 2020

01 — Welcoming remarks 7 Alexander Schallenberg, Federal Minister for European and International Affairs Ernst Woller, First President of the Vienna Landtag Andrea Mayer, Secretary of State for Culture and the Arts, Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport of the Republic of Austria Mikhail Shvydkoy, Special Envoy of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cultural Cooperation Sergei Cheryomin, Minister of the Moscow City Government, Head of the Department of Foreign Economic and International Relations of Moscow Sergei Monin, Chairman of the Board, АО Raiffeisenbank 02 — NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center An Introduction 21 Simon Mraz, project curator, director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow (Russia/Austria) 03 —Introductory text 25 Sergei Kuznetsov, Chief Architect of Moscow, first deputy chairman of the City of Moscow committee for architecture and urban planning (Russia) 04 — The Construction of Social Housing in Vienna Christian Schantl, Head of Communications and Marketing for the City of Vienna (Austria)

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05 — How Moscow fell in love with its outskirts: The birth of the Muscovite periphery Kirill Golovkin, author at Strelka Mag, strelkamag.com (Russia)

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06 — Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide Sergei Nikitin, Moscow historian, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, head of the MosKultProg arts group, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor (Russia) 07 — The outskirts as a quest: the automation of saccades, the logic of gameplay and the deceptive homogeneity of the dormitory districts Alexander Burenkov, curator (Russia)

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08 — A rather personal text Alina Gutkina, artist (Russia)

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09 —An involuntary teetotaller on the outskirts of Moscow Martin Leidenfrost, freelance writer (Austria)

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10 — The “settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike Vyacheslav Glazychev, scholar, urbanist, publicist (1940–2012, Russia)

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Project Participants

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Contents

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

For the space of over three years, Austrian and Russian artists, writers, urbanists and institutions from Vienna and Moscow, under the leadership of the Austrian Cultural Forum, have been working together painstakingly on the theme of art initiatives on the outskirts of the city, the aesthetics of the periphery, and new housing construction as seen from the point of view of artists.

Leading institutions such as the Vienna Museum, the Austrian Film Museum, the Architekturzentrum, and Basis.

Kultur.Wien have developed some of the most fascinating art initiatives, adapted for implementation in Moscow with the participation of Austrian and Russian artists, thus achieving not only international success in the media but also, first and foremost, establishing a relationship of trust between artists and between institutions.

The resonance caused by this project well reflects the cultural and political approach that we are following: a meaningful agenda and elaboration of themes of significance for both Russia and Austria, which attracts the best initiatives, the institutions with the richest experience, and  Welcoming remarks

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the most powerful artistic positions of both our countries to the project.

“NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center” is the largest, most ambitious project in the field of art that has been carried out between these cities bound by friendship, Vienna and Moscow, in recent years. The project was only made possible thanks to the inspiration and dedication of everyone who took part in it. I am especially gratified that such fruitful collaborations are constantly emerging in the field of cultural cooperation alongside these efforts.

The project to which this publication is dedicated is a collaboration of the Federal Ministry of European and International Affairs (including its Section for International Cultural Relations), the Bureau of the Federal Chancellor of the Republic of Austria, and the City of Vienna.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the partners of the project, as well as those who privately support Austrian cultural activities in Russia. Through their efforts, they have all contributed to the successful implementation of this initiative.

It is my wish that this publication, which goes well beyond the usual understanding of a catalogue, makes a longterm contribution and inspires further initiatives and encounters.

Yours sincerely, Alexander Schallenberg, Federal Minister for European

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and International Affairs

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today, Vienna is the most liveable city in the world. Perhaps there is no other city so saturated with cultural heritage as Vienna, where contemporary cultural life abounds in such vitality. Here, art and culture occupy a central place in people’s lives, and not only in the big houses in the city centre, but in all the residential districts too, including on the outskirts of the city, on the so-called periphery. After all, art and culture should not be the sole prerogative of an elite group, but should enrich the lives of everyone. And it should do so in a form that is easily accessible, as diverse as possible, and which offers the very highest in terms of quality.

And so, for more than a century, the concept of “culture for all” has been implemented in Vienna in a highly successful manner. The city of Vienna has built up internationally recognised expert experience in the field of creative initiatives—a fact that is deeply connected with the ambitions and fruits of more than a hundred years of social democratic cultural policies.

I am particularly pleased that the principles behind our understanding of culture have now triumphantly entered the capital of the Russian Federation, thanks to the efforts of the di Welcoming remarks

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rector of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, Simon Mraz.

Through the project “Vienna—Moscow—Beyond the center”, it was possible to attract some of the best institutions dealing with the theme of “Art and Culture on the Peripheries” into collaboration with our partners in Moscow. Of these, Basis.Kultur.Wien is the central and most immediate connecting element between the city of Vienna and figures working in the realms of culture and art. Others who participated in the development of the concept for the whole project and who brought their own expert experience to it include “Shift”—a City of Vienna programme to support innovative culture and art, whose goal is to improve cultural support in the regions of Vienna located outside the city centre, the Vienna Museum, the Austrian Film Museum, as well as numerous institutions such as the Architekturzentrum Wien.

Moscow and Vienna are united by a friendship lasting many decades, and in many aspects it is precisely in the field of culture that these two cities are most interconnected. Without this established trust and openness, including the willingness to enter into substantive discussions and to adopt an artistic outlook on things, this large-scale project could not have been realised. For this, I would like to thank the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, as well as all the participating artists and cultural institutions in Moscow and Vienna.

Though this publication may represent the final culmination of an incredibly exciting and successful project, I have no doubts that this beautiful and fruitful path of cultural cooperation between our cities will continue.

Ernst Woller, First President of the Landtag of Vienna

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In 2011, under the title Avstriya, davai! or “Come On, Austria!” the Moscow Museum of Architecture exhibited some of the most important objects of contemporary Austrian art. Since then, we have continued to developed and hold joint exhibition projects with numerous partner institutions in Russia and Austria with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow. Many of these have been realised in unusual places, such as on the atomic icebreaker Lenin in Murmansk, in what was once the world’s largest observatory in the Caucasus, or in Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East.

For this shared participation, it has always been important to pay attention to and support the freedom and creativity of the artists involved, while simultaneously touching on topical socio-political issues.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of international cultural work with Russia, I am very pleased with the forthcoming publication of the current joint project “Beyond the center”. The themes of this current project include such important issues as the development of the city, the situation in Welcoming remarks

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the outskirts of the metropolis, and the involvement of the general population in creative discourse and discussions.

Apart from the documentary materials on this AustroRussian project, it is my hope that readers will also find in this publication inspiration for future initiatives.

Andrea Mayer Secretary of State for Culture and the Arts Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport of the Republic of Austria

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Dear Friends,

Russian-Austrian cooperation, both in and beyond the cultural sphere, offers without doubt a prime example of friendly interstate relations which are possible even in the face of political disagreements on certain issues.

“Cross Years” between our countries are held on a regular basis, covering the widest possible spectrum of relations.

Just recently, the Years of Youth exchanges and the Music and Cultural Routes took place with great success. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has brought some delays to the programme for the Year of Literature and Theatre. But hopefully this will not last long The project presented in this catalogue forms an organic supplement to the expansive palette of bilateral interaction and raises the rather hot-button issue of cultural development as something desirable not only for urban centres, but also on the outskirts of cities. It is imperative that the inhabit-ants of the so-called “dormitory” areas cease to feel ignored and are given the chance to live a full-blooded cultural life.

This project has been devised to help solve this difficult task. I am confident that the experience of the cities of Mos Welcoming remarks

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cow and Vienna will be eagerly solicited and highly useful in this respect.

I would like to thank the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow and our long-time friend Simon Mraz for their invariably creative approach to Russian-Austrian projects in the field of contemporary art.

Special Envoy of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cultural Cooperation Mikhail Sh vydkoy

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Dear Friends,

I am delighted to welcome you here on the pages of this catalogue dedicated to the wonderful project “NA RAJONE. Beyond the Center”.

Moscow and Vienna are partner cities with a long shared history, and the cooperation between them is built on a mutually beneficial long-term basis with excellent traditions and future prospects in the fields of economics and culture.

Both the Russian and Austrian capitals are cities with a rich cultural palette, and their numerous joint humanitarian projects have long served as a real symbol of rapprochement and mutual understanding between our peoples.

In this regard, I would like to bring up the “Days of Moscow” held in Vienna at the end of 2017, whose programme was aimed at attracting a broad mass of residents and guests of Vienna. One of the central points of the programme was the photographic exhibition “Moscow Today”, organised in the Museum Quarter of Vienna, and a street performance by the Moscow youth cadet ensemble. A Moscow gala concert was held in the Main Hall of the Vienna City Hall, and performed to a full house.

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We are very grateful to our Austrian colleagues from the Vienna City Hall for the fact that our joint humanitarian projects, despite the difficult epidemiological situation, have not been cancelled, particularly in the case of the two capitals’ support in April this year, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Victory in World War II and the liberation of the Austrian capital by the Red Army, for the installation of memorial plaques at Vienna’s Central City Cemetery bearing the names of those who died here as Soviet prisoners of war.

The “NA RAJONE. Beyond the Center” programme is yet another excellent example of the joint work carried out by Vienna and Moscow.

The intensive search for new formats of interaction and the desire to further gain a sense of life in the residential districts of the two cities have also become factors bringing us together with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow. That is why we were delighted to accept the idea of implementing the “NA RAJONE. Beyond the Center” project.

Over the course of several years, the organisers and participants of the programme devoted painstaking study to the life of cultural spaces in the outer districts of Moscow and Vienna, something which, of course, was of great interest for all of us.

The development of cultural life in the city’s districts is one of the most important and pressing tasks facing the Moscow City Government. Cultural centres, libraries, theatres, cinemas and parks are the venues at which the city offers a wide variety of activities and cultural events for citizens right in their own neighbourhoods.

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Thanks to “NA RAJONE. Beyond the Center”, we have been able to further diversify the cultural agenda in the city’s districts, uniting Muscovites and the guests of the capital in a single creative impulse.

It should be noted that, as part of this initiative, we not only sought to saturate the cultural life of the urban districts with events, but also to look into the experience of our Viennese colleagues.

I would like to express my gratitude to the organisers of the project and my sincere hopes for further fruitful cooperation with our friends in Vienna!

Minister of the Moscow City Government, Head of the Department of Foreign Economic and International Relations of Moscow Sergei Cheryomin

Welcoming remarks

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Dear friends!

For over 10 years Raiffeisenbank, together with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, has supported the most relevant Austrian-Russian projects. They include social, cultural and historical topics and are held across Russia: from Murmansk to Arkhyz, from Novosibirsk to Moscow.

The Bank supports initiatives promoting the creation of a common cultural space between Russia and Austria; the Bank also tries to independently contribute to developing dialogue between our countries.

Our top priorities include the productive cooperation of Austrian and Russian cultural organisations, as well as the support of individual creative initiatives of musicians, writers and artists. We pay special attention to cultural projects that are capable of introducing innovative changes into our modern reality.

A perfect example is the long-term project “NA RAJONE” (“In the Neighbourhood”), aimed at creatively exploring the urban suburbs of Moscow, and implemented within the framework of cooperation between Moscow and Vienna. We consider all the initiatives included in this programme and 18

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integrated into specific territories as contributions to the development of urban areas. The Bank was especially pleased to support this cultural initiative. Enjoy reading!

Sergei Monin, Chairman of the Board Đ?Đž Raiffeisenbank

 Welcoming remarks

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NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center An introduction Simon Mraz, project curator, director of Austrian cultural forum Moscow (Russia/Austria)

This publication covers a bilateral Russian—Austrian cultural cooperation exploring the cultural importance ­beyond the city center: workers’ districts, so-called green districts, sleeping districts, new districts—talking about those parts of the city where the overwhelming majority of citizens live.

It has been almost three years Austrian Cultural Forum and its partners first reached out for initiatives and artistic projects dealing with Moscow´s districts and periphery, collecting artistic projects—partly shown already on different occasions, partly commissioned—and specially dedicated to the cultural dynamics beyond the city center.

Urban residential districts are those critical places where the culture of today and tomorrow is defined, not artificially but driven by the real circumstances of life and growing from the very middle of society—common life as the manifestation of cultural behaviour. Also it is the struggles and dreams of everyday life that determine the relevant questions of today´s culture as also the aesthetics themselves: youth cultures have grown up, the aesthetics of former 21

sub-cultures are dominating what today´s young people recognise as culture—in fashion, in the visualisation of music videos, and in the arts.

Why Moscow, Why Vienna?—Moscow has long been the epicenter of radical social and urbanistic experiments. ­Visionary plans have been put in place, Moscow has been the ­capital of the socialist world and has seen its collapse and is today the subject of ambitious plans for the future. At the same time, Moscow is widely associated internationally with not much more than Red Square, the Kremlin and maybe still some important constructivist buildings and Stalin Empire, all while the outer districts of Moscow hardly ever ­appear in the focus of interest.

Vienna, however, is also much more than its historic city center, it stands also for a continuous policy of urban development. Its social housing policy of the so-called “Red” (socialist and social democratic) Vienna dates back to the b ­ eginning of the 20th century. The city remains to this day ambitious to be innovative and internationally on the forefront of finding visionary and smart solutions for new districts.

The goal of “NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center” was to collectively present some of the most important recent art projects by Russian artists dealing with the topic of Moscow districts and at the same time to bring to Moscow some of the most interesting Viennese cultural initiatives dealing with periphery and district culture, respectively to try to implement these projects in Moscow together with Muscovite partners.

The goal was not to search for exoticism like documenting compounds containing the villas of so-called oligarchs or 22

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to exploit the places as a source of inspiration, more importantly that all the activities and projects should take place in districts, should be at the same time about city districts but also a contribution to the places, and should be integrated into the places the works are actually about.

This publication should however be more than merely a documentation of the projects realised, as additional texts have been collected and written for this occasion, in Vienna and in Moscow.

This publication also stands for a final point of a series of Austrian-Russian cultural projects that started in 2013 with the first project “Lenin breaks Ice” on board the Nuclear Icebreaker Lenin, realising projects in many parts of Russia, from Murmansk to Arkhyz, from Krasnoyarsk to ­Birobidzhan. To reflect the cultural power of suburbs seems to be an insight into perhaps the most powerful era of social change and a good final point, marking a turn in the dynamics.

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Introductory text Sergei Kuznetsov, Chief Architect of Moscow, First Deputy Chairman of the City of Moscow Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning (Russia)

If you were to try and fit the city’s plans for the development of individual districts into a single sentence, it might go something like this: “The main goal in the development of the outskirts is to do away with the sensation that living there means living on the fringes of the city.� That is, to make them full-fledged multifunctional elements of a unified urban environment.

At present, urban life is concentrated in the centre. This much cannot be denied, just as the difficulties caused by such an arrangement cannot be denied. But Moscow is striving to become a more polycentric city, and is taking confident steps in that direction.

The transport system is developing at an unprecedented pace. Moscow is a world leader in the construction of new metro stations. In parallel with this expansion, new roads are being built that will ensure fast, reliable communication between districts. As a result, people will no longer have to travel through the centre to get to work or to visit friends.

At the same time, new centres of gravity are developing in the districts and new jobs are being created. These 25

have been planned well in advance, for example, in redevelopment projects for the capital’s industrial zones. For a long time these lingered in a half-abandoned state, literally crumbling into ruins before our very eyes. Now the city is actively reclaiming them, bringing life to these areas, creating new modern neighbourhoods that are more than just places to live in, but also places of employment. The territories of the industrial zones are becoming model examples of quality improvement; modern comfortable parks are being laid out in them. A noticeable contribution in this regard will be made by the development project for the banks of the River Moskva. Their condition will gradually improve. As a result, I am sure that we will end up with a high-quality, comfortable and attractive space on both sides of the river.

But the provision of urban amenities will be raised to new levels even in the already existing dormitory suburbs. The renovation programme will be of great help in this. Under this, an urban environment of a qualitatively new level will be created, as well as new living space. Comfortable landscaping, greenery and new pedestrian routes will be introduced in the updated areas. In addition, the non-residential ground floor spaces created will bring a mass of new facilities to diversify both life and the economy in these areas.

On top of this, the “My Rayon” programme will make a considerable contribution to the beautification measures already underway.

As a result, I am confident that living in Moscow, regardless of the district, will be a diverse, comfortable and prosperous experience.

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The Construction of Social Housing in Vienna Christian Schantl, Head of Communications and Marketing for the City of Vienna (Austria)

Vienna is the capital city of Austria with a population of 1.9 million—and is: • the second largest German-speaking city in the world • the sixth largest city in the European Union • the largest university city in the Germanspeaking countries • the fourth most prosperous region in Europe • and hosts the headquarters of the UN and OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries).

Around 2.8 million people live in and around Vienna—­ almost a third of the total population of Austria. Apart from this, Vienna is a city with a very high quality of life, something which is repeatedly confirmed by international studies. In 2018, for example, the Economist ranked Vienna first place in its best cities for living in league tables, displacing the Australian multi-million population metropolis Melbourne from the top spot. For the tenth time in a row, the extremely high quality of life was recognised with first place in the worldwide Mercer study, in which 231 capitals are evalu27

ated annually in terms of their economic, social and political situation or the construction of housing.

Vienna’s municipal housing policy made a significant contribution to these encouraging results, because the quality of life and that of residential housing are closely interconnected. Through its housing development model, the city of Vienna ensures the creation and maintenance of high-quality, demand-oriented and environmentally-friendly housing. In addition, there are a variety of measures in operation that keep housing prices affordable for people with middle or lower incomes. It has been precisely this economic development, continued in recent years, that has so emphasised the future importance of preserving affordable housing with high aesthetic and material standards.

An active communications policy The success of the “Viennese Way”—more than 50 per cent of all Vienna families live in subsidised apartments—demonstrates that there is no contradiction at all in the combination of innovative architecture and social housing policy; on the contrary, it lays an important foundation for balanced urban planning and effective coexistence. The four-pillar model—based on sustainable development, architecture, ecology and economics—enables the provision of good and affordable architecture.

The foundations of this active communal policy were laid approximately one hundred years ago. Vienna’s current housing policy relies heavily on the achievements of Red Vi28

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enna. Although many new initiatives have been developed and implemented over the decades, the most important principles of Red Vienna are still valid today. These include, first and foremost, aspects of accessibility, high quality, social cohesion, and a balance of social mixing.

“Light, air and sun” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Vienna experienced incredible housing shortages. First of all, the working class was forced to live huddled together in extremely cramped and poor conditions. There would only be one bathroom per floor, one running water tap, and a public toilet. In order to cope with the high rents, they began to take in lodgers, chiefly itinerants who would pay for sleeping places by the hour.

Extreme density of population and unhygienic conditions led to epidemics. Tuberculosis was even called “the Viennese disease”, because it was here that it reached its highest rates in Europe. It was also regarded as a typical mass disease of the workers. Influenced by this experience, the Social-Democratic city government, elected for the first time after the First World War, set out to significantly improve the housing situation. The first Vienna Housing Programme instituted by the city council in the early 1920s provided for the ­construction of 25,000 new apartments in five years.

And they managed to achieve this ahead of schedule.

There then followed an expansion of the plan to 30,000 apartments. The council then decided to build another 30,000 apartments in the period from 1929 to 1933. Up unThe Construction of Social Housing in Vienna

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til the uprooting of democracy in 1933, a total of more than 66,000 housing units were built, divided among 348 residential complexes and 42 settlement groups. The main goal was to provide the general public with financially affordable high-quality apartments. But they succeeded in outdoing this: residential complexes with “light, air and sun”, provided with day nurseries, schools and libraries, as well as municipal institutions.

During the Second World War, one in six municipal apartments in Vienna was destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.

But here too, the city reacted with large-scale social housing programmes, continuing to follow the path charted out

by Red Vienna in the Second Republic. While the legal conditions and requirements may have changed over the years and decades, the main political approach to guaranteeing the populace modern, affordable housing has survived intact to the present day. Unlike in other European cities, the profitable business of trading in municipal buildings has never come up for discussion. Today, Vienna’s development of its housing stock is one of the city’s most important tools to ensure an adequate supply of affordable homes in spite of growing demand. And it is precisely because of this that Vienna is considered one of the best cities in the world to live in.

Improving quality The core of the Viennese apartment market is made up of the approximately 2,000 urban residential complexes which would never have come into existence without the social and 30

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political convictions and efforts of Red Vienna. Viennese municipal construction is globally unique in terms of its history and architectural diversity, but most important of all is its socio-political and social significance. 220,000 apartments and almost half a million inhabitants make the city of Vienna the largest communal homeowner in Europe. What began with the construction of the first municipal properties developed during the course of the 20th century into an exemplary model of urban housing policy.

Reliable partners: Non-profit housing societies Along with the 220,000 apartments in municipality-owned buildings in Vienna, there are a further 200,000 built by non-profit housing societies. These rent out apartments at cost, significantly below the market price. Commercial enterprises are motivated by the maximising of their profits, while non-profits focus instead on community benefits. This priority is clearly enshrined in the Federal Law on Non-Profit Housing.

Non-profit housing societies have to comply with the provisions of this Law on Non-profit Housing, which fixes rental prices at a level that covers the cost of land, construction work, administration and financing. Rental costs also include maintenance and long-term support measures. However, housing societies do have the right to profit to a certain limited extent, in order to reinvest this back into the acquisition of land, financial rehabilitation and launching new construction projects. As compensation for these restrictions The Construction of Social Housing in Vienna

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and regulations, housing societies are exempt from corporate income taxes.

By means of social or subsidised housing, the city of Vienna contributes to social integration and social mixing, as well as increasing general attractiveness, economic dynamism and even pushing for global climate goals. And all this is achieved in dialogue with people on the ground.

Housing support Vienna’s housing support programme provides affordable housing for a wide range of income groups. Without housing subsidies and corresponding restrictions on the upper threshold of construction and rental costs, costs to tenants would be one third higher. Various support plans foster the construction of new buildings, as well as the rehabilitation of old housing stock and providing direct financial assistance to low-income people.

The financing of social housing is based on a clearly fenced-off part of income tax revenues. One per cent of income is charged in equal shares to employers and workers as a contribution to housing development. With the help of this national tax, Vienna receives an annual sum of approximately 250 million Euros for housing purposes, but to a large extent it then supplements this amount to allocate a total of around 500 million Euros for housing construction. This financing method creates a reliable basis for planning largescale social housing programmes which would be i­ mpossible under a purely market-dependent housing policy.

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An active land policy A commitment to an active housing policy implies a commitment to an active and forward-thinking land policy. After all, the development of the city requires space, and affordable housing requires, first and foremost, affordable plots of land. However, in a growing city such as Vienna, demand, and with it land prices, is high, so tools are needed to enable the purchase of a sufficient amount of space under affordable conditions.

Back in 1984, the city of Vienna established the non-profit foundation wohnfonds_wien for the purposes of housing construction and urban renewal. This body is responsible for the acquisition and provision of land for social housing and is currently in possession of approximately 2.8 million square metres of land. On the basis of its reserves and longterm planning horizon, wohnfonds_wien is still able, despite increasing land prices, to acquire agricultural land or abandoned industrial facilities under beneficial conditions.

Smooth urban renewal Along with the creation of affordable housing, the goal of “smooth urban renewal� is primarily associated with sensitively improving the quality of life and housing, as well as engaging the population in the process. At the same time, residential buildings and entire neighbourhoods are not only repaired, but economic and cultural aspects are also taken into account in their renovation. The combination of The Construction of Social Housing in Vienna

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Deployment of subsidies

BENEFITS PAID TO PAID TO PROJECTS VIENNA HOUSING PROMOTION SUBSIDIES 2019 total approx.

Euro 461 million

Origin of funds: Employer and employee contributions Amounting to 0.5% of gross pay

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SUBSIDISED REFURBISHMENT approx.

Euro 149 million

approx.

Euro 361 million

BENEFITS PAID TO INDIVIDUALS approx.

Euro 100 million

SUBSIDISED CONSTRUCTION approx. Euro 212 million Mostly as loans with annuity subsidies paid by the City of Vienna

local identity, the historically shaped built environment, and the new Vienna architecture of “smooth urban renewal” has been honoured with many awards, including the UN “Scroll of Honour”. This Housing Oscar was awarded to Vienna in October 2010.

Urban renewal is not something limited to the city’s historical quarter, as the Viennese municipal authorities also take care of the proper maintenance of their own buildings.

The 1982 Law on Rental Rights introduced a maintenance levy and made this possible. Numerous large municipal buildings of the interwar period have undergone major repairs and are being repaired today, and the old houses of the city have been restored. he Viennese social housing model: T traditions plus the future The tools that ensure the success of social housing in Vienna are highly diverse and include, along with a high degree of tenant protection and visionary land policy, support for housing construction, tenders among construction contractors to ensure the quality of subsidised housing, and a wide range of services for tenants (such as free legal advice, calculations to control rental costs, etc.).

Although many new initiatives have been devised and implemented down the years, the most important principles of the Red Vienna of the First Republic remain in effect to this day. These cover, primarily, aspects of accessibility, high quality and social cohesion, as well as balanced soThe Construction of Social Housing in Vienna

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cial mixing. The guiding principle of Vienna’s housing policy has long been to approach people’s housing needs flexibly and implement housing construction in accordance with current needs of the population. Not only did this succeed brilliantly in the past, it will also affect the future of Vienna’s housing stock. Thus, the city of Vienna, among other things, is responding to the growing demand for high-quality, compact and affordable housing with the help of the “SMART” housing construction programme and the “NEU” municipal building programme.

Viennese housing is recognised worldwide as a successful model to follow. Not surprisingly, international experts’ interest in subsidised housing construction in Vienna has increased manifold. No other European city has such a long and continuous history of social housing policy, where the city authorities refrained from halting whenever the spirit of the time began dictating neoliberalism and privatisation.

The city is committed to municipal construction and, unlike many other cities, has never considered the option of selling off public real estate.

A large supply of subsidised apartments has had a cushioning effect on prices across the entire rental market and has ensured a degree of social mixing in the city. Rental costs for accommodation in Vienna are thus relatively modest compared to other metropolises. A wide selection of affordable apartments remains a matter of course in this city. The uniqueness of the Austrian capital lies in the fact that it is impossible to determine how much a person earns from their home address alone. And this is something we are proud of.

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Under the aegis of the “Beyond the Centre” project, from the 29th October to 17th November 2019, the ZIL Cultural Centre in Moscow hosted the exhibition “100 Years of Social Construction in Vienna”, created especially for this event.

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How Moscow fell in love with its outskirts: The birth of the Muscovite periphery Kirill Golovkin, author at Strelka Mag, strelkamag.com (Russia)

In the summer of 1960, Moscow underwent its largest period of urban expansion in the 20th century. On the 18th August, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR ­issued a decree making the MKAD, or Moscow Automobile Ring Road, the new boundary of the city. At a stroke, the area of the capital increased 2.5 times. Five small towns were brought into the administrative structure of Moscow, along with a whole array of workers’ settlements, summer dacha residences, villages, hamlets, kolkhoz collective farms and sovkhoz state farms.

The old settlements swallowed up by the capital then began to disappear. Where wooden houses, cowsheds and wells had stood so recently, multi-storey residential areas sprang up one after another: Cheryomushki, Belyayevo-Bogorodskoye, Khoroshyovo-Mnyovniki, Yasenevo, Degunino, Vykhino, Golyanovo and so on. The leading architects of the Soviet Union took part in the design of these new mikrorayon neighbourhoods, filling their territories with standardised panel-built apartment blocks: at first came the f­ive-storey Khrushchyovki houses, and then these were followed by tall39

er structures. And so, over a period of several decades, this was how the dormitory suburbs of the capital took shape.

With the expansion of Moscow, the city was divided into 17 districts or rayony. Four of these were located within the Garden Ring, and the remaining 13 took the form of wedges extending outwards from this internal ring road to the new borders of the city. This division created units that were rather large in size: for comparison, the territory inside the MKAD now comprises more than a hundred such rayon districts. The boundaries of the rayony that were proposed in 1960 had nothing to do with the traditional historical geography of Moscow, and the administrative-territorial division of the city would be changed again as early as 1968.

In total, during all the years of Soviet power—from 1917 to 1991—the number of districts in the capital changed no less than 11 times.

It should be noted that, in pre-Revolution times, the administrative division of Moscow had also been subject to bureaucratic formalisation. This organisational system existed for the sake of various municipal services, primarily for fire brigades. Moscow’s historical localities have developed over ­centuries, including such areas as Kitai-Gorod, Zaryadye, Ivanovskaya Gorka and Zamoskvorechye, but officially the city was divided into units that did not even have names.

They were simply called chasti or “parts” and were identified by number: the first part, the second part, the third, and so on.

The district grid that has developed in the city up until today has been in existence since the early 1990s. In 2021, it will be just 30 years old. In the centre of Moscow, the districts partially reflect the aforementioned ancient areas, while on 40

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the outskirts they most often correspond to residential areas dating to the Soviet era. However, the Moscow rayon remains a formal concept that serves various administrative purposes. Moscow is not Berlin or New York; you will not find yourself in a new world if you cross the district border, especially when it comes to the peripheries. People identify with other things: with their nearest metro station, with the street they grew up on, or with their own mikrorayon residential development, and if they say “I’m from Vykhino” or “I’m from Khovrino”, then the last thing they will have in mind here will be places defined by rigid official boundaries. And if you consider how mobile the city has become today and how easy and often it is possible to change accommodation here, many simply identify with Moscow as a whole, without thinking about a more local level of identity.

Away from the centre In 2013, I drew attention to the fact that the main city media of that time had begun to write more often than usual about the outer parts of Moscow. The pieces concerned took the form of profiles of individual regions or reports from them, and one magazine’s website even launched a section featuring “district blogs”. Topics that had formerly only been discussed in groups on social media networks, in Live Journal diaries or, even earlier still, on forums, suddenly appeared on the pages of fashionable magazines.

The reasons for this phenomenon were varied, and included some political motivations. In 2012, several independHow Moscow fell in love with its outskirts

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ent candidates were elected as municipal deputies in Moscow and, thanks to them, the focus of public attention began to shift on occasion from the centre to the periphery. In the autumn of 2013, riots broke out in the West Biryulyovo rayon, and this also affected the attention the media paid to the outskirts. But in general, it seemed that journalists in the new media had by this time exhausted the resources of the centre of Moscow and had begun to look further afield for new stories, away from the Kremlin and closer to the MKAD ring road. Summing up the year of 2013 in his column, journalist and television producer Alexander Urzhanov called it “the year of the outskirts”.

The most important “district” phenomenon of those years was the “Belyayevo Forever” project by the Polish architect Kuba Snopek. Initially planned as a graduation piece for the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, it gradually turned into a complete educational programme with excursions, lectures and workshops. The project was dedicated to the Belyayevo-Bogorodskoye housing estate in the south-west of Moscow, which is usually referred to simply as Belyayevo. Today it forms part of the administrative rayon of Konkovo.

Belyayevo caught Snopek’s interest for two reasons. Firstly, this housing estate had been designed in the 1960s by the Polish architect Jakow Biełopolski and clearly reflected the urban planning trends of that era. Secondly, Belyayevo had played an important role in the history of unofficial Soviet art. Here, in one of the panel-built apartment buildings, lived the poet, artist and founder of Moscow conceptualism Dmitry Prigov, who would become a key figure in Snopek’s 42

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project. Actions were often held by unofficial artists in Belyayevo, including the world famous “Bulldozer Exhibition” of 1974, which was dispersed by the authorities.

These findings inspired the architect with the utopian idea of having Belyayevo added to the UNESCO intangible heritage list and preserving the unique spirit of its standardised panel buildings. In 2014, the essay “Belyayevo Forever” was published in Russian in the form of a book. Despite the intervening years, this project still constitutes a model example of the successful reconceptualisation of the periphery of a capital city and, in a sense, has become something of a cult phenomenon.

Attention to the periphery of Moscow did not waver after 2013, either. In autumn 2014, an exhibition of the artist Pavel Otdelnov was held, entitled “Inner Degunino”, with landscape views of high-rise buildings in the north of Moscow. Journalists began to take local symbolism into account and publish materials about regional coats of arms. In 2016, Yandex launched its Yandex.Rayon communication service.

The social networking sites witnessed a growth in the number of local online communities. Designers began to produce clothing emblazoned with the names of districts and came up with identities for them.

However, the real boom was still to come. 2018 was a mayoral election year in Moscow. The programme of the main candidate—current mayor Sergei Sobyanin—involved the development of the capital’s periphery, to make these territories no less prestigious than the centre. This expressed an understanding of life on the outskirts that would receive strong support from the administration with all its resourcHow Moscow fell in love with its outskirts

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es. Not only did the independent city media begin to write about the outer districts, they were now joined by media controlled by the mayor’s office too. Priority projects for galleries and libraries served as pretexts for local research work.

One popular printed magazine commissioned by the city began to produce an illustrated insert, each issue of which dealt with a given district of Moscow. City museums and even transport services joined in with the city hall’s projects.

However, this does not mean that the regional theme became one that was exclusively institutionalised and under the control of the authorities. It was just that, by 2019, it had become so popular that it penetrated its way into all parts of the media. I am reminded here of Vladislav Kruchinsky’s “Free Koptyevoland” exhibition. The artist prepared a largescale installation about the Koptyevo area, which told a fantastical story about how the Koptyevo rayon had u ­ nilaterally seceded from Moscow. The first time I read about this was not on the Internet or in some press release, but in the onboard magazine of an airline whose flight I had taken to get back to Moscow after a business trip.

The editors of Strelka Mag, which I also work for, conducted a major special project in 2019, in which we examined Moscow’s districts and suburbs from various different angles: we talked about local businessmen, listened to the anthems of the municipal districts, searched for references to the districts in songs, fiction and in paintings, made guides for little-known local sights, and talked about the evolution of the housing.

In addition, we regularly find new hero-enthusiasts who, prompted only by personal curiosity, are exploring the area 44

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in which they live and who have become experts on local lore.

They get in touch with older district inhabitants, start blogs, and give guided tours. Since 1960, when Moscow expanded outwards to the MKAD ring road, the new dormitory suburbs have lived their own history. For decades, these peripheral landscapes have been perceived as an inevitable element of our everyday life. But as time has passed, these territories have accumulated a sufficient number of meanings to attract their own researchers. In each area, sooner or later there will be someone who turns up with an interest in the history of the land they live on, their famous neighbours and the local architecture.

By the way, architecture plays a crucial role in all this.

In the 2010s, the cult of the Khrushchyovka developed on the Internet. Prefabricated panel houses built under Nikita Khrushchyov, which had previously been associated with domestic ­inconvenience and ugliness, now became an object of romanticisation and artistic exploration. Images of these panel-built houses are regularly found on clothes and souvenirs, books are written and documentaries filmed about the Khrushchyovki and Brezhnevki. Online, you can purchase decorative boxes and even furniture made in the form of panel buildings. Recently, my colleagues and I wrote about a group of Russian developers who had launched a version of the game Tetris for smartphones that had standard serial residential buildings in place of the usual abstract blocks.

All this has also helped change the image of the outskirts: a warm nostalgia has replaced the former horror at the gloomy monotony of the dormitory zones.

Along with this trend, which is rather entertaining in nature, attitudes have changed towards the architecture of How Moscow fell in love with its outskirts

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the USSR as a whole. Cinema theatres, department stores, research institutes, university buildings and other structures built in the late Soviet years have begun to gain value in the eyes of the expert architectural community. It turns out that each model building has its own author, and almost every project of this era was innovative in some way. The functionality of the buildings was carefully thought out, and the grey glass and reinforced concrete facades had a peculiar aesthetics of their own. At first, it was foreign photographers that started filling their albums with images of this architectural style, which was called “Soviet modernism”, and in the last 5-6 years it has come to receive more attention among Russians too. People are realising that if you look at the history of buildings which we used to regard as boring and grey, then whole areas that we have been familiar with from childhood suddenly open up in a completely new way.

The pain of architectural loss The wicked irony here is that as soon as we learned to appreciate the legacy of Soviet modernism and fall in love with our dormitory suburbs, we immediately started to lose them forever.

One of the main losses of recent years has been the building of the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences (­abbreviated FBON in Russian), in the south-western part of Moscow. In 2015, the library, designed by Jakow Biełopolski, was almost completely gutted in a fire. According to the ­investigation, its cause was out-dated utility lines and fire safety problems. For more than four years, the blackened 46

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building was left a charred ruin. In the summer of 2019, all surviving fragments of the structure were finally demolished. They promise to restore the library according to the original drawings, preserving its dimensions and the appearance of the facades, but technically it will be a brand new building.

A few years after the fire at the FBON in Moscow, a whole wave of destruction of Soviet modernism began: the cinemas of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fell to the wrecking ball. Some of them were closed or reused for other purposes, and some carried on working without turning a profit. To get rid of useless real estate, the city authorities sold these buildings to a development company for subsequent r­ econstruction.

In total, the businessmen got their hands on 39 Soviet-era cinemas.

At first, the developers really did want to reconstruct these buildings and preserve their appearance. Inside, they planned to open district centres—spaces for leisure, in which the commercial component would stand side by side with the social. However, for various reasons, these plans have been modified. The cinemas began to be demolished, to be replaced by new buildings that are almost no different from any other ordinary shopping and entertainment centre.

Most of these cinemas and concert halls were located on the outskirts of Moscow. Their demolition did not lead to largescale protests, and experts and architects were more often among those who spoke up in defence of the structures than local residents. But it is now clear that this project has caused irreparable damage to the city in terms of local identity. Many of the cinemas were conceived by Soviet urban planners as How Moscow fell in love with its outskirts

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cultural and architectural landmarks for their rayon. Entire generations went there to watch films and performances by popular entertainers. Amid the uniformity of panel-built apartment blocks, these buildings stood out against the general background and, in a sense, became symbols of their area. And just at the moment when their almost half-century of life had begun to grow in the memories of local residents and turn into living history, they were demolished This problem has both an architectural and an urbanistic aspect. Some of these buildings were part of pre-planned architectural ensembles or else grew into such ensembles over time. One of these oases of Soviet modernism is located in the southeast of Moscow, in the Vykhino-Zhulebino rayon.

There, several such structures were lined up in one row: the complex of a scientific institute, an art school, a department store and a cinema and concert hall that has been somewhat updated by the current tenants. Most likely, by the time this text is released, the latter will have been demolished, and the complete ensemble will thus have ceased to exist.

We cannot fail to mention one particular renovation project in Moscow—the programme for the demolition of the five-storey Khrushchyovki and the construction of new housing in their place. These old panel houses were built as quickly as possible in order to give the apartments within to people then living in crowded communal apartments and barracks. The service life of these buildings is about to expire today, and the living conditions in them do not always meet the requirements of a modern city dweller: there are no lifts, the ceilings are low, corridors are narrow, and the kitchens are very cramped.

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Despite this, the renovation was met with much disapproval in Moscow, and today this programme is increasingly considered to have “fallen through�. One of its main problems was considered to be the replacement of small Khrushchyovki with multi-storey residential complexes. This would have a drastic effect on population density in the mikrorayon neighbourhoods, without a revision of their boundaries.

One of the most dramatic examples I have seen of the impact renovation can have is found in the east of the city, in Izmailovo. There I interviewed a local resident Anastasia Petrova, a local historian who has studied the architecture of her rayon. I learned from her that, due to the construction of new residential buildings, the city plans to demolish the Pervomaisky department store—a beautiful two-storey building erected in 1973 with a gallery, courtyard and a pedestrian zone in front of its entrance. It is quite possible that by the time this article is published, the Pervomaisky will also have disappeared.

During the interview, my interlocutor showed me a photograph in which her one-year-old child was walking on the slabs that paved the platform in front of the entrance to the department store. Anastasia said that these slabs had been brought to the construction site by her own grandfather.

Such is the connection between generations and times, and one which, it seems, is destined to be ruptured.

District studies instead of Moscow studies Despite serious architectural losses, cultural and research life in the rayony goes on.

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I live in Belyayevo, exactly in those places to which Kuba Snopek devoted his project. Last year, a museum of the district, or, as the founders call it, a Centre for District Identity, opened its doors not far from my house. This space is housed inside the local Belyayevo Gallery, which is completely given over to the understanding of the district. There is a permanent exhibition of books, artefacts and photo albums, and lectures, workshops and temporary exhibitions are held here too.

In addition, over the course of several months, a new group of enterprising neighbours coalesced right in front of my eyes—a collective united by their interest in their mini-homeland. It included employees of the local library, a municipal district deputy, the curator of the Centre for Identity, and a range of generally motivated local residents. Together they conduct tours of the area and come up with educational and art projects.

There is another local society that I follow on Facebook.

Its members are mainly engaged in socio-political work and hold discussions on pressing social topics. This includes renovation, and the violations that take place during the construction of new facilities and major repairs of residential buildings. Naturally, these were the ones who reacted most actively to the demolition of the Soviet Vityaz cinema in the autumn of 2019.

I believe that life in other peripheral areas of Moscow looks approximately the same. In some places a library is more active instead of a gallery, and sometimes political issues prevail over artistic research. Some districts have a local populace who are only just starting to explore their his50

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torical heritage, while others have been doing this for a long time. But anyway, all this is out there. We have finally noticed the valuable and the curious that lies right beneath our noses.

In this tale, I have remained an observer and to some extent a chronicler, collecting stories about my rayon and from time to time recording new shifts in how its inhabitants relate to it. After getting acquainted with Kuba Snopek’s project, I also took up the study of local history and started looking for Soviet articles on the construction of the district, meeting with local artists and occasionally penning something on the matter.

However, the issue of local identity remains open to me.

It’s still difficult for me to understand what the locals consider themselves to be primarily: Muscovites or “citizens” of their districts, and I’m still inclined to the former.

But the city dictates its own rules and forces us to bear in mind the established boundaries. Next time a local heritage defender is called upon to protect a building under threat, he will have to write an information request to his local council.

When an activist decides to influence the improvement of his courtyard, he turns to the district deputies. Active cultural institutions that accumulate the weight of the local community account for the territory entrusted to their care. Even an amateur historian finds it vital to demarcate the boundaries of their interests, to render their work more understandable.

On top of all this, the Moscow authorities are now actively supporting district initiatives—and in the minds of the authorities, a rayon is a specific territory with clear boundaries.

A few years ago, I thought that a district-level identity would reach full form among the younger generation that How Moscow fell in love with its outskirts

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would study local studies at school instead of Moscow studies, and who would talk about historical events that took place in the district as a regular part of their school day, learning about famous people who lived in their neighbourhood, and about paintings, songs and poems dedicated to it. I didn’t have such lessons when I was at school. I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but everything does appear to indicate we are coming to a point where this will happen.

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Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide Sergei Nikitin, Moscow historian, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, head of the MosKultProg arts group, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor (Russia)

Una delle prime sensazioni che ho provato vedendo Mosca e che mi piace ritrovare è che mi sento Alice dopo aver bevuto dalla bottiglietta e diventa piccola. Le case sono giganti, le strade sono giganti, i marciapiedi sono giganti e sono giganti e pesanti anche le porte della metropolitan. E poi mi piace il respiro della metro che fa aprire le porte della metropolitana, anche se a te per aprirle servono due mani perché sono pesanti. Bisogna tornare1.

Manuella Merlo

Columbus forever I’ve been exploring Moscow throughout the latter two decades of its 873-year-long existence. I’ve crossed it, outskirts to centre, on foot and by bike, many times. I’ve dug into its 1

Among my first sensations upon seeing Moscow—and one I like to revisit—was the

feeling that, Alice-like, I’d swallowed a drink-me potion and shrunk to a fraction of my former size. The houses were gigantic, the streets and pavements vast, the metro entrance doors colossal and hefty. I dug the metro-breath that flings these doors open, even though their weight is such that opening them yourself requires both hands. I have to go back.

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archives, poked about in its libraries, spoken to thousands of its denizens, developed over a hundred excursion itineraries, and I’ll say this: Moscow is a city that remains undiscovered, unstudied, a city that abounds in untrodden spots and corners.

It is also a city in the grips of a perpetual, iridescent metamorphosis; what first strikes the eye as glitter and brilliance—the thoroughfare of Tverskaya Street, for instance—suddenly loses its sheen. By the same token, a seemingly grey, nondescript neighbourhood—the environs of Baumanskaya metro station being a good example—suddenly finds itself on the rise. Moscow demands return visits.

We Moscow-lovers, assiduous explorers of the city, forever feel like urban Columbuses in a metropolis undergoing constant construction and (alas, inevitable) destruction. With almost every passing month, new preservation petitions spring up on change.org. This seethe-and-roil is only to be expected, what with almost twenty million inhabitants in perpetual activity and motion.

The capital’s outlying neighbourhoods comprise the greater part of its overall territory. With an extent of 18.9 square kilometres, central Moscow—the expanse within the Garden Ring—amounted to one fifty-ninth of its pre-2012 area; today, following that year’s incorporation of the Troitsky and Novomoskovsky administrative districts into the city boundaries (+1440 km2), it amounts to a mere one eightieth. The neighbourhoods within the Moscow Ring Road (MKAD) tend to be dominated by prefab apartment blocks. What do these locales have to offer?

My way of finding answers to this question is to explore any such neighbourhood with the utmost seriousness, to look 54

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upon it with a gaze normally reserved for St Basil’s Cathedral, the Parthenon, or indeed any other of the planet’s recognised landmarks.

If you think about it, even the most impressive feats of ­architecture and urban planning are marred by errors, by implementational shortcomings of some kind. But we generally don’t pay attention to these minor issues: instead, we seek to fathom out what makes such feats successful, delving into their minutiae, deciphering their symbols, p ­ ondering spatio-temporal accretions enriched by the experiences—at once quotidian and unique—of local residents. If you train the same kind of gaze on Beskudnikovo or Kuzminki or Perovo, what reads at first as a mere heap of broken images will eventually coalesce into a narrative: a point on a map, in other words, will become an experientially defined locale, a place you want to discover, to revisit, to introduce to friends and loved ones. When I started organising exploratory walks with MosKultProg—and, later, historically themed nocturnal bike rides (VeloNochi, or VeloNotte)—around Moscow’s outskirts, I was surprised to see that hundreds, even thousands of people were game to take part. (MosKultProg is a cultural initiative, founded by yours truly, whose primary purpose is the organisation of Moskovskiye kulturologichiskiye progulki, or “culturological walks around Moscow”.)

These walkers and cyclists were motivated by the desire to see and hear about ostensibly unremarkable dormitory neighbourhoods—Nagornaya, Chertanovo, Obruchevsky, Pechatniki, Maryino, Kuntsevo, Profsoyuznaya, Nizhnie Kotly, Metrogorodok, Golyanovo—you won’t find mentioned in many guidebooks. Traditionally, such toponyms have, in Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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the main, been confined to crime reports: drug dealer murder in X, robbery in Y, house explosion in Z. And suddenly here we were, instigating an aesthetically oriented conversation about the suburbs.

Truth to tell, we’ve had our fair share of aggro: “What’re you after? Jog on, nothing interesting to see here! We’re gonna call the police.” The band band Zvyozdnye Voiny [“Star Wars”] penned a great little number about this kind of aggressive stance for our street musical about the neighbourhood of Sviblovo. Appropriately enough, it was called “Nothing Interesting”. But I recall the words of Dostoyevsky: “The city-dweller,” he says, “is so distracted in the winter, and has so many pleasures, business, work, card-playing, gossip and various other amusements—besides which there is so much dirt—that he would hardly have the time to look around, to peer into [his city] more attentively, to study its physiognomy and read the history of [...] all our epoch in this mass of stones, in these magnificent edifices, palaces, monuments”. Dostoyevsky was writing about Saint Petersburg, whose beauty is now universally acknowledged. I, for my part, now ­venture to voice the same thoughts about our metropolis of Moscow.

Ways of exploring the capital I’d now like to provide you with a few keys to the city. Pick whichever you find to your liking:

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1 It’s best to approach the city by train, even if that train is the Aeroexpress, a service connecting some of the city’s major stations to the airports. Fields and forests, grey suburbs and squat garages give way to handsome edifices, all balconies and columns. There already? Nope: here come more industrial estates, fences, junkyards. A church looms on the horizon—and there’s the Ostankino Tower. Where is Moscow, then? Moscow is everywhere; Moscow, like Russia, is very heterogeneous.

2 No investigation of Moscow is complete without a bit of “courtyardology”. Courtyards reveal the true nature and function of the building and its neighbourhood; sometimes they’re private, almost off-limits spaces, and sometimes they’re welcoming ones. You can ask questions here, chinwag a little, find out what’s what from bench-perching grannies (whose numbers, it’s true, are ever dwindling). Moscow’s courtyards—from Arbat and Pokrovka to Biryulyovo—are unofficial workspaces for me.

If you venture into a courtyard, you’re more likely to happen on some textural remnant of the past: an old cast-iron lamppost here, a couple of smashed-up urn pedestals there.

Such remnants serve as reminders that good things were once afoot in these places. But what things, exactly? A granny pokes her head out of a window. “You taking photos of the dance floor?” she asks sternly. Thank you, granny!

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3 In my imagination—currently running wild, thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown—Moscow is an infinitely green city, although our trees stand barren and leafless for most of the year. It is a majestic greenery, calm and unruffled, especially during summer sunrises, when you feel as though you can embrace it, whole and entire, together with the city itself, and all the more so if you greet the dawn amidst the alleys, propylaea and sculptures of the Sparrow Hills. I always feel a particular longing for the summer, a season when I can show off Moscow to visitors and to myself, my attention forever being captured by details hitherto overlooked.

The city’s greenery is governed by a special code. The old elms with which it has traditionally been associated have died out. In certain places, though, you’ll find blue spruces.

These may indicate that the house you’re looking at was once the administrative building of a factory, a residential district or an entire settlement—Moscow is constantly engulfing settlements and even whole towns. Your presence, meanwhile, attracts the attention of local denizens, surprised at your surprise. Cue questions, revelations about entire destinies, and sometimes tea-drinking in the houses of strangers.

There’s a certain wistfulness in what we call “golden autumn”, in the blizzards and gales blowing down the immense avenues so beloved of the twentieth century’s gigantomaniacs. The colossal buildings stare blankly down at you, an endless forest of concrete verticals bristling in Izmailovo, Koptevo, Sviblovo, Belyaevo, Kuntsevo… These boxes may seem drab, standoffish, shabby by day, but, come evening, 58

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they’re aglow with lights, a reminder that the state put free roofs over the heads of hundreds of thousands of waiting-list families. For this, at least, we must extend our thank-yous to the governments of Khrushchyov and Brezhnev!

4 Of all forms of transport, Moscow is best admired by bike or, failing that, from the window of a tram. Get moving, though, before yawn-worthy electrobuses are introduced on all routes.

5 The fabric of the city is a multifaceted one. Its general configuration, as we all know, is radial, with rays emanating from the forbidding sun of the Kremlin. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see that it is actually fragmented into a multitude of island-like enclaves, each radically different from the next. Moscow’s motorways, rail lines and industrial zones have long functioned akin to rivers and lakes, disrupting the cityscape’s coherence and inhibiting movement across it (people rarely cross major highways, preferring to stay put on their own side). As a result, the city’s “islands”— of which there may be hundreds within a single administrative district—have become highly varied in character. Local inhabitants are generally incognisant of these idiosyncrasies, insensible to the aesthetic qualities and value of their own immediate neighbourhoods. What’s more, the power of municipal administrations is weakening with every passLooking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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ing year (at least for now: someday we’ll see a reverse process kick in).

I love hunting for these enclaves: you can seek them out on foot or by bike, or simply scour the map. That’s how I discovered the Stroginsky Backwater, some twenty kilometres from my house. Created on the site of a former sand quarry, the Backwater became a major water-sports hub during the 1980s. Dotted with high-rise apartment blocks, the Strogino peninsula is home to numerous species of animals and plants listed in the Red Book, a state document cataloguing Russia’s rare and endangered flora and fauna. The Backwater’s environs host some three hundred species of plants; rarities include orchids (twayblade, white adder’s mouth, early marsh, common spotted), lily of the valley, globeflower, bistort, and yellow iris. It’s remarkable that you should encounter, among Strogino’s concrete expanses, plants typically found in steppe-land meadows: purple-stem cat’s tail, creamy strawberry, purple milk-vetch, wild liquorice, kidney vetch, blue eryngo, mountain stone-parsley, mountain clover, as well as vulnerable ornamental plants such as Fischer’s pink, ragged-robin, water forget-me-not, ox-eye d ­ aisy, and bellflower (clustered and creeping). The surrounding area is rich in lichens (thirty-nine species, all told). Besides shrews and mouse-like rodents—species common throughout Moscow—Strogino’s resident mammals include the hedgehog, brown hare and stoat. Among the area’s nesting birds are the sand martin, sedge and marsh warbler, common reed bunting, nightingale, rosefinch, western yellow wagtail, and northern goshawk. Here, too, is the sole breeding ground for buzzards within the city limits. While work60

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ing on an account of the area for the Moscow Urban Planning Institute, I floated the idea for a project: that of inaugurating a park for central-belt flora there.

My map-scouring also led me to discover a district named Solomennaya Storozhka—Little Straw Lodge. I was struck by this gentle toponym and its affectionate-diminutive suffix ­–ka, which I imagined as a word-scrap nestling amidst concrete high-rises. It turned out that a cooperative of scholars had built private cottages for themselves there in the late 1920s (a noteworthy fact, since no such private residences were constructed in the city between the ’30s and ’80s). We ended up organising a public walk around the area and put together an extensive report for Moscow Heritage magazine.

6 The history of Moscow began attracting serious scholarly attention a little over a century ago, and we possess a sound knowledge of entire provinces of Muscovite life, and whole regions of the city to boot. Its outlying neighbourhoods are least well known, however: artists and poets started depicting them in their work—grotesquely, melancholically so— only in the 1970s, and it was only in the ’90s that historians came to research them. This is understandable: with rare exceptions, Moscow’s outskirts played no role in the city’s iconography—they were simply dormitory satellites of the ceremonial centre. Something akin, in other words, to a pyramid-builders’ settlement in Giza, paltry in scale and purpose compared to the pyramids themselves.

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What makes life in Moscow so interesting is precisely this profusion of hitherto unexplored locales—wrinkles in the urban fabric capable of inspiring fresh patterns of thinking as well as conversations with others.

Moscow’s semantics Looming large in the life of every city are events and objects of foundational importance—what we might call the city’s narrative linchpins. Such linchpins may take the form of remarkable buildings or architectural clusters, as is the case, for example, in Pisa and Bilbao, New York and Paris. Berlin shocks visitors with the horrors of the Wall and fragments of the Nazi era, while London has long been monetising what has now become a veritable Jack the Ripper industry. Moscow, for its part, was completely reconceptualised during the Soviet period. From the 1930s onward, no one bought, sold, published or designed anything in the city other than state institutions, with all other players relegated to an illegal black market. And it was the Soviet period that spawned the immense metropolis we know today—almost everything between the Garden Ring and the MKAD. In the USSR, people grew up and lived with the notion that the “capital of our Motherland” was an ever-festal, triumphant city, festooned with flags and portraits of leaders. Moscow wasn’t simply the focal point of the Soviet cult, with Lenin’s mausoleum marking its dead centre: the capital, in fact, became the subject of a cult itself. In the hungry year of 1947, the government embarked upon a “morale-raising” celebration 62

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of the city’s 800th anniversary, with the 100-kilometre-long Moskva–Volga Canal being renamed the Moscow Canal, and the foundation stones of the Seven Sisters skyscrapers laid in its honour. During the celebration of the anniversary itself, electricity was diverted from the Moscow Region to light up the city—something that became common practice, according to the region’s denizens, in the ensuing years.

Moscow was a “sacral” city during the Soviet period insofar as you could move there from the provinces only if you a) married a Muscovite or b) got offered a job there. The city was essentially closed to ordinary Soviets, giving rise to provincial Moscow-fantasies, Moscow-envy, and Moscow-hatred.

As a result, the “Moscow narrative” became rigidly orthodox, revolving around a number of key architectural visions: Red Square, the Kremlin, VDNH, a handful of monuments, highrise–lined thoroughfares, and the Mausoleum podium complete with waving Soviet demigods.

For many, the desire to relocate to Moscow was strong indeed. Susanna Khristoforovna Tapaltsyan, cult restaurateur and proprietor of Café Paros, told me how delighted she’d been to do just that back in the early ’60s. I couldn’t resist probing a little: “You had a three-room apartment in Yerevan, a family, connections in high places, you could easily’ve become an academician. Yet you moved to Moscow with your husband and child, squeezing yourselves into a single room within a communal flat. What was the point?”

“You really don’t get it, do you, Sergei? This is Moscow we’re talking about! You’re a Muscovite—you just don’t understand!”

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I truly didn’t. I grew up sort-of in Moscow, but on the outskirts—in a neighbourhood that went unmentioned in books about the city (“nothing interesting”). Subsequently, when I was working on the Izmailovo itinerary, I discovered that there’d been an airfield close to my school during the war years. Why hadn’t anyone told us? We would’ve seen our grey-brick neighbourhood in a completely different light.

Also nearby, though, was a Gulag labour camp, but this was classified information; I got wind of the truth only recently, when I started writing this article.

Goodbye, Leninsky!

The more I walk the city, the more I show it off to visitors from other towns, the more I grow fascinated with its contrasts and borderlines. Supplementing borderlines real and visible are images, stereotypes, signs of the past. Moscow is rich. Of course it’s rich. Is Moscow swanky? Of course it’s swanky. And exhilarating, too—wall-to-wall exhilaration.

Is Moscow poor? Of course, there are poor people here, and many of them.

In the twentieth century, you’d have been hard-pressed to find an address more prestigious than Leninsky Prospekt.

This avenue was home to Party cadres, Supreme Council members, special services personnel, academics—in short, much of the Soviet “nobility”. Not far away is the main campus of Moscow State University, with the “Golden Brains” building of the Russian Academy of Sciences looming over the avenue as it approaches the centre. The Prospekt takes 64

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you most of the way from the Kremlin to the government airport at Vnukovo-2. It was—and remains—an avenue with architectural character: it holds a certain allure. These days, new residential complexes are under construction here; there’s lots of students about. And yet it is now just another avenue. The legend of its “chosenness” is difficult to convey, for that old hierarchy is no more.

I grew preoccupied with this transition—one which took place before my very eyes: the symbolic Soviet city, which in the 1930s had been branded the “capital of our great socialist Motherland” (an epithet eventually shortened to “the capital of our Motherland”), suddenly metamorphosed into the country’s largest and most central city. The collapse of the Soviet cult and its attendant castes threw things into confusion—buying an apartment in a prestigious area now became a question of money. To have done so previously, you would’ve needed to occupy a solid niche in the Soviet hierarchy—a niche earned by brown-nosing the system, joining the Communist Party, and so on and so forth.

By the time I began my university studies, the Soviet Union had collapsed, yet the Prospekt still retained a particular aura of respectability. People would speak about it with adulation: it was there, they breathed, that real life was to be found, and, oh, what shops! what amenities! But with the advent of the market economy, the windows of the famous Soviet-era shops—inaccessible without the right connec­ tions unless you were prepared to join an infinitely long queue—grew dim: furniture and china could now be bought elsewhere. By the end of the ’90s, nobody was really shopping on the Leninsky: it’d become a grey, noisy, dirty artery, Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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not unlike the Dmitrovskoye Highway or any other of Moscow’s radial roads.

The disintegration of the Soviet cult precipitated the collapse of the symbolic city. It was during this era that my friends and I embarked upon our “Goodbye, Leninsky” performance walks. In the shadow of once-fêted walls, we’d read out fragments of Soviet texts about formerly celebrated buildings and institutions, attempting to reconstruct, through conversations with locals, the ambience and cultural codes of these places during their “golden ages”.

Kutuzovsky Prospekt: a chic avenue or a workers’ settlement?

Cammini in un quartiere degli anni 30, passi attraverso un cortile e sei davanti a un palazzo modernista, poi giri l’angolo e sei di nuovo nel passato. I cortili fanno da membrana osmotica tra un momento temporale e un altro2.

Manuella Merlo

Contrasts—semantic, social, architectural, compositional—comprise a sign-web from which the urban text is woven. The periphery/outskirts dichotomy is far from clear-cut in Moscow.

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Strolling through a 1930s-era neighbourhood, you pass through a courtyard and find

yourself before some modernist edifice, then turn the corner—to be transported back into the past. The courtyards serve as an osmotic membrane between one temporal moment and another.

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Let’s turn our attention to the environs of Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the Dorogomilovo district, which, in the Moscow imaginary, is Russia’s answer to Kensington, all unadulterated luxury (it’s not for nothing that the Dorogomilovsky market is the most expensive in town). Kutuzovsky Prospekt, one of the principal highways of the Soviet city.

After the war, the newly completed Prospekt—now a proper imperial thoroughfare—came to be lined by grand edifices sporting columns, loggias and towers, and richly decorated with stars, reliefs, sculptures and the like. These magnificent facades materialised here in order to beautify the locale for the eyes of one man: at the far end of the Prospekt, hidden away in a copse, stood the so-called “nearer dacha”, one of the personal residences of Iosif Stalin. The Prospekt connected this residence with the Kremlin, where Stalin worked. The apartment blocks along its length were occupied by employees of the principal (and somewhat terrifying) Soviet institutions of the 1930s and 40s. The Kutuzovksy, as ­conceived by Muscovites and anyone “in the know”, is synonymous with Kremlin-level prosperity. Two general secretaries, Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev, were registered residents of house no. 26. And yes, the triumphal courtyard of the general secretaries impresses with the variety of its vegetation, but—what’s this? Suddenly you notice that the ­quality of the brickwork in the courtyard is poor.

Slapdash, shoddy. That’s odd.

On the other hand, the janitor’s lodge in the neighbouring courtyard recalls a diminutive Roman rotunda. A sanctuary of cleanliness. But let’s have a natter with the locals, shall we? While reminiscing about going to the polls, about Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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the general secretaries, about how friendly and modest they were compared to the current leadership, a few residents— middle-aged folk who would’ve been schoolchildren during the 1970s and 1980s—suddenly recall playing with a skull.

Another chap joins the conversation: “We too would find skulls in the ground hereabouts,” he says. Right, let’s take a look at an old map. The building that housed Brezhnev and Andropov was constructed on the site of two cemeteries, Russian and Jewish, which were bulldozed to make way for the Kutuzovksy’s handsome edifices. What else had been here before? I remembered seeing an izba (log cabin) in one of the ­local courtyards back when I was a youngster. Was my memory deceiving me? “Oh yes, the ‘Napoleonic’ hut— that was over towards Kievskaya metro, until it was torched in the 2000s.”

The Dorogomilovo area had a wholly different character in the not-so-distant past: as late as the 1960s it remained an industrial settlement, complete with chemical plant, brewery and power station. Let’s take a walk around the courtyards, maybe we’ll happen across something interesting.

Opposite the Brezhnev-Andropov apartment block stand buildings originally constructed to house employees of the NKVD (which would eventually split into the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry for State Security), the Commandant’s Office of the Moscow Kremlin, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You leave behind the whirlwind hubbub of the metropolis as soon as you enter the courtyard of the Commandant’s Office. One of these blocks was once home to legendary Dynamo goalkeeper Lev Yashin. But here’s the remarkable thing: in the centre of a courtyard brimming 68

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with expensive vehicles stands… a wooden pavilion! Why is this so remarkable? Because such a structure radiates an atmosphere of rural tranquillity. There’s an inscription on the pediment: “Summer Reading Room 1936”. Temporary wooden structures throughout our city are under constant threat of being demolished, or torched by vandals, yet this one, somehow, has survived. (Admittedly, though, it’s been repaired using modern metal roof tiles and block-house panels.) I­ nscriptions of this sort became a thing of the past in the post-war period, making the pavilion a more or less unique monument of its era.

Let’s step through the arch of no. 31, a building whose ground floor is lined with upmarket boutiques such as Valentino, and take a couple of steps toward the courtyard, where we’re greeted by a completely different type of architecture: to wit, simple, artless, brick-clad blocks, late twenties or early thirties vintage, the sort of five-storey affairs that wouldn’t be out of place in Tver or Samara. In the centre of the courtyard stands an iron dovecote, a monument of innocent postmodernism. Soviet dovecotes are always phenomenal, and dovecote construction is, in fact, a Soviet tradition of considerable importance. In Soviet Moscow, as ­a lready mentioned, everything was built by the state: although some private residences still remained in the city, they were gradually demolished and replaced by communal apartment blocks. Conditions in these apartments were (to say the least) cramped, with families herded into single rooms. Have yourself a sleep, and then it’s off to work: no space or opportunity for the man of the house to do much else. Dovecotes, though, could be built by anyone, provided, Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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of course, that you secured the countless requisite permissions. So Moscow’s menfolk, seizing this opportunity to create something with their own hands, simply for beauty’s sake, would use means fair and foul to source impossible-to-find building materials (the USSR suffered from shortages of, well, everything). A ­ fter 1956, when the government asked Moscow’s pigeoneers to provide 40,000 birds for the opening ceremony of the World Festival of Youth and Students, pigeon keeping became a modish pastime, and fanciers were allowed to erect dovecotes in their courtyards.

The dovecote on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, 31 was cobbled together by some resident of the building—who exactly this was I don’t know—from whatever materials he’d been able to lay his hands on. Hunks of sheet iron, metal railings (the sort you normally see around flower beds—he must’ve picked them up somewhere), gratings… Where would he have got these from, though? Perhaps he was a police officer or a prison guard? The overall structure strikes me as the handiwork of a man afflicted by desperation and delirium; something about it recalls the work of architect Alexander Brodsky.

The city administration is now pushing back against dovecote construction, so hurry if you want to see them for yourself. We’re doing our best to bring out a book on their history and architecture as soon as we can.

You emerge onto Dunayevsky Street, with Studenches­ kaya Street extending perpendicularly to your right. A student of Vladimir Tatlin’s who used to live here once told me that, in the middle of the 1930s, her kids were given to larking about in a cemetery—and now, of course, I know exactly what cemetery this was. If the old map is anything to go by, 70

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it would’ve been very crowded and noisy hereabouts, what with trams clanging down the street. A hundred steps onward, and the horns of diesel locomotives begin to pierce the silence, with the student residences of Dorogomilovo now coming into view over the houses.

Here begins another rhythm, another narrative. This complex—six rectangular blocks housing single undergrads, two H-shaped ones for married students and graduates—was built in the constructivist style by a team of young architects. When he first saw them, the Urals-born DJ Yegor Kholkin, with whom we collaborated on our “Kutuzovsky courtyards” project, remarked that these buildings reminded him of Uralmash, an outlying worker’s settlement of Ekaterinburg. I can’t say the same for myself, but the important thing is that a bit of courtyard-hopping allows us to imagine ourselves into completely different places.

Let’s stroll along the road, taking in the residence complex, until we reach a pocket park. The park’s flower bed, complete with long since non-operational fountain, has, so I am informed, been branded “The Ashtray” by students: it’s popular as a place for informal recreation, an ideal spot for a chinwag and a smoke. In the 1990s, when life was more free-wheeling, you could play your guitar there, too, and belt out a few tunes. Now that Muscovites have a far more European attitude to noise, people no longer put up with racket on their doorsteps and end up calling the police.

Behind the residences is yet more imperial window-dressing from the 1940s and ’50s: grand edifices—all reliefs, columns and triumphal arches—built so that passengers coming into the capital on the Moscow–Kiev Railway would be Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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greeted by urban magnificence. No constructivist aesthetic could ever generate a comparably glittering impression.

Behind these edifices, in turn, is an expanse of railway territory. Studencheskaya metro station, one of the most modest in Moscow, has an almost suburban feel.

One last thing: the cars in the area are a unique mix of Bentleys, Kias and rusty Soviet-era motors. In the old days, cities were mixed environments with rich and poor living side by side, and so it is in Moscow today.

So there you have it—the one-kilometre stretch around the elite Kutuzovsky Prospekt; all of Russia makes its presence felt here. This is Moscow’s interurbanism at work. It revitalises the lives of enlightened observers, facilitating t­ ravel between epochs and far-flung spaces.

Reface the faceless

E poi Mosca ha i muri più belli del mondo! Le screpolature delle vernici, i tubi, i buchi, le scrostature più emozionanti del mondo3.

Manuella Merlo

In 1960, five towns and numerous villages were annexed to Moscow, then in the process of being encircled by the MKAD. During the Soviet era, villages and small towns were ab3

What’s more, Moscow has the most beautiful walls in the world—and the world’s

most captivating cracked paintwork, pipes and holes, chips and scuffs.

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sorbed into the city in entirely unceremonious fashion. Historic buildings, lived experiences, topography, toponymy— everything would be bulldozed over, metaphorically and literally. Nothing remained of these locales save for industrial facilities and supply pipelines. More often than not, it proved more cost-effective to raze everything to the ground and put up new houses, as per the requisite standards and regulations. Wherever possible, the land itself would be be levelled—building things, after all, is far easier when the horizon’s pancake-flat.

Though street plans sometimes survived unaltered, street names still needed changing. Practically every Soviet village had its own Ulitsa Pushkina, Ulitsa Lenina, Ulitsa Shkolnaya, Ulitsa Sovetskaya, Ulitsa Tsentralnaya... Twenty Central Streets in the same city? That’d make navigating— or sending a letter—rather difficult. Where was the main drag in Babushkino, in Perovo, in Sviblovo? Who knows, these days? The main drags of these settlements were all engulfed by an endless metropolis, with the “main” stuff— everything of interest or significance—now seemingly confined to its centre.

Having grown up in Moscow’s outer reaches, my MosKultProg friends and I began investigating the city’s outskirts because we simply had to: we wanted to understand where exactly we were living. And our first challenge was to ­“reface” a landscape rendered faceless by industrial urban ­development and city politics—a landscape created out of nothing, without any cultural or physical context.

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ents were confined to a single room in a communal apartment. I did my growing up, however, in Yuzhnoye Izmailovo, one of the city’s furthest-flung areas. Sited adjacent to the MKAD, this is perhaps the most boring, most unpromising of Moscow’s outer suburbs. It took my family’s fancy thanks to the fresh air afforded by the immediate proximity of Izmailovo Park, but central Moscow was an hour away by bus and metro. You could easily wait a good twenty minutes for the former, standing there in the cold and the rain. Virtually no one had a car. It was a godawful, dreary hole; we waited an eternity for a cinema only to get a general store, or universam, which stood forever empty (late-Soviet shortages). When I was a kid, the entire neighbourhood with its population of 20,000 souls was served by five grocery stores, two newsstands and two ice-cream kiosks—which, you’ll no doubt be surprised to hear, were often devoid of ice cream (shortages again!). There was no “Moscow feeling” here— there was just space, vast, empty, hanging heavily in kilometre-long (!) mega-courtyards that came, before our very eyes, to accommodate concrete-panel school and kindergarten buildings. But even Yuzhnoye Izmailovo boasted a sight capable of piquing our interest. This was a brick house close to the forest, the only one amidst a panel-built paradise.

Nothing special—three floors, little square windows, wonky frames, boiler-room chimney. Clearly built before our time, it looked like it had stories to tell. None of the neighbours had any titbits to pass on—they’d all moved here from other corners of the city. What yarns us young’uns span about it! Our teenage years found us claiming that there’d been a brothel here: you know, red house, red lights. Not long ago, 74

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though, I finally discovered the truth from some old-timers: the house was a remnant of a vegetable-growing sovkhoz, or state-owned farm, called Sickle and Hammer. It’d served as a landmark for kids growing up in the area during the ’60s: “This building,” one of the ex-sovkhoz people informed me, “was initially known as the New House. As residents of neighbouring ‘Finnish’ houses”—small wooden prefabricated dwellings, imported from Finland to the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia—“we thought it the very height of comfort. Having said that, the whole settlement was very pretty, with big orchards and blooming front yards.” Blooming front yards… I’ve not seen any photos, but I readily believe that this was a beautiful, vibrant place.

In the 1970s, the sovkhoz fields were built over: up sprouted the nine- and fifteen-storey concrete slabs and towers I grew up amongst. The new streets laid out alongside them were given ear-grating names—Magnitogorskaya, Chelyabinskaya, Chechulina (in honour of the former chief architect of Moscow, Dmitry Chechulin, who designed the neighbourhood). The proportions may have been good, but these were cookie-cutter affairs—no individual houses, no gardens. The prefab panels have a lifetime of half a century or so, which means demolition won’t be long in coming.

And the capital’s territorial expansion is still proceeding—actively so—in our own time. To see this for yourself, you need only head to Moskovsky Settlement or Kommunarka, to the city’s south west. These are vast dormitory neighbourhoods—swathes and swathes of high-rise apartment blocks laid out on former kolkhoz lands, almost as if nothing had been there before them. And so another layer of history Looking for Moscow: An Explorer’s Guide

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is vanishing, just as unprinted photos get lost in the depths of our smartphones and hard drives. Did such-and-such really happen or didn’t it?

Invitation to a journey Behind the self-confident glitz and gloss of the main drags lurks the tranquillity of the courtyards. Spend enough time in Moscow and you’ll be sure to encounter slivers of rural picturesqueness. Eventually, you’ll start getting clued up on various facets—political, social, industrial—of the city’s lively biography. These features lend dynamism and charm to the Moscow narrative—a landscape still to be discovered and enjoyed.

Moscow, you have to return.

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The further you go from the centre, the stronger and more attentive you need to be: on the outskirts, the Department of Courtyard Studies has instituted a Regime of Intensified Contemplation (abbreviated RUS in Russian). Inspection of the courtyard between two standard Khrushchyov-era blocks in Kuzminki together with its inhabitants provides many impressions for consideration. Everything is important here: the memories of children’s fights (now there are no children visible in the yard—only cars), and the spectacle of a gutted bouquet of roses or a thrown away (and smashed) bottle of vodka are a dramatic experience to take in. Even the random combination of colours of drainpipes and faded panels is to be perceived as an artistic gesture. A severe frost revives Soviet courtyard rituals—drinking in the stairwell with friends or having a bite of gingerbread. As we were talking with a woman, pigeons pounced on the food she had put out for the dozen (!) cats that live in the basement. The artist Dmitry Gutov shows his courtyard to Sergei Nikitin and the Department of Courtyard Studies in Kuzminki. © Alan Vouba

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“An attempt to explain Soviet Moscow: the symbolic and happy theatrical set that is Moscow lit with a soft pink light under the eternally blue dawn sky. And then the reality behind this facade, the “outskirts”, which you can’t even call Moscow—carefully concealed by this pinkish scenography of the capital of our homeland. In this greyish reality, ordinary Muscovites swarmed—the subject of endless shame and retouching, and demolition. I realised that there was no “centre” to that Moscow: there were only symbolic paintings that denied and marginalised the living—and un-epic—city.” Collage by S. Nikitin (2020), above—a historical photograph of Dorogomilovo (1951) © Yuly Chvertkin

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“Where is the centre? The triangle is the original Moscow, the yellow circle is that part of the city inside the Garden Ring, which today’s Muscovites call the “centre”, and further out are the twentieth-century outskirts, within the 1960 ring road. The territories of New Moscow (2011) are shaded in a mustard colour.” © Collage by Sergei Nikitin (2020)

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The outskirts as a quest: the automation of saccades, the logic of gameplay and the deceptive homogeneity of the dormitory districts Alexander Burenkov, curator (Russia)

During the period of the coronavirus pandemic and mass self-isolation on the part of Muscovites, the historical centre of the capital lost a significant part of its advantages in the fields of commerce, services and domestic comfort, and came to be compared with the city’s dormitory suburbs, which gained new advantages (as evidenced in studies by the Moscow Centre for Urban Studies and other independent experts). The diversity that the inhabitants of the ­centre and areas of historical development have grown accustomed to was compensated for during the quarantine period by the low population density (approximately 10,000 people per square kilometre). The outskirts of Moscow, where the population density can reach 30,000 people per square kilometre, with their high-rise buildings and large distances between buildings, have lost almost nothing in terms of ­variety in their commercial functions, and residents have more green spaces within walking distance of their homes, not to mention spacious courtyard spaces in their immediate vicinity.

The dormitory zones of Moscow, so often accused of being isolated and cut off from the rest of the city by their initial 95

nature, have proven more suitable than other areas for the self-isolation of their inhabitants.

All the residents of dormitory zones regard their home areas to be very ordinary, and this means a priori bad. Is this because the “ordinary” is generally perceived as something “bad” in our country? Trademark Russian hyper­ centralisation also affects general attitudes, according to which a ­ nything good can only be found in the centre. Speaking of urban improvement, “good” is associated in the minds of most citizens with something rather tasteless. When citing an example of a “good” courtyard, a senior councillor will definitely opt for an image of one in which there are sculptures of dragons, knights and dinosaurs—a portal to the fairy-tale world that exists literally 100 metres away from a typical courtyard as yet untouched by any improvement.

The poor (or what is considered to be poor) environment of the dormitory zones encourages citizens to organise themselves in some way to solve common problems (holding subbotnik weekend clean-up initiatives or appointing a representative for each block), but the low numbers of active people hampers many grassroots efforts and self-organisation formats, and the most popular forms of leisure for most residents remain home visits and gatherings.

Very many dormitory zones lack a distinct centre that residents can easily identify. Areas of experimental development such as Chertanovo-Severnoye, Troparevo-Nikulino and a number of others were luckier in this sense: they do have clear boundaries and a defined centre, and it is an easy matter for their residents to outline “their habitat.”

But in the typical built-up areas of a later period, such as 96

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around the Kantemirovskaya metro station, the idea was not initially to establish any definite points of assembly for these territories, and so an incomprehensible “spatial porridge” was formed there, in which the local residents simply get lost. And when there is no understanding of where the boundaries of “us” end and “them” begin, this not only contributes to spatial disorientation and aesthetic hunger, but also makes it difficult to formulate a coherent programme for transforming this environment. Nevertheless, despite their extreme eclecticism and self-contradictory nature, dormitory zones with their unique aesthetics have become one of the main themes in modern art and photography, and even in fashion and advertising, raising reasonable questions about how long the exploitation of post-Soviet images of panel-built architecture will remain relevant and when the romanticised melancholy of the abandoned wastelands of post-Soviet cities will cease to be a main theme in contemporary culture. A new generation of photographers and artists is looking for ways to discover new unexpected strategies and methods for understanding the peripheries with the aid of media technologies, performative interventions, collective actions and v ­ ideo and computer games, hacking a trail from documentary photography to the logic of gameplay.

In the winter of 2019, the Ekaterina Foundation hosted the “New Landscape” exhibition, held in Ekaterinburg under the curatorial leadership of Anastasia Tsaider and Pyotr Antonov. Not only was this exhibition the first generalisation of all photographic studies of the Russian landscape, it also constituted a staged review of photographs reflectThe outskirts as a quest

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ing the new Russian urban reality. The impact of this Russian exhibition project could be compared with that of the legendary exposition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”, shown in 1975 at the Museum of Photography and Cinema in the American city of Rochester. That ­exhibition had involved the participation of ten photographers who took the landscape of the United States and its built-up environment as the basis for their work. A new circle of themes was then opened up for American landscape photography, and banal images of city outskirts, parking lots, gas stations, motels and highways became a full-fledged aesthetic subject, replacing majestic mountain landscapes and spectacular panoramas. Hermetically sealed and closed, devoid of any propagandistic pathos, moral or evaluative judgment, the works of the “new topographers” became the next step on the road towards a rapprochement between photography and the world of contemporary art. The birth of a detached and neutral American photography took place due to an overabundance of images as such. By that time, emotional pictures were associated with commercial offers and advertising. The same thing is happening in Russia today. The artists of the “New Landscape” project, in contrast to the sickening post-irony or exoticisation that has successfully sold the aesthetics of the outskirts to Western brands and media, have relied instead on neutral photography. The exhibition participants covered the whole geography of the country: from Liza Faktor, who turned to Siberia exclusively as a space that was partially developed but then abandoned again, to Valery Nistratov, who explored the outskirts of Moscow and pointed 98

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out examples of the eruption of the new economic system into the natural world.

Perhaps the answer to the question regarding the causes of international interest in the aesthetics of the post-Soviet peripheries lies in their belonging to a monotonous, standardised world, with a shared nostalgia for other speeds of existence and the idea of the collective construction of a single happy future for all. Interest in the neutral reflection of typical post-Soviet landscapes first emerged in the late 2000s, coinciding with the emergence of a massive movement to protect urban heritage, urban fashion, Internet communities and VKontakte social network publics, the most famous of which were Estetika yebenyei, which may be translated “Bumblefuck Aesthetics” (with the subtitle: “The romance of the urban suburbs | the exciting worlds of yebenya and industrial zones | your virtual stroll”) (https://vk.com/yebenya) and “Credit for 30 minutes for Russian Federation c­ itizens” (https://vk.com/creditfor30minutes). The creator of the latter, the journalist Kirill Rukov, claimed that he had started this public group out of a desire to challenge the prevailing stereotypes: “In the minds of foreigners, Russian cities are a large, cold, deserted, post-Soviet space, stuck in time, similar to the scenery for the films of Alexei German Jr. Thank God, Russia is not like that, and I record things that don’t fit into this stereotype—fanfares for young business and the emblems of survival.”

According to Maxim Sher, one of the main aims of the “New Landscape” exhibition was the demythologisation of space: “Our whole culture is extremely mythologised.

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explore culture analytically. This isn’t my own phrase, but I love repeating it: in our culture there is a great deal of literature and very little detached analysis. In so far as journalism is inextricably linked with the history of literature, it constantly reproduces these literary myths. Politics is now viewed through the prism of Pelevin or Dostoyevsky, although languages of political science do exist. And it is only during the last few years that political analysis has been conducted from the point of view of political science rather than literature. The same goes for landscape. Landscape is simply the result of political, economic and social processes.

We are interested in exploring this, and that is what we are doing. Without any song or dance about it.”

In some sense, the “New Landscape” exhibition could be read as a study of the contemporary Russian architecture of the dormitory zones—if we were to understand the latter not as art, but as a human being’s method of living in spaces. Of particular interest to the photographers, artists and researchers was a range of topics related to video-ecology, the doctrine of the ecology of the visible environment, which forms an integral part of the general ecology, and which analyses the visual environment of the city and proposes alternatives for harmonising the urban environment based on the requirements of human psychophysiology. It has been scientifically proven that, in addition to the traditional types of pollution, visual (optical) pollution of the urban environment likewise exists and affects human health.

From an evolutionary point of view, vision provides humans with a complete perception of the world, warning us of danger, and our brain transforms visual images into aesthetic 100

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ones, giving rise to a different emotional assessment of our environment. The human eye scans visible space at a speed of about two saccades per second, capturing all the elements and delivering this information to the brain. Saccades are the rapid movements of the eye that occur involuntarily and continuously. The theory of saccade automation is the theoretical foundation of video-ecology. Optically, the physiological capabilities of the human eye are limited, since it is only able to adequately display what is seen within a certain range of vision, modes and speeds of perception, along with the level of illumination. If these physiological parameters are not provided for, then urban spaces appear hypertrophied to the human being, and he experiences a feeling of insecurity and discomfort, against which urbophobia naturally develops (the fear of urban spaces). Conversely, the natural environment meets all the physiological needs of vision: it is saturated with forms that are diverse in silhouette, size, texture, colour, illumination and remoteness (in most cases something lacking in the urban environment). The architectural space of a modern city is mainly composed of homogeneous and aggressive fields that create an unnatural visual environment in which the fundamental mechanisms of vision and thought cannot function to their full extent, which inevitably leads to their disruption, causing fatigue and irritation, misinforming the brain, and provoking disorientation in space. It is well known that the so-called big city syndrome, which manifests itself in the aggressiveness and increased fatigue of the inhabitants of large towns, metropolitan areas and megacities, is directly related to visual and colouristic violations of the urban environment. The The outskirts as a quest

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colouristics (colour saturation) of a city and its lighting design are also a vital element in creating a comfortable visual environment. Properly designed illumination of architectural objects, taking into account the psycho-physiological needs of human beings, high-quality advertising, optimistic painting of buildings following the requirements of video-ecology, and other expressive colour accents can significantly improve the visual and environmental conditions in a city. In an ideal world, the design of the urban environment should aim at creating a harmonious space that creates and maintains the psychological comfort of citizens of all ages and social categories. This is achieved by matching the colours of residential building facades in the dejected and homogeneous dormitory districts by means of coloured tiles and metal panels, saturating the urban space with small forms of architecture (flowerbeds, plant pots, boulders and stone slides) and street furniture, sculptures and sculptural ensembles. With the integrated creation of ecologically safe conditions, the urban environment is made much more comfortable, and architectural and planning decisions must play a significant role in this integrated approach.

At the same time, the artists discovered an alternative way of combatting monotony-induced gloom and aggravation in the dormitory zones—a detached romantic point of view that turns suburban cityscapes with large-scale architectural typologies into something approaching the contemporary sublime. The fascination these views hold over modern artists and photographers can appropriately be compared with the cult of ancient and mediaeval ruins in the romantic era. The most important singer of the urban 102

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periphery, Alexander Gronsky, often worked in remote and inaccessible regions of Russia, where the population density frequently drops below one person per square kilometre.

The co-curator of the “New Landscape” exhibition, Anastasia Tsaider, placed chaos and nature, which are conquering the mikrorayon from human control, right at the centre of her project. Both photographers turned to the romanticised image of the ruins of the “Soviet empire”, creating the main visual fuel for the post-Soviet market for ruin-porn.

The romantic glorification of the urban fringe as a utopian world reached its climax in the “Umwelt” project of Kirill Savchenkov, who grew up in Yasenevo and examines the city outskirts through the prism of eclectic personal memories. For Savchenkov, the dormitory zones are a mythical space of Soviet ideals cast into independent development and the synthesis of old and new, gentrification processes, and flooded with new cheap building materials employed by migrant builders. One of the most memorable images of the entire Savchenkov series is a 3D visualisation of a utopian mountain landscape with panel-built housing blocks on the summits, whose inspiration had been drawn from the participants of the Düsseldorf school, themselves largely influenced by romantic painting, and the photographs and romantic paintings of the 19th century Hudson River school.

Savchenkov praises the dormitory zones with the assiduity of the artists of this landscape school, who had painted only one area, the Hudson River Valley and its environs, including the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountains, idealising these places to the status of a utopian state utterly unique in its beauty. The artist himself explained his interest in the The outskirts as a quest

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image of the mountains precisely in terms of the scale of panel construction in residential districts: “Panel-built residential blocks are anonymous, vast in scale and perceived as a mountain landscape. When I was a child, I went past these buildings on the bus and looked at them as the perspective changed during movement. I always felt as if they might tumble down on top of me. When you look at mountains, you cannot help but think: ‘what if a rock or avalanche were to come rushing down?’ Standing before this beautiful mountain landscape, you simply die under its weight. The same can be said of the shattered ideas, the space left by its creators, the society that gave rise to these ruins for a large Soviet project, where they never managed to realise their original plans.”

Photographs in the ruin-porn genre referred to Cold War subjects and reminded people of the failure of the Soviet experiment, which had been unable to keep up with the real world. In such simultaneously symbolic and exotic landscapes, the human is almost always absent, and if present at all he performs the “stilted” function of an auxiliary element that helps reveal the scale of the magnificent background, and humans’ relationships with the landscape and with each other are constantly unclear. Alexander Veryovkin’s photographic series “Topography of the Void” (2015) captured the experience of an observer placed in a typical Russian landscape. The neutral aesthetics and randomness of the locations emphasised the fact that the place the photograph was taken was not important, and rather that all the sites form parts of a single homogeneous space, connected and mediated by a single culture. Perhaps the answer to the question 104

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regarding the reasons behind international interest in the aesthetics of the post-Soviet suburbs lies precisely in their belonging to a monotonous, standardised world, which, despite being in ruins, has an incredibly romantic hauntological vibe of nostalgia for a world that existed at different speeds and was connected with the idea of the collective construction of a single happy future for all.

The post-Soviet districts composed of identical residential massive—gloomy, grey, and most “blank” or faceless in their structure—seem akin to ghettos, and are incapable of serving as a source of inspiration. And yet it has been precisely these that, in the last ten years, have become the main symbol of the search for identity and self-determination of a whole generation of post-Soviet artists. For seven years, from 2011 to 2016, the photographer Yegor Rogalyov worked on a large-scale photographic project entitled “Synchronicity”, attempting to identify the complex relationship people who grew up after the collapse of the USSR have with the Soviet architectural heritage, all against the backdrop of armed conflict between Russia and the Ukraine and the ensuing decommunisation policy. At the same time, the artist notes that, even when not yet finished, the project ended up being replicated in various publications that greatly simplified its original meaning for the sake of embedding it in a range of fantastical and exoticising media concepts such as “the New East”. As the artist remarks “Today I see the potential for working with this facture rather in performative practices while using the experience of relational aesthetics aimed at redesigning the architectural landscape and its social reactualisation,” The situation was somewhat saved by the use of The outskirts as a quest

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his photographs in Madina Tlostanova’s book What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?, where they were placed in the correct context for the first time. In her research, Tlostanova traced how contemporary post-Soviet activist and decolonial art mediates this new state of man, while seeking out an alternative to the abrogated concept of a happy communist future in a capitalist market situation.

Yegor Tsvetkov’s 24-minute video essay “Something is falling down”—made in the form of a home-made spy-movie and assembled from the author’s own recordings and documentary films found on the Internet, animations by Saint Petersburg studios and architectural video renderers, using the construction of the controversial Lakhta Centre by way of an example—raises questions on the memory of the past, a predetermined future and the elusive nature of the present. The project for a new image of the future, offering a cyberpunk panorama of a revitalised Petersburg that is anxious to rid itself of the conservative image of an open-air museum stuck in the past, not only grossly ignored the historical buildings, but also demonstrated the power of the indifference of capitalism. At a time when reality had not yet ­managed to get closer to the render, Tsvetkov considered it important to capture the fleeting present in order to possibly get closer to the truth, while regarding an identity based on a corporate image as incapable of supplanting the identity of a person who possesses a memory of this place.

Last summer, in 2019, the exhibition “RayON.0” was held at the Museum of Moscow, where historical artefacts from the dormitory districts were presented on an equal footing with the works of young artists who recognised the world 106

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of high-rise buildings as the inevitable future for the whole of human civilisation and, therefore, a zone of collective responsibility. The majority of the authors regarded the peripheral zones as primarily a source of nostalgia for those who had grown up there and been shaped by their visual codes and artefacts. In the project “Just a hurricane” by Ekaterina Zloi and Vladimir Fomin, the husks of sunflower seeds howl in an intricate dance inside a vertical plastic flask; “Swan” by Denis Sazonov sings a swan song for the receding aesthetics of ZhEK art (where ZhEK is the Russian acronym for “Housing and Public Services”); “Series PO-2”

by Pavel Ryzhenkov recalls standard concrete fences; and in his “Miracles in Wire Mesh”, Ilya Plotnikov finally gets to the bottom of the small glass balls that were used as the main trading currency in street play. All manner of legends were told to explain the origin of these balls, which were found on the territory of the entire USSR in the vicinity of railway lines, factories and airfields, but they were actually used to make glass thread in metal moulds, semi-finished for the manufacture of various products, particularly (who could have imagined!)—fibreglass reinforcing mesh. For other artists of the exhibition, the dormitory zones are a spatial backdrop for the agonies of growing up and the severity of being, which must be overcome despite everything. The motif of destruction in the works of Yegor Fedorichev, created on plasterboard, canvas and advertising banners found on city streets, is present not only as an element of graffiti culture with all of its vandalism and protest, but also as a ­desire to change, to puncture and break through the customary petrified notions about the norm in terms of growThe outskirts as a quest

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ing up, the city, history and art. This desire is mixed with eclectic teenage artefacts and barely visible images of a departing childhood. In the work “UmiRai” (a play on the Russian words for “die” and “heaven”) by Sasha Biryulin, a seam at the junction between two panel blocks was perceived by the artist as an infinite crucifix, a symbol of martyrdom, erasure, and cancellation.

Despite the interest in the aesthetics of post-Soviet landscapes and in the wider international artistic context (videos

by Cyprien Gaillard, videos by Roman Gavras, installations

by Andro Wekua and projects by Ryan Gander, addressing the artefacts of the mass development of post-Soviet cities’ dormitory suburbs), most Russian artists had come to share the general feeling by the end of 2010 that the representation of the outskirts of urban areas alone, whether in photography or even through painting, was unlikely to say anything new about the topic. The potential for working with this set of facts is found in conceptual, performative and psychogeographic practices that employ the experience of relational aesthetics aimed at redesigning the architectural landscape and its social actualisation and reactualisation. At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, artists increasingly began opting for the genre of the walk, for psychogeographic drift, taking migration as a tool for developing the environment, resisting the existing order, and finding a new way of life, a method of survival in an aggressive environment, escapism and internal emigration as the consequences of an authoritarian regime. In such cases, artistic studies of the peripheries often transform into sacral activist practices aimed at reinventing the experience 108

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of living in the city and creating horizontal connections in temporary communities, thereby illustrating the myriad of angles for revealing the aesthetics of the outskirts from new perspectives.

Against the backdrop of pre-existing strategies for artists to understand peripheral urban districts, a tendency is becoming ever more noticeable for a peculiar gamification of the experience of living on the edges of the city: artists deconstruct their everyday lives according to the principles of game mechanics, sorting it into a set of rules and methods that in a certain way specify the scheme by which the player should interact with the game. A typical housing development, reminiscent of mechanically copied pixel sprite blocks from a source pattern in a 3D sketch, becomes a homogeneous zone propagated throughout the city with a certain sticky temporality, a sensation of frozen time determined by the main function of these districts, which is to provide shelter for workers to rest and sleep comfortably after spending the day at their place of employment. The mechanistic existence lived in such neighbourhoods and the repeating patterns of interaction between residents and their urban environment become a reason for modelling life in this environment according to the principles of a digital gaming space, passing through which subjects one to the instructions for moving along predestined routes, picking up achievements along the way, exercising micro-control over each unit, taking advantages of lootboxes and implementing tactical survival tasks. In increasingly turning to the aesthetics of video and computer games, which now serve as one of the most popular and affordable forms of both individual and group enterThe outskirts as a quest

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tainment, artists are building a narrative about the unique experience of living in dormitory zones based on the principle of gameplay, describing how a player interacts with the game world, how the game world responds to the player’s actions, and how the range of actions the game offers the player is determined.

Thus, Vladimir Kartashov primarily devotes his investigations to the gaming spaces in which he spends most of his life, even when referring to the subjects of everyday life in panel-built housing: he creates copies of the virtual world and embeds them in everyday life. Combining the traditions of Mexican muralism and the new Leipzig school, Vladimir has deduced the laws of a new style—the cyber baroque. Glitch effects on traditional canvases, idealised fantasy characters, and shifts in perspective resulting from “lags” are some of the many techniques that enable Vladimir to violate traditional perceptions of perspective and uncover the versatility of a new, user-generated reality. Kartashov presents many answers to the question as to whether we await the complete disappearance of man and his preservation in the form of disembodied artificial intelligences, or a return to materialism in a post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” scenario. In the panel paintings Apartment 22 and Apartment 97 from the series “A House of a Standard Series”, Kartashov contrasts the automatic logic inherent to artificial intelligence (the “training” of recognition and categorisation) with random, mythical/metaphysical phenomena (the “supernatural”, that which defies explanation, and is based solely on ­intuition) and storylines that unfold in the everyday spaces of apartments in the high-rise buildings of the 110

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dormitory districts. Kartashov arranges his painted canvases in blocks, set atop one another in the space of the exhibition hall, as if assembling a kind of panel architecture, reinforced by an installation in the form of a camping tent and sculptures that have emerged from computer and video games to finally taken on physical form. Our upbringing, surroundings and education assign images—and the way in which we recognise them, and only the reactionary violation of patterns, reveals our personal attitudes and what is “superficial”. Human decisions are based on personal traits, mood, intuition, “ifs”, “buts” and context. A gun is a murder weapon or a decoration. Fine art is a beautiful ideal or a terrifying curiosity, an amazing placebo effect or a chance error. According to the notions of Kartashov, machines are incapable of understanding such modulations, which is the exclusive reserve of the human being.

Anna Rotayenko works with the reverse side of things in her treatment of the urban dormitory zones. In her “Inside Out” project, the artist explores the expanded perception of the city and the new memory and mythology it has acquired with the advent of global communications, shaped by security cameras, telepresence, and mobile apps. The connecting fabric of the project is, in the literal sense, the banner cloth that perches comfortably between the real and virtual worlds, and from which almost all urban scenery and advertising are made. Banner fabric comprises the outer envelope of any construction site, renovation project or modernisation.

It stakes out the contours of the footprint of a forthcoming building or new feature. In a modern city, these processes are constantly underway, although these structures themThe outskirts as a quest

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selves are referred to as temporary. Banner fabric thus turns out to be a material which is a marker of perpetual renewal and, in framing the “monuments” of temporary structures, it itself becomes a monument to these processes. Other materials that make no claim to “high” status are likewise important for the artist—plastic, film, profiled flooring, planks, strings of lights, everything which people use to assemble housing and retail points, to furnish and decorate the courtyards between their homes. Rotayenko strolls around in urban areas to capture the situation and texture of streets by means of her digital camera. The resulting material is processed on a computer and compiled into 3D models, uploaded

by Muscovites into 3D libraries, which constitute constantly updated virtual copies of the city, while preserving all previous versions of the urbanistic environment—like plastic tents which have since been taken down in reality but continue to live on as phantoms. After printing, the banner fabric is organically mounted in the exhibition space by the same means as it is on the street, and is then complemented by drawings, collages and layers of other fabrics. Once the printing is complete, the artist creates cuts in the fabric through which virtual objects and 3D models penetrate the photographs. This technique coincides with the natural collage that we can observe out on the city streets whereby banners overlay one another. Rotayenko’s installations and objects are suspended between the real and the virtual, and the layering of plots, heroes, urban materials and 3D models immerse the viewer in an urban environment that lives by its own rules, making them become part of this space.

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alyse the boundaries between the real, the virtual and the artistic, along with the mechanisms of research into and transformation of the urban environment.

How can we avoid depression under the onslaught of dreary standard architecture and the futility of existence in such landscapes? The gameplay offered by the artists proposes patterns of interaction between the player and the game based on its rules, determining the relationship between the player and the game, the challenge presented and how to overcome it, and a plotline in terms of the player’s participation within it. Artist and photographer Yelena Tsibizova has created the installation “Game” (2019), which is a visual diary by the artist, where entries are made by means of a game. A map of Moscow is plotted out on a wooden panel, divided into 121 different plots. By throwing dice, the artist determined the coordinates of the site that would be the starting point of the next trip, thereby prompting her to explore the city over the course of several months, driven entirely by chance: Tsibizova made her way to the point determined, where she would collect visual and audio information that later served as material for creating the collage and recorded soundscapes connected with the given zone.

Eventually, the entire space of the board was filled up with an a ­ rray of images in which the zones are numbered as the author progressed around the map and the collage.

Dmitry Morozov’s multimedia project with three stages of implementation, “::vtol:: tracer” (2018), is another example of the performative exploration of urban areas. The artist created ten small portable handheld electronic devices capable of recording the GPS coordinates of the peoThe outskirts as a quest

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ple ­carrying them. The artist handed out the devices to city inhabitants to be used for several days, accumulating a database of their movements. The second phase of the project involved the production of a robotic drawing machine that used the pre-recorded GPS data to draw on a large sheet of paper. ­Using different colours, the machine created a cartographic visual work based on people walking around the city. During the third and final stage of the project, the artist created a compact portable drawing machine in the form of a satchel, which the author of the work wore himself while moving around the city. The machine drew in real time, mapping human movements using GPS data. At the same time, the satchel was given a transparent design that made the mechanics of its operation visible and understandable to everyone on the streets of the city who saw it.

The main visual metaphor most of the works in Andrei Syaylev’s project “Beyond the Limits of Engagement” (2018) are based on is brickwork, which is subjected to a variety of transformations in the artist’s installation: like the dynamic elements in arcade games, the bricks are deformed, split up into elementary forms, and spread out into shapeless heaps, duplicated in mirrors and turned into books and screens of electronic devices, and finally made to form new architectural structures or sections of fences and the carriages of Russian Railways, and standing in as the edges for fragmented images of buildings and panel-built tower blocks. For the author, brick serves as a kind of elementary, primordial “form of forms”, in whose creative preparation you can point to the basic matrix of vision, which the author names “the structure of subjective involvement”. He encourages his audience to try 114

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to go beyond their limits, implying that taking such a course is connected with the realisation that the various processes, emotions and sensations we experience have their own external shell, and constitute one of the “building blocks” or assorted “containers” that, cemented together, form the experience of perceiving the world. In a video, Syaylev shows another exhibition dedicated to a mythical hero, a street artist of the future, who has made a series of strange works using the “skills” that will be available in coming years: A strange marker that draws in space, or a rubber that erases the contents of space, removing its interpretative layer.

The faceless and unified architecture and layout of the dormitory zones, ignoring the very essence of human individuality, have also become a source of alarm and threat in the works of contemporary Russian artists, rather than one of comfort and stability. For these, they represent a zone of uncertainty, unpredictability and “the fog of war”. This was the title of a group exhibition that I supervised at the Khodynka municipal gallery in the summer and autumn of 2019.

Its German original—Nebel des Krieges—was a term introduced in 1832 in the treatise “On War” by the Prussian commander and military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, where it was employed to indicate the inaccuracy for one reason or another of situational data in the theatre of conflict.

In a broader sense, the phrase is used allegorically about the inaccuracy of data or the unknown state of forces and positions held in conditions of warfare. In military-strategic computer games, the fog of war is a game mechanic whereby the action takes place on a large map, and the territory and activity of the opponents are hidden at the beThe outskirts as a quest

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ginning of the game, only becoming known to the player as he explores the corresponding part of the map. Each part of the map can either be unexplored (the type of terrain is unknown) or previously explored, but the player is unaware if there have been any changes since the last time he looked (such as deforestation, the appearance of an enemy detachment, construction of enemy structures etc.). Unknown terrain is usually shown as black voids on the playing field of the map, and those parts of the field previously explored by the player are shown “in a grey fog”—their former state is visible, but the player cannot see the intervening actions of his opponents in this space. In order to see the current state, a given point on the map must be located within the field of view of a friendly unit. To obtain information about the state of the map, the player needs to send out scouts and spies—this way, the player learns about the location and actions of the enemy, and the nature of the terrain, location of resources and so on becomes known. The unknown creates a game experience full of tension and uncertainty, and thus the fog of war become an important component of the gaming process.

The theme of the project “Awkward Balance” (2019)

by Artyom Goloshchapov is the state of an unarticulated but growing alarm associated with the unpredictability of development of Internet platforms. The peripheral urban landscapes featured in the artist’s video collages are ­populated with memes and gifs that directly testify to the artist’s reaction to the burgeoning development of video marketing in the urban environment. In addition to video, ­Goloshchapov also makes use of digital painting on self-ad116

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hesive film—a cheap and non-environmentally friendly material used for advertising on vehicles and the decoration of temporary stands throughout the city. The artist raises the ­problem of the opacity of new network mechanisms for the distribution of benefits and control pertaining to the capitalism of surveillance (especially relevant since the breakout of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020), which lead to massive cognitive distortions and a fragmented perception of the world, one radical manifestation of which is conspiracy theory. The urban dormitory zone and the outer districts, appearing in the form of a faceless abandoned place where terrible and supernatural things can happen, thus become a platform for the playing out of conspiracy theories.

The intensity of the threat and information aggression in urban residential districts reaches its apotheosis in Anna Rotayenko’s interactive installation “Shooting Range” (2016, 2019), in which the viewer himself becomes the shooter. Like a virtual revolutionary, he can play around with modern mythologies: he can set the eye of Sauron on an electricity pylon, set tyres on fire, replace the figures of homeless people with medical orderlies, turn barbed wire into rainbows, and Cossacks into mermaids. Figuratively, this composition of objects is the mythical “Russian forest”, but it also includes modern subject familiar to post-Internet culture. As the installation develops, we see an absurd theatre of interaction between Soviet, fairy-tale and media images, turning their reading into a game. The flat nature of the objects and their conditionally dual nature rhyme with the two-sided structure of the shooting range, where The outskirts as a quest

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visitors can “shoot” at each other with lasers, being positioned on opposite sides of the ideological barricades. The shooting range is an interactive installation that, on the one hand, reflects on the theme of the attraction of this genre while, on the other hand, aiming at the active inclusion of the viewer, making one feel like an interpreter of familiar media symbols. The soundtrack for the installation was based on audio recordings collected in the city: the sounds of the metro, an ambulance, street conversations and much more besides. The use of building materials and found objects refers to the aesthetics of DIY, and becomes more important than the content of the cardboard images, turning the installation into a slice of the city’s augmented reality, in which the human being is the subject of a host of different mechanisms of information warfare.

Is it possible to sleep peacefully in dormitory zones under the conditions of a permanent infodemic? Daria Makarova’s project “A little to the left of the centre, according to the golden section” (2019), reflecting on the changing function of dormitory zones and sleep per se in contemporary society, takes sleepstream as its starting point, the phenomenon of sleep commodification and the special experience of drowsiness and timelessness inherent to dormitory suburbs and their inhabitants. Sleep tracking, circadian rhythms, mental hygiene, breathing practices, neuroses, jetlag, and monitoring of the body’s condition—all this still fails to exhaust everything that is bound up with the natural physiological state. Expanding the problem in the logic of capitalist pressures, the artist considers the need for sleep as a subject of commerce. As part of a study into the changing attitudes 118

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of city dwellers to sleep, the project destabilises the concept of a rest period. Sleepstream is not an unambiguous voyeuristic practice in which viewers watch bloggers sleep. It is an opportunity to interact with the sleeping person: to ask a personal question, to wake him up for premium currency.

For the influencers, the broadcasting of one’s own sleep thus becomes a means of monetisation, entertainment and a new form of communication.

In linking the experience of living in dormitory zones with the mechanics of modern computer games, contemporary artists are increasingly turning to the form of video games and “non-games” where the competitive element is absent. A game without a game sounds paradoxical, but this does not mean that it is impossible to play it. Non-games are the vanguard of game design; they smash established canons, call into question long-established conventions, and give players a new experience unlike anything else. In 2010, independent video game developer Michaël Samyn released the nongame manifesto, which led to the emergence of a community of developers who strive to go beyond the accepted genre restrictions of game design. Most important for Samyn was the illusion of immersion in the video game world, though he often found that the experience of this extended existence in the digital environment was destroyed by the gameplay element itself: after all, a player must have a goal—to win, and he needs to make an effort to achieve this goal. Samyn suggested taking the best from existing video games—the experiences that they give the player—while abandoning the play element: “The idea of a ‘non-game’ was inspired by traditional video games. Those moments of virThe outskirts as a quest

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tual experience, when we feel as if we are in a different world, when we believe that a digital character is our friend, when our bodies merge with the system and the program becomes our own eyes and hands, when we are fascinated by what we are doing right now—independent of any reward we might win or lose.”

At the same time, the concept of “broken reality” is important, for artists who turn to the logic and mechanics of gameplay in their projects, as formulated by Jane McGonigal in her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. According to this author’s reasoning, developers now know how to ensure interaction and cooperation on a scale once unimaginable, and are constantly inventing new ways to motivate players to perform increasingly complex tasks while devoting more time to this activity and playing as part of much larger groups. These essential skills of the 21st century could be of assistance in finding new ways of having a deeper and longer-lasting impact on the world, aimed at solving real problems—from hunger and poverty to climate change and global conflicts. Indeed, many would like the real world to be as perfect as the ideally designed worlds of today’s multiplayer games.

In his video projects, Abram Rebrov deconstructs television footage found in archives or online, exploring the texture and architecture of video games, the physical parameters of digital images, and the aesthetics of glitch and digital noise. In 2016, the artist designed the video game Visibility on the Unreal Engine game engine, making it part of the “non-game” genre, whose main difference from tradi120

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tional video games lies in the absence of structured goals or tasks and problems to be solved, giving the player a greater degree of self-expression through play in whatever manner they set their own goal to achieve. In Visibility, Rebrov conveys the general impressions of a modern human being, his desires and his thoughts about himself. The hero finds himself in a cave filled nothing but movie posters located on advertising stands, each of which is a thematic film catalogue, grouping films into certain categories and displaying a polyphony of concepts about, for example, the female, the national, or the childish. The video game architecture designed by Rebrov acts as a system of coordinates for the hero’s self-determination and the search for rules and goals in playing the game.

Another striking example of the aesthetics of the outskirts being artistically interpreted in a non-game format can be seen in the video game ShKhD: ZIMA (part of a largescale project of the same name by the musician, poet and artist Ilya Mazo), which received considerable international ­interest under the English title It’s Winter. Here, in the absence of a plot, the dormitory zone appears to be a place of stopped time, where there is nothing happening and the only thing you can do is to wander aimlessly through the empty standardised courtyard amid the standard panel buildings and admire inconspicuous little things: the Eliza beauty salon, a closed grocery store, and a boy wearing a hat over his eyes. Ilya Mazo uses the term “digital opera” to describe his experimental art project, which includes a short film, an album, a computer game and a play that has met with international acclaim. At the centre of all these works is winter.

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The action in this project takes place in dormitory districts and courtyards between residential buildings that are frozen in a contemplative timelessness. The attractiveness of the project, which manifested itself particularly strongly in the computer game created in the “Russian toska” genre invented by the authors, lies in the stability of this lost world: “There is nothing waiting for you: there is no possibility of leaving, there is no room for adventure.” As the creator of ShKhD: ZIMA, Ilya Mazo, notes: “The aesthetics that attract people are connected with the fact that we see this every day and don’t want to run away from it. With all the despair (toska) of how it looks, you can still love it with all your heart.”

In early June 2020, Ilya Mazo released a 48-second video for the song Light Music, in which, at first glance, nothing happens except for the fluttering of a garland of flags in the breeze and an occasional flashing light. In the video’s background is a statue of a ballerina which gradually soars higher and higher as the film goes on, reacting to the sound of the song in accordance with a specially written algorithm.

As the creators of the video work, commented, it is controlled

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by a system that understands chords and intervals in music tracks, and so the direction of the wind and the blinking of the light depend on the frequency, amplitude and other musical characteristics of the section then playing. The video is not an animation set to music but a whole algorithmic ecosystem, which has absorbed the total melancholy of the aesthetics of dormitory zones over recent years. As it plays, the following lyrics are sung: When you die — you’ll end up there, on a Crimean summer night In a café on the waterfront You will become light music And after a while you’ll just ask: “Lord, what is this?”

Or “What the devil?”

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Daria Makarova, “A little to the left of the centre, according to the golden section”, 2019, installation at the exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery. Author Daria Makarova, courtesy of the artist

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Anna Rotayenko, “Shooting Range”, 2016, 2019. Fragment of an interactive installation, (soundtrack co-authored with Gediminas Daugela).

Plastic, banner fabric, cardboard, acrylic, duralight, neon, objects found, microprocessor, mixed media. The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery. Author Yana Sidikova, courtesy of the gallery

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Lena Tsibizova, “Game”, 2019, mixed media.

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

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Dmitry Morozov, “::vtol:: tracer”, 2018, robotic installation.

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

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Andrei Syaylev, “Beyond the Limits of Engagement”, installation, 2018, ultraviolet printing, silicone brick, mobile application, found objects.

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

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Anna Rotayenko, installation from the “Inside Out” series, 2016, “Castle”, “Concierge”, “Stalls” (banner, photography, acrylic, mixed media), “Trip” (projection, video slideshow).

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

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General view of the exposition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery, curated by Alexander Burenkov.

Photograph by Yana Sidikova, courtesy of the gallery

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Artyom Goloshchapov, “Awkward Balance�, 2019, frame from the video. Courtesy of the artist

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Artyom Goloshchapov, “Awkward Balance”, 2019, installation, self-adhesive film, sketch.

Courtesy of the artist

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Artyom Goloshchapov, “Awkward Balance”, 2019, photograph of the installation.

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

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Ilya Mazo, ShKhD: ZIMA, 2018-2019, digital opera.

Computer game screenshot.

Authors: Ilya Mazo, Alexander Ignatov.

Assistance with publication: GrĂźn Studio (Marek Juhanson).

Courtesy of the artist

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Vladimir Kartashov, “Apartment 22”, from the series “A House of a Standard Series”, 2017, painting, oil on canvas. “Untitled”, 2017, object, painting.

The exhibition “In the Fog of War” at the Khodynka gallery.

Author Vladimir Kartashov, courtesy of the artist.

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A rather personal text

by Alina Gutkina, artist (Russia)

A long-time insider to the Moscow street subculture scene, I produce art about the people of my milieu. My main interest centres on the theme of “identity search” among the generation born in the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am looking into a particular topic of street subculture, exploring the theme of “identity search” in the suburban underground: radical youth, teenage scenes, and various illegal practices. S ­ tarting from graffiti and finishing with skateboarding and rap. The subject of my practice is the so-called fourth sex. However, in my case it is always boys.

As an artist I often hear the term “post-Soviet space” as that in which I work. Actually, the subject of my research is the boy born in the nineties. But my hero is not post-Soviet, he is just different. More precisely, my hero is completely freed from self-identification in space. The only thing that matters about space is freedom, which we received after the collapse of the USSR. Because of my proximity to subcultur-

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al street practices, I observed how Western culture became a platform for self-identification. I was born in the eighties, a time when criminal behaviour was a necessity for survival.

No system worked. As a child, I remember the consequences of collapse, fears of being on the streets, poverty. The understanding of any values has gone, the concept of “identity” has disappeared.

Because of my proximity to subcultural street practices, I observed how Western culture became a platform for self-identification. If I have a real connection, it is “nostalgia” for everything Soviet deriving from my own memory.

My heroes—on the contrary, they just copied the codes. They have a completely broken communication. Especially in acting at and beyond the boundaries of the law, everything illegal became the object of aspiration.

For a very long time I used to film boys and enact delegated performances. The state of my heroes is very clearly shown. The main ideas are: “I do nothing, I do not know anything, I do not know who I am”. The most important is— nothing happens. Later, my heroes themselves became an art. I started doing performances. My favourite is just about identity search. As an example, for the performance “I am” that was about our environment where all too often fashion brands captured the street subculture and expropriated it.

I asked my heroes, a couple of naked young men, to describe “clothes”, actually transparent costumes made out from polyethylene with the slogans of famous fashion brands every-

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one seems to follow like a fetish. The boys were thus invited to “try on” the slogans alone, without any clothes anymore.

I am sometimes asked—“why only boys?”—my simple answer is that the boys are more in the subculture, in which I myself grew up. Furthermore, women are an object there, a thing that you are appropriating (in the same subculture of rap or graffiti). In Russia, more women are habituated to this attitude. In this sense my project always looks like toxic masculinity but I see this as a research area and often position myself as a coach. This way I leave the zone of objectification.

As an artist I always have a concern about my right to speak for my heroes, so in 2014 I created an anonymous platform called VASYARUN. I work with boys aged 16 to 28, who have no experience of performing but have decided to try themselves as performance artists. The figure of the artist, versed in other people’s stories, disappeared. The platform works like a monastery. This is a difficult internal job. The teenager is distinguished by a constant search for an answer to the question of who he is. Any doubts are considered normal. While you are young you play this game. Everything related to illegality elevates you. This is an indicator of strength. Street subculture gives such an opportunity. This is a game in real life. You can be a gangster. ­Dangerous games fill the void. And there is no long struggle. Just a way of life, behaviour. I would explain.

The guys who came to the casting very much wanted

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to participate only because of the stories. Texts for performances I collected from real people. A story about a team of Russian graffiti artists who were caught in Paris, stories about drugs, street fights, guns, problems, but it is not simple storytelling. It is an attempt to escape from a system of judgments about ourselves. All plays and performances try to answer the question as to what is our personal play and for whom. Through the game of others, they realised their own game. That is, before you tell me something about someone, tell me how well you know yourself. Well, there is always confusion. Slowly we began to go back behind the text. The guys who just wanted to play someone, show themselves through someone, quickly realised that they would not succeed. Many left, and only a group of six or eight people was ready to go on with the project. The whole idea was about one person, the voices of one. We called this one imaginary person Vasya—this is such a popular Russian male name.

Vasya is the archetype of today’s young man. All performers wear masks (bandanas). They are all of one height and one set. The viewer does not enjoy a young boy, a beautiful appearance. He sees plasticity and hears voices. To the question “who am I?”, the answer is in the presence. Therefore, the first and main task is to work with presence and memory. For each performer, this is an important part of the practice—self-remembering. So, we have performers and their inner work, we have text and music as space, we have a viewer that is in interaction, we have physical space and move-

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ments. We have time to perform internal tasks. We have the viewer’s time, or rather his or her observation. Performance is some intermediate stage in the work. It must be shown publicly. But for the whole performance there is not a certain goal we are preparing to follow, it is a condition for verifying the authenticity of internal work.

VASYARUN as a platform is constantly in search of the optimal form of its own existence, existing between concepts such as a school—Institute for self-knowledge—Theatre— Temple—Residence, but the main key is always the “processuality”. In fact, it is always the same play we are playing, just extended in time, depending on the members participating, on the extent of their involvement, on the intensity of their internal acting. Our work involves daily training, trips, practices of a mental and psycho-physiological nature. As such, the play itself is not the reason for our doing, the reason is created, respectively pulled out of the process and every moment of it, sometimes difficult for the viewer to catch. Of course, the structural elements of the performance can be easily comprehended: text as an independent space, music for the realisation of dives, practice-like tasks for participants, the viewer as being in the freedom of interpretation. Performance becomes then an “event” for the viewer. The audience will get a personal experience of what is happening.

As for identifying participants, a casting platform runs continuously, based on specific criteria. Castings are organised as real events, but also online. The potential participant

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must comply with primarily physical requirements: age from 18 to 28 years old, height from 180 cm upwards, thin or athletic physique, minimal stretching, bald head, a good ear for music, good voice, good memory. By literally looking the same they seem to lose their individual appearance, taking on one anonymous entity. Anonymity in our case performs several tasks at once. For a participant, this is an opportunity to be heard, not seen. For the viewer—to stop “enjoying” their appearance and stop choosing a “favourite”, because everyone looks like one person—one height, one physique, bald heads. A blank appearance. The idea of anonymity in itself, of course, is hardly feasible today. Cameras, phones, social networks. But there is an inner work that needs protection. Anonymity is a prerequisite for this work.

My project works on the juxtapositions of our contemporaneity, and though its evocative power, it analyses the inner self of man. I work with different practices and teachings, studying and combining what has the greatest internal response for most project participants. As I developed, I worked quite intuitively, highlighting certain dark zones of participants. George Gurdjieff’s practice (1866–1949, mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher and composer of Armenian and Greek descent) has been one of the components of the group’s work over the greater part of its six-year existence, while the Sufi tradition forms the basis of almost all the latest performances of VASYARUN. We compile and integrate tasks that somehow bring us closer to the main goal—presence. Move-

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ments are powerful, and the ability to reproduce them is directly related to the state of presence. For a movement being a group, this is an indicator of where the “I” is and the answer to the question of who the “I” really is. I’d like to specify about the ­number of practices that I am interested in, starting from experiments with breathing, ending with boxing.

Lately I have been fond of “somatics” like Ideokinesis or the Feldenkreis method.

The last performance I did before the coronavirus pandemic and isolation in 2020 leads participants to the “unknown zone” with the presence of predefined components that are known, but whose playback is directly related to the moment, to the “here and now”. Multitasking is still associated with the mobilisation of centers (mind, body, feelings), with their swinging and study for subsequent synchronisation. The list of internal tasks of the performer includes work with gravity (methods of body-oriented therapy and biosynthesis) and chakras (methods of theta healing). Movements in space were connected by routes along a playing field, unseen by the spectator, which contains therapeutic indicator issues. The text created a structure that united the performers, but did not allow for the spectator to read it. The meaning of the words was revealed inside each participant, finding a separate response. Through complexity, the performance formed an experimental field for everyone at the level of perception at which the participant was located.

I know that I cannot portray the performance p ­ recisely

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here, except for a detailed description of external conditions—light/sound/text. The invisible space however cannot be described. Words do not create an immersion, only participation, only presence do so. But as an artist now I mostly feel like a choreographer of external work or perhaps a coach of internal work. I cannot say for sure how long the anonymity will last or the criteria for participation will remain, but I know that the participants, ordinary guys from the streets, and myself do experience it, something which does not separate us from each other. It is an opportunity to look deep into oneself.

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The performance “I AM” was originally created as a photo project for my solo exhibition “industry of actual boys” at GMG Gallery Moscow in 2011, and then realised as a performance twice, in 2012, curated by Oleg Kulik, for the special programme of the Kyiv Biennial “Apocalypse and r­ ebirth”, and in 2013, curated by Andrei Parshikov, for “Gallery of Victoria” in Samara (Russia)

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“I AM”, photo from the performance by Alina Gutkina, curated by Oleg Kulik, for the special programme of the Kyiv Biennial “Apocalypse and rebirth” 2012, photo: courtesy of the artist

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VASYARUN is an anonymous collective composed of men aged 17 to 27 from the outer neighbourhoods of Moscow.

Their live pieces, which they have performed at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and at Saint Petersburg’s Street Art Museum, among other venues, merge contemporary art, theatre, graffiti, hip-hop and the spiritual practices of the Sufi and the samurai. They combine text, gesture, sound, costume and atmosphere to create a complex symbolic work exploring male-dominated street subcultures and the participants’ biographies. “Vasya”—the typical name of a Russian young adult struggling with the new realities of work and consumption that he must accommodate to become a worthwhile member of society—is at the center of all of their works.

The collective’s practice extends far beyond their performances: The participants work together several times a week and VASYARUN is also an institute of self-knowledge, as well as a theatre, temple, school and residence. In their new work, IF YOU WANT TO CONTINUE, VASYARUN explore the concept of the heroic figure and take on the role of mediators for a future present (project description for the performance “If You Want To Continue” by VASYARUN at the Internationales Sommerfestival Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany, 2019)

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“If you want to continue�, photograph from VASYARUN performance at the Internationales Sommerfestival Kampnagel, 2020.

Photograph by Peter Honnemann, courtesy of the artist

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An involuntary teetotaller on the outskirts of Moscow Martin Leidenfrost, writer (Austria)

First of all, I must hasten to assure the reader that these notes were written by an ardent Russophile, a passionate lover and admirer of the Russian way of life. My heartbeat quickens at the very first chords of a piece of Russian music, whether it be pop, the stirring pathos of the Russian “estrade”, or the sincerity of “Russian chanson”. The author of these lines has spent well over a hundred nights in taverns and dance bars, sometimes on the final frontiers of Russian speech. And he survived all these nights, recalling the amateur bards behind the synthesisers, ready to play you Vladimirsky Tsentral for mere pennies, the fraternising on the edges of conflict, almost shifting over into violence amid these fraternities, and those times of lingering passion to slow ballads in the arms of women who were utter strangers to me.

And yet the world that opened up to me on the outskirts of Moscow proved rather different. Russian music was not heard anywhere, and vodka and cognac, contrary to my habits and expectations, did not flow in teeming rivers. On the far side of Moscow’s administrative border, to my

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horror, only beer was actually offered on tap. And still more, neither wine, nor, moreover, anything stronger could be got hold of. In these parts, the Moscow suburbs, in a frightening contrast with the conventional (and quite justified) image of Russia, there appeared to be a desert more arid than the Muslim areas of Europe. Never before have I lived as such a teetotaller while in Eastern Europe. And yet I didn’t endure anything untoward, absolutely nothing, as these notes shall narrate.

With its nearly 20-million strong population, Moscow is Europe’s largest metropolitan area. The adjoining fringes of Moscow—no matter how you define their territorial borders—are also striking in size. If the neighbouring administrative area of Moscow Oblast were part of the EU, it would undoubtedly rate among the largest states in the community.

The Moscow agglomeration includes, in addition to the capital itself, various adjacent sub-agglomerations, two of which count more than a million people among their inhabitants.

To make a start, I decided to base myself somewhere the air is relatively clean. This was the Odintsovo rayon, notable for having the highest population density in Russia. The area consists of the suburban town of Odintsovo near Moscow and numerous villages, including several areas of new development. One of these, a residential area of Soviet panel-building type, is called Vlasikha, known in the past as “closed military camp No. 22/1”, where the command post was located for the Soviet nuclear missiles. Vlasikha is still surrounded by a concrete fence today. I was taken off the bus and kept in front of the checkpoint for half an hour, in order

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to inform me that access to Vlasikha was closed to people carrying a foreign passport. * I got to Bakovka by suburban train. The station had undergone reconstruction, lengthening the platforms, but the underpass was positioned at the far end, in the form of special convenience offering passengers an extra half-kilometre loop to their walk. All those with healthy legs opt for the daring jump of about two metres height directly onto the rails.

I asked people where “Station Dead End” is—such was the address of the cheap overnight stay I had booked. The answers I got were slurred but off-colour.

The largest condom factory in the Soviet Union was formerly located in Bakovka, in the Greater Moscow region. The village still retained the nature of a summer dacha settlement in part. Behind the wooden fences you can see garden beds, small late apples, a granny in aprons and assorted drunks of indeterminate age. Here and there, this poverty has already given way to mighty brick walls, the invisible owners behind them living in respectable mansion houses. The question arose spontaneously as to where all the deposed presidents, autocrats, arms kings and bandits of the post-Soviet era were hiding in the forest expanses of New Moscow.

I wandered over to the Mozhaiskoye Highway. Napoleon ingloriously retreated along this road in 1812, but today it’s a very busy thoroughfare leading to and from Moscow. ­A lmost right on the side of the carriageway is a building

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where Armenians are engaged 24 hours a day in assorted commercial activities, toiling away gloomily. You can get your car washed here, there’s a tyre service and a car repair shop—all going non-stop. And also the Garazh café, located above which are found the dubious comforts of rental accommodation. And that’s where I stayed.

I then took a walk to what is probably the most awful neighbourhood of new panel buildings on the outskirts of Moscow.

Inhabited at just half capacity, mainly by immigrants from Central Asia, it has every chance of becoming a ghetto in a few years’ time. I asked the new Uzbek settlers the name of their new, voluntarily chosen home. Nobody really knew the exact answer, let alone where to place the stress. Lókhino?

Lokhinó? Skolkovskaya? Or just Skolkovo—like the famous project for a Russian Silicon Valley of the same name, at that point only existing on the drawing board? One respondent said that he was satisfied with his rented apartment. I think he was joking. In these houses, even the entrances are designed to make going in with a suitcase impossible without banging your head and scuffing your arms and knees.

The zone is piled up with 26-storey houses, some of which would be twice as high if you put them on their side. Standard, orange or purple metal baskets have been put on the walls in glazed loggias to accommodate air conditioners, though there was no sign of air conditioners themselves. And there were neither restaurants nor even cafés around, only shops selling basic provisions.

A motley school building stands between the houses, behind a double fence of painted metal rods. There are two tiny

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playgrounds and a box of a mini-football pitch in a barred cage, no other place had been found for it. Many of the mothers in the playgrounds are Uzbeks with their faces covered. Against this background was a lean, mournful, unfashionably dressed Russian woman, walking forlornly back and forth on the soft tartan floor covering. Immersed in her iPad, she was reading a newspaper. She must have come out for a breath of fresh air.

The monotony of the built environment bore down on the psyche. Wherever you turn in these playgrounds, the same gloomy, identical facades assail you from all sides. And you have to lift your head at quite a considerable angle to catch a glimpse of the sky.

The neighbouring Novaya Trekhgorka mikrorayon had been constructed a little earlier. It consists of 47 residential tower blocks, also 26-storeys in height, but more attractive in appearance. In 2013, a one-room apartment here cost 100,000 euros. Anyone who made such a purchase on credit will ultimately pay twice that sum. But they can take comfort from this thought: “But it’s only 19 kilometres from the Kremlin.”

The yellow towers of Novaya Trekhgorka are the new post-Soviet equivalent of the old panel buildings, and gaps yawn here and there between the panels that are almost the width of the palm of your hand, smeared over to some extent with plaster. The spaces between the houses are often cluttered, and the largest green square is surrounded by a green plank fence.

Lots of grocery stores open until late at night in Novaya Trekhgorka. Which is quite understandable—the journey “into town” and back takes more than an hour, and many re-

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turn very late. Apart from that, there were many pharmacies, several beauty salons and—for five rubles a litre!—a handful of vending machines selling bottled water.

There was absolutely nowhere to imbibe any fare of a cultural nature. Beyond the administrative limits of Moscow, the sale of bottled alcohol is strictly regulated, and only a very few and very expensive establishments have the appropriate license. Having seen two girls over a bottle of red wine in the window of the only café still open in the whole of Novaya Trekhgorka, I rejoiced and stepped in, but was brutally besieged right from the doorway with the phrase “We don’t serve any alcohol at all”.

So I found something else instead —one of those invariably small, unprepossessing places that, as a rule, have a sign saying “Beer”, and where this is sold both in bottles and on tap. Since some of these tochki or “points” are called “Pif-Paf”, in harmony with the Russian word pivo for “beer”, that’s what I will call them here. In Novaya Trekhgorka, it’s these pif-pafs that have turned out to be the bastions of evening leisure; I counted 14 of them. They closed, apparently, no later than eleven at night.

Entrance into these provincial establishments always begins differently, and invariably ends the same. The person coming in has to weave his way around three bends sometimes, wandering through a maze of cramped corridors and flimsy partition walls. The objects encountered on the way are very different—two chests of drawers with geraniums, a refrigerator containing ice cream, a bookmaker’s stall, or a display case full of Barbie dolls.

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However, behind the last corner, all these pif-pafs are more or less identical: a fridge stocked with beer, beside which is a tiny counter with a tap, sometimes just hastily knocked together from chipboard panels. From one to seven seats, no more. Women are rarely met here. A hastily quaffed plastic glass of draft beer for the coming slumber—this is the whole illusion of the “beautiful life”. It was mostly from a sense of duty that I visited all 14 pif-pafs. But I am not a fan of beer and plastic glasses, so in every one I just turned around and left.

I crossed the invisible border between Novaya Trekhgorka and Lokhino, along which the local “development leader” had thrown up new recumbent skyscrapers. The labour of construction workers is cheap, so work on the bare boxes of these buildings was in full swing even on a Saturday after midnight. The 26-storey buildings stretched out in the darkness, interspersed here and there lit up squares, like balconies, where the builders’ lights shone out. Suspended gantries clung swaying to the facades, human shadows swarming around in them. To the din of hammer drills, these shadows bore holes in the walls.

I wandered over to my overnight stay, intending to wish another gloomy Armenian duty manager good night and go to bed. Along the way, I passed several flower shops that work 24 hours a day right along the kerb of the Mozhaiskoye Highway. One of them was a glass pavilion with a ticket office at the entrance and flowers behind a partition where a humming air conditioner was pumping cold air. Above the bouquets were three posters showing views of Mediterranean cities submerged in an efferves-

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cence of flowers. The poster in the middle, despite not being the closest to the air ­conditioner, fluttered tirelessly. A bewitching sight. * In the south, on the Volodarskoye Highway, I discovered one of the best new areas of the inner Moscow suburban region.

It seemed that none other than a wizard has been at work here, the whole housing complex seemed so spacious, despite its high population density. Pleasing facades were not disrupted by excessive chaos, but charmed the eye with the original rows of loggias and balconies. None of the buildings were higher than 9 floors. The development area was carefully planned out. I couldn’t even believe that these compact buildings could contain 600 apartments.

It is even cosy here in the evenings. And that in spite of the same standard dark grey metal boxes protruding from the walls, just as in Lokhino, again rarely containing an actual air conditioner (they more often had tyres stored in them). But the library in the cultural centre building is well equipped, with the Russian classics being well represented.

The developer, who has been celebrated for his initiatives in Austrian cultural life, has also demonstrated his concern for the spiritual needs of the population here. Novo-Molokovo is inhabited on the whole by representatives of the middle class, mainly ethnic Russians, but there is also an Armenian minority. I didn’t notice the presence of any ethnic conflicts, except for the expressive rolling eyes I received in response

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to questioning people about the Armenian diaspora.

There are an unusually large number of prams and, even more unusual, these are often pushed around not by mothers, but by fathers. There are countless playgrounds. One of them has a poster urging you to be careful with the soft tartan flooring. There are symbolic images on it of what is allowed here as well as six forbidden things: 1. Cigarettes 2. Bottles 3. Dogs 4. Shovels 5. Bent nails 6. Women’s shoes with stiletto heels.

A graceful silence reigns almost everywhere. In the surrounding area you can still enjoy the remnants of wild nature. I was told that there is a lake nearby where you can rent a cottage for the day and have barbecues, and there is also a forest where people go mushrooming. But the forest is small, so you don’t get lost.

However, these silent surroundings don’t suit everyone.

In the place I decided to have lunch, a cartoon was playing on a huge screen accompanied by deafening music, to which various creatures were sucking up long worms, constantly burping and smacking their lips. I wasn’t terribly impressed.

In another place where I had breakfast, there was a zombie film being shown, fountains of blood spattering from bodies and faces. I sat with my back to the screen, but this did little to not save me from the machine gun bursts and the wild shrieking of the undead, killed on the spot, but still immortal.

I chatted with many local residents in Novo-Molokovo, this was easy to do there. I pretended I wanted to move here myself, with my wife and child. All the new inhabitants were more or less satisfied with life in this mikrorayon. One Mus-

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covite who had moved here said that the apartments were now even cheaper than before. She enlightened me that apartments in Russia are usually sold “bare”, without finishing, so you have to throw in the cost of “doing it up” when buying. “I spent three and a half million for a two-bedroom flat, and another million and a half went on doing it up. And the developers finish to such a bad standard that everyone prefers to hire their own workers to finish them off.”

“Sign up the child for a nursery place at once,” another resident, a Georgian woman, instructed me, “otherwise you’ll have to wait a few years.” She strongly warned me against the private “Wunderkind” day-care: “It’s nothing special, but it costs ten times more, thirty thousand a month.” The school in N ­ ovo-Molokovo has just been completed. The Georgian advised me to take obtaining official Moscow residence status more seriously, otherwise she would not envy my children. “We’re registered in Moscow, my son is studying there at the gymnasium. And if you register here, it’ll be impossible. You can’t even find a music teacher here.” But she praised the favourable social climate in Novo-Molokovo. “It’s not like in Moscow, you’d never hear of someone having their child kidnapped here. Here I can happily let my son go out on his own.”

A young guy, an Armenian, had a seditious conversation with me. He praised Navalny and admired the fight against corruption being waged by the new government of Armenia. He himself was born in Russia, and had never been to Armenia, but was now tempted to go there. However, what worried him most of all was military service—either here or perhaps in Armenia, he didn’t want to serve in the army an-

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ywhere. And he was glad that his parents also owned some property in Yaroslavl. “I am registered there, so they’ll spend a long while searching for me there.”

The chief misfortune for everyone was the traffic jams.

From half-past six to nine in the morning, getting to Moscow is sheer misery. The nearest metro station—Domodedovskaya—seems close by, but it takes forty-five minutes to get there. However, on the narrow, two-lane Volodarskoye Highway, traffic can occasionally become congested at other times of the day too. But hopes for a widening of the highway are faint, and only scheduled seven years in the future.

I asked for a viewing of one of the apartments. The lady in the sales office allured me with talk of there being a lot of artists and members of the creative intelligentsia in the area. And this is true; the artistic aspirations of the residents had already announced themselves loud and clear in the spacious elevator: the white-toothed smile of the young family on the advertising poster having been enriched with a ballpoint pen. Admittedly, only the mum and dad flaunted toothy gaps; the artist evidently couldn’t be bothered sorting out the child too.

For the viewing, I picked the largest apartment, going for about 90 thousand euros. It had three rooms and, indeed, there was nothing to it but bare walls. Neither wiring nor plumbing had been fitted, and yawning pipes peeped out in lonely fashion from the walls. I also had to mentally lower the height of the rooms, as the concrete floor was much lower than the level out on the stairwell. But all the rooms were spacious, and the kitchen too. However, I would have to fence off part of the

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nursery or bedroom to set up my office. And that would have meant doing without a window. So I didn’t buy the apartment.

In Novo-Molokovo there was not a single pif-paf to be found. I sat for a long time in a bakery and pastry shop decorated with bleached wood to the quiet accompaniment of the English-language Radio Relax, sweet songs constantly alternating with such instructive snippets of wisdom as “To be happy is not a goal, but your decision”. Positive life energy was compared with the petrol you need to achieve the goal, and “the rest is dust and decay.”

There were some strange moments too. In that same confectioner’s, then completely empty, a little boy suddenly sat down at my table. He drank something and was playing with something. I was sitting at a table with a stranger’s child.

While I was thinking about how to establish the kid’s situation, whether the boy expected me to put down the book and start playing with him, his grandmother, a prosperous Soviet citizen, also sat down at the table. Without saying a word, she pushed aside my coffee cup. To my perplexedly polite question “Am I bothering you?” she muttered obscurely: “There is no other table for us here.” I changed my seat.

Later on, at the bakery, I was standing in the queue for the cash register. In front of me stood a frail, prematurely grey-haired woman. Looking straight ahead, without turning her head, she asked her son what he wanted her to buy.

Having received no answer, and still facing somewhere towards the cash register, she began listing the pastries on offer. And only a little while later she discovered that her son wasn’t nearby at all, and she left.

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In the evenings, I went to three establishments where you might at least be able to “relax”. One, filled with a highly diverse “metrosexual” clientele, was called “Good Place”, and had a charming old-fashioned cart selling candy floss parked in front of it, in retro style. Another, “Friday”, had advertisements that promised “beer for nothing, topless waitresses and false propaganda”. It ended up being rather boring inside, just two guys showing each other funny videos on their smartphones, rolling with laughter. They were drinking non-alcoholic beer, but a bottle of whiskey they had brought with them stood on the table. They were allowed that. “And they often allow it,” they explained to me. “We’re in Russia, we have to be able to move around.”

But even here the jollities ended at 11 o’clock, even on weekends. All the businesses in Novo-Molokovo closed at 23:00, including “Wine Paradise”. In the evenings, this Armenian-ran alcohol market was perhaps the most attractive place in the entire mikrorayon. The assortment contained a lot of Italian, Georgian and even Abkhazian wines, and was eagerly attended by young adventure seekers. At eleven, sales of alcohol come to a halt. At 23.05, in a store that had not yet managed to close, I witnessed a very thirsty customer attempting to teach the cashier a crafty way to trick the cash register. The cashier did not cooperate.

I also wanted to finally get something to drink. In front of the already shuttered bar “The Tipsy Baron” I discovered a peculiar work of art: a whimsically built pile of stones on which to sit. Having decided to spite Novo-Molokovo’s neo-Puritanism here, I set myself down on one of these stones with

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the intention of making a small protest by smelling the bottle of Dagestan cognac I’d purchased in Wine Paradise. And then the silliness of this dawned on me all the same.

A small chunk of the “wild east” is still preserved here on the Volodarskoye Highway. Between the villages of Misailovo and Molokovo, neat metal structures stretch along the kerbs in an almost unbroken line: car washes, metal repair, welding, casting, snack bars, shops, stalls and the like. On this suburban highway you can still occasionally come across Central Asians who don’t understand the concept of “closed”.

And as a matter of fact, I ended up being able to observe these Central Asian men at virtually all hours of the day: with their impenetrable faces, coarsened by heat and extreme cold, giving off tart odours to those who come in contact with them, silently wandering along the highway to their own little hut, known only to themselves. They didn’t seem to have any concept of “free time” at all. On the Volodarskoye Highway, Uzbeks run a vegetable stall around the clock. There, in a small trolley, melons are laid out for sale. Nearby are two more grocery kiosks, these are larger. A bright light bulb dangling on a cord shines its lone beacon in the night. Behind the stall is the container in which the Uzbek seller sits, lies, sleeps, and generally lives. He stays here in the winter too. “Is it not cold?”—“A little.”

Looking out at the night, I sat in the “Asia-Mix” teahouse, and when I came back there again the next morning, the nice kid in the shabby white sweater had still not slept and served me again. That morning, a venerable old Uzbek woman, an imperious matron with delicate facial features and a wise,

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motionless, fixed-on gaze, was seated in the very centre of the teahouse. The back door was open. In the opening there was a view of a flat meadow, without a single building, a lush green sward running down into the distance, and a little further still, a small island of woodland. The landscape breathed space and eternity, not fitting in the slightest with the rest of the surroundings.

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The “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike Vyacheslav Glazychev, academic, urbanist and publicist (1940–2012, Russia)

... A man is a needle lost in a haystack, in a meadow (if there is a haystack, if there is a meadow).

A man is a leaf on the seven winds.

A man is a plough, and the earth is dust. ... You are sunburnt und covered in snow, neither my mistress, nor my wife.

Oh, my dear Russian nobodies, your non-life hasn’t made you soft. (from poems of 1982) As is well known, the illusion that everything is obvious and clear is stronger than the reality of everyday life. So in the blessed times of Brezhnev era stagnation, during my work in an office for urban planning and architecture, when I had the audacity to claim that there are no cities in Russia and that 173

moreover they had never existed, people, offended by this statement, would answer just as the priests from the novel The Little Golden Calf1 did, “What do you mean? Here they are!”

Foreign specialists encounter the same certainty when they really believe they are actually in a city. Sure, it might be a somewhat strange city, but it’s still a city for all that. And they start giving professional recommendations without understanding why their Russian colleagues, despite their polite attentiveness, are giggling at them.

In fact, there is a certain kind of a built-up area which is administratively separated from, let’s call it, the “non-city”. You can also find road signs showing you the entrance to the city, and sometimes even a traffic plan. The city government marks their presence with appropriate signs at the office entrances.

There are a number of residential and other buildings, as well as more-or-less cobbled streets, and so on and so forth. Of course, aerial photography reveals some particular identifying features of the Russian city. First of all, the lack of true density and the abundance of wastelands and semi-wastelands both fenced and unfenced, is apparent. This, however, is for an outsider no more than a technical defect or even a resource for future development. On a large-scale plan and, in particular, on maps, these features disappear almost completely. This fact has successfully allowed Russians to pretend, at international meetings, that urban planning policy actually exists and has done for dozens of years. Using international terminology made this even easier. Moreover, a small detail like the non-existence of urban plan1

The Little Golden Calf (Russian: Золотой телёнок, Zolotoy telyonok) is a satirical

novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, released in 1931.

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ning anywhere in Russia, could be considered a bad translation from the English words “urban planning” and thus transfer the subject of disagreement to the field of comparative linguistics.

I dare say that, while being able to successfully imitate the form of the city, there are no proper cities in Russia, and somehow this seems natural. This provocative statement could be considered insignificant. After all, there are many things actually happening in Russia, there are some things that seem to be happening, and other things that seem not to be happening.

Very much like the Stalin Constitution,2 one is tempted to say.

However, there is reason to believe that without understanding the unique nature of Russian “non-urbanism” it is difficult, but not impossible, to understand the peculiarities of the local culture and, even more so, the mechanics of daily life.

Of course, the city, in the essential sense of the word, was also non-existent in the East, where Greco-Roman style citizenship was never known. It is important though to keep in mind that non-existence can also differ from one place to another, and so the city’s non-existence in Russia was completely different from that in ancient Egypt, medieval India or China. In those countries no one even thought of following the European pattern of the Civilis kind of the existence of culture, or isolating culture from the environment that embodied the highest value of Tradition. We, in Russia, have never been 2

The 1936 Soviet constitution, also known as the Stalin constitution, rede-

signed the government of the Soviet Union. It purported to be highly democratic, with multiple guarantees of rights, and democratic procedures. Supporters around the world hailed it as the most democratic constitution imaginable. In practice it solidified the total control of the Communist Party and its leader Iosif Stalin.

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able to afford such indifference, and even the most passionate support for the uniqueness of our culture quite naturally reflects the difficulty of keeping and maintaining this uniqueness, this “otherness”. But at the same time we cannot get rid of the all-embracing confidence that everything that grows on these loamy soils certainly looks different. And the greater the desire to reproduce something foreign, the stranger the final result looks. The same thing has happened and is still happening with the idea of the city and the form of the city.

Being naturally inclined to nominalism,3 Russia is usually believed to belong to the circle of Western civilisation, at least from the times of Peter the Great onwards. With this point of view, it is irritating to be unable to recognise the “normal city” in some built-up areas, separated from the outlying areas. As if we are angry with the Russian reality for its “wrongness” and are looking for—starting with V.O. Klyuchevsky4—an explanation for this incorrectness and ways of eliminating it so that, having correctly applied them, we can at least hope to become legal members of the European club. It is somewhat more difficult to adopt a different attitude: we are dealing with a special reality where all international concepts, such as urbanisation, are deceptive and substitute and mask reality. If we follow this position and try to keep balance in it, we will have to start building a model 3

The doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any cor-

responding reality.

4

Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky (Russian: Василий Осипович Ключевский;

1841—1911) was a leading Russian historian of the late imperial period.

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of environmental management but not so much in the usual way—from the whole to the particular, but by restoring or ascending to the whole from the smallest manifestation of this whole, which cannot be grasped in conceptual models.

It is not easy to find the location of such a “molecule” of coexistence in Russia. But in any case before we start, it is expedient to abandon the following two extremes. One extreme is the conviction that only the state, in the formal sense, has a comprehensible essence as an indivisible medium. This brings a natural desire to find the so-called roots in the earliest historical traces of the initial land development. The other extreme is the conviction that we can study and fully understand only the micro-environment of an individual (not even a family). Behaviourist philosophy is indifferent to historical time, taken on the scale of the ancestral and biographical memory of an individual. It seems reasonable to start with some final integrity of the common living area at a given moment in order to further expand in time and space to their limits grasped by a more or less equipped consciousness.

In the summer of 1993, I finally had a chance to get to the “monad” of Russian “quasi-urbanisation”, which could only be the smallest Russian town. Just as any numerical series must have a number that completes the whole series, such is the case with the town of Likhvin.5 5

Chekalin (Russian: Чека́лин), formerly known as Likhvin (Лихвин), a town

in the Suvorovsky District of Tula Oblast, Russia, located on the left bank of the River Oka. In 2010 it was the least populous inhabited locality in Russia with official town status; now the smallest town in Russia is Innopolis, in the Republic of Tatarstan, with 96 inhabitants according to the 2016 Census.

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Prior to the Bolshevik re-arrangement of the administrative borders, Likhvin together with its area was a natural part of the Kaluga region. Afterwards, with the usual ease found in such matters, it was first transferred to Tula Oblast, and then deprived of its county-level status. But the town was renamed Chekalin to commemorate the death of some poor teenager killed by the Nazis in 1941,6 and therefore retained its town status.

Likhvin is special due to the unusual fact that it was the smallest Russian town in 1900, and the city lay quite comfortably within the urban planning corset of 1782. So it says on a plan approved by the Empress Catherine II, when the network of the old streets was replaced by ordinary grid quarters, which from the 5th century BC has been called the Hippodamian grid plan.7 However, the Empress was, as usual, prudent and did not try to draw into the town limits the old villages of Pushkarskaya and Streletskaya. And so they too stayed in their places. Neither did they try to include in the plan the fortress on a high cliff; the fortress has not survived, but the cliff is still there.

There are 1,240 people living in Likhvin now, while in 1900 there were a bit more, around 1,700 people. Just like 6

Alexander (Shura) Pavlovich Chekalin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Па́влович

Чека́лин; 1925—1941) was a Russian teenager, Soviet partisan, and Hero of the Soviet Union. Chekalin was captured, tortured, and hanged for partisan activities in Tula Oblast near Moscow during the German-Soviet War. 7

The grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which

streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid pattern.

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everywhere in Russia, more people die here than are born, more people leave the town in search of a better place than arrive. The town’s special feature is that most of its residents are stubborn, suspicious and self-sufficient Soviet pensioners. They live on their pensions, and also by selling dairy products, vegetables and fruits to the inhabitants of the nearby “town” of Suvorov (i.e. a quasi-industrial village), the residents of which work in factories and receive a relatively high salary while cultivating nothing. The people of Likhvin also earn decent money by converting their own houses to summer houses for their heirs and relatives. Houses were almost never sold to outsiders, which helps the community to retain its identity.

As a part of the so-called general production, there were two hotbeds of industrialisation in Likhvin: the dairy plant, still visited by trucks, and something called the “factory”, which produced sheets, blankets and pillowcases, at least while the delivery of raw materials was regular. Since the main workforce of the “factory” are women of pre-retirement age, and the calculation of the pension is kindly allowed to be taken from any five years of work experience, the presence or absence of raw materials and work don’t worry anyone. If they bring the raw materials, good, there is work, if not—it’s also good: the relations in the “club” are quite self-sufficient.

The director of the “factory” is a rather young lady, elected through a completely democratic procedure. She gave herself quite a tolerable salary, which does not depend on the “factory’s” performance, because, as is customary in Russia, this is not an independent enterprise, but a “branch”. There was an attempt to break into technical progress by setting up the The “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike

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production of feather pillows and blankets, but the local labour force could not cope with the great problem of processing feathers correctly, despite the help of visiting technicians, so technical progress had to be temporarily cancelled.

Just like in Gogol’s Mirgorod,8 sheep, goats, chickens, geese, dogs and cats roam about Likhvin. However, there is no particular puddle,9 since its place is occupied by a pond built in the early years of Perestroika thanks to the energy of the mayor, and now it has become somewhat silted up. The Likhvin herd numbers more than 600 heads, which is quite comparable with the collective farm herd. But, unlike the glue factory of a collective farm, the animals here look healthy and in good shape, although of a somewhat average, mixed Soviet breed. The mayor of Likhvin, quite a remarkable man, managed to take away almost 30 hectares of remote and therefore abandoned arable land in a nearby economically depressed collective farm, so the situation with the garden plantations is not bad at all.

Contrary to the traditions of Soviet urban geography, it has been proved that a settlement can very well exist without the so-called urban planning factor, a term which was supposed to indicate industry. There is a secondary school which has a computer class thanks to some sponsor: this already provides over forty jobs. There is a polyclinic (although the medical treatment 8

Mirgorod (Russian: Миргород) is a collection of short stories written by Nikolai

Gogol, composed between 1832-1834 and first published in 1835. The title Mirgorod refers to the Ukrainian city of the same name. The stories portray provincial Ukrainian life.

9

Mirgorod Puddle. The pond in the center of the city, next to the Church of the

Assumption, immortalised by Gogol in his story “How Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”.

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center had to be closed due to the collapse of the trade union) which gives another thirty work places. There is a library and a Sberbank branch. There is a bread factory which hasn’t been renovated since 1907; they wanted to close it and even built a new one, but have not yet installed the equipment and finally decided that the old building is good enough to work in. So here we have another twenty places. There are three shops: a stationery shop, clothing shop (always locked), which gives us another fifteen or twenty more places. In addition, there is a private shop sheltered between two houses, where a solid demand for overseas sweets, canned beer and other joys of life is satisfied. Some things are transported by trucks, which need to be repaired somewhere and filled up with petrol. The fact that there are no traces of life at the petrol station does not mean that there are no jobs. There is a post office. There are fragmentary elements of the district administration in the form of various offices. There is a water supply station and water pumps on the streets which function properly. There is a power plant.

There are a dozen jobs in the town administration.

There is the forestry enterprise nearby, which is basically parasitising on the renting of land to looting foreign (Moldovan) procurers, which, of course, did not diminish the number of jobs. The shuttle bus to the town of Suvorov passes by the huge sanatorium of the trade unions (as many as six five-storey buildings), which is still one hundred per cent filled, so there are quite a few jobs there.

In total, there are about 300 jobs, so with a population of 1,240 people, of which 750 are pensioners and about 250 are children (partly their own, partly left by ex-Likhvinians who have fled to Moscow and other centers of Soviet civilisation), The “Settlementation� of the Land of Gardarike

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Likhvin needs a work force from the outside. From year to year there are about thirty difficult-to-fill vacancies; difficult because it is hard to tempt out-of-town people with low salaries, while the local people, for whom the state workplace means earnings and peace of mind, have the opportunity to pick and choose. So unemployment is out of the question.

It is a very typical story when partially self-supporting Likhvin parasitises on the remnant Soviet economy not in a luxurious way, but by a domestic standard in a very decent way.

At least the town still has about 300 private passenger vehicles.

This is a very common story too because for almost eighty years the whole semi-urban infrastructure has been parasitic on a material substratum that had been created sometime between 1880 and 1916. In the pre-stagnation Soviet times, only a plaster monument lost in the foliage with an outstretched hand and a few signs of the earthy existence of poor Sasha Chekalin were erected, actually four of them, if not taking the name of the town itself into consideration: a commemorative plaque on the house where he lived, a plaque with a star on the school building where he studied, a plate under a tree where he was killed, and an obelisk over his grave. In the era of stagnation, Likhvin was enriched, as already mentioned, by the building of the House of Culture on the town outskirts, a standard brick school, a communications center building, one shop and two two-storey apartment buildings assembled from concrete wall panels. All the rest has been inherited and keeps slowly disintegrating. However, there are also signs of rebirth: they are finishing the repair of the local church, and in a well-known Soviet manner they are covering the outside of many private wooden houses with bricks, with a hint of an artistic touch. The 182

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mayor, with the help of his teenage sons, is heroically restoring the fine wooden frame of an old school, which had been purchased from the town at a residual value of 2,000 rubles back when he was still a teacher and not yet the mayor. Moreover, the same mayor managed to get money from the district government to fix all six town streets, but then inflation hit, and the stones for road construction were correctly brought in and then piled up, then negotiations with the road workers began, and by the time of my departure it had not been completed.

Likhvin also has the picturesque ruins of a prison built during the time of Catherine II. Four families have settled down in the ruins of the prison, adapting it so as to create a place of a tolerable, almost normal existence. Meanwhile the only canteen in the town has closed due to being unprofitable. They turned this canteen into a bakery which often functions as a Russian form of bar: people bring some food or drink with them, sit at a table and leave to do their business.

There are no other places for socialising, with the exception of the standard building of the regional House of Culture, which now is still functioning as a cinema and a marriage registration office. It is unlikely that any new privately owned places of entertainment will appear in the nearest future, as there are not enough people to justify them. And due to its geographical location there is little hope of people coming from other towns and villages to patronise Likhvin’s establishments. Moreover, during the annual flooding of the upper River Oka, the town is cut off from the road network (except for a lonely train from Kozelsk running on the half-abandoned single-track) for two or three weeks, because the bridge built in the 1960s was so low that the flood The “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike

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water covers it completely.

However paradoxical it may seem at first glance, the present day de-ideologised Likhvin is much more similar to a European town than other large settlements. However, there is a formal opposition in the town, and it will probably dismiss the zealous worker and the hated “democrat” of the mayor in the next elections. The town reminds one of European cities by the fact that it exists for its own sake and lives by its own rules. The things that make the town different are the fact that, on the one hand, it is clearly more successful than the towns in the zones of acute economic depression, if talking about the psychology of mental equilibrium, and on the other hand, it is somehow almost devoid of signs of everyday social life.

However paradoxical it may sound, contemporary Likhvin is more of a town now than it ever was during its long history, because it gets practically no attention from the government and lives “on its own”. It is interesting to note that when answering the questionnaire of the Academy of Sciences sent out on the direct instruction of Catherine II, the burgomasters were unanimous in answering question No. 21: “What are the common people engaged in?” (The German original of the academic text clearly shows through the literal translation). The answers were brief and all the same: “The townsfolk are engaged in garden work,” with neither trading nor any other activities being mentioned.

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word as a “land of cities”, and although with the efforts of A. Gurevich10 the word “gard” (гард) regained its original meaning, this did not have any effect on Rossica’s mythopoetics in the style of B. Rybakov11 or his countless graduate students.

Gard, or, to be more precise, the гърд (g”rd) was and is the direct and obvious equivalent of the fenced tun, the fenced homestead or yard of a free peasant family, no more, no less.

However, the desperate attachment to modernisation, by virtue of which the word gorod, which in various European languages is rendered as urbs, or town, or stadt, was abandoned in the depths of the semi-legendary early history of Russia, has led to an insistence that cities exist and that there be many of them. That is why the usual method of archaeologists was and still remains to use two words: the town (gorod) and the site of an ancient settlement (gorodishche). These two words are like hot potatoes tossed from hand to hand until the weary reader is ready to accept anything, be it the equalisation of a fenced area with built-up territory or the following statement: “While the feudal estates were densely built up and people lived in fortified places, the sites of ancient settlements being the centers of their districts ­(volosts12), apparent10

Aron Yakovlevich Gurevich (Russian: Аро́н Я́ковлевич Гуре́вич; 1924—2006)

was a Russian medievalist historian, working on the European culture of the Middle Ages.

11

Boris Alexandrovich Rybakov (Russian: Бори́с Алекса́ндрович Рыбако́в,

1908 — 2001) was a Soviet and Russian historian who personified the anti-Normanist vision of Russian history.

12

Volost (Russian: во́лость) was a traditional administrative subdivision in

Eastern Europe. In earlier East Slavic history, volost was a name for the territory or principality ruled by the knyaz; either as an absolute ruler or with varying degrees of autono-

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ly, were not in constant use as settlements. These were places for collecting tributes, administering courts, announcing princely orders and so on.”

Cities in the European sense of the word did not strongly take root in Russia at any period in its never-ending development and that is why we constantly have difficulties with the urban form of culture. Its very existence was and is in question. For the last five hundred years in Europe (with an obligatory curtsey to exotic regions), urban culture means culture in general, that is, a special environment for the generation, distribution and exchange of values among relatively free citizens, whom the Greeks called polythei or those involved in politics.

Of course, engaging in the story of non-urbanism on purely literary material is not forbidden, but it is probably more appropriate to bring in your personal observations that occurred not only as a result of idle curiosity, but also because of professional involvement in the problems of surviving settlements.

Built on the steep west bank of the River Oka, Likhvin is only 27 km away from the capital of the ancient Kozelsk principality and the famous Optina Pustyn.13 However, there was never any direct road through the gently sloping watermy from the Velikiy Knyaz (Grand Prince).

13

The Optina Pustyn (Russian: Оптина пустынь, literally Opta’s hermitage) is

an Eastern Orthodox monastery near Kozelsk in Russia. In the 19th century, the Optina was the most important spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church and served as the model for several other monasteries. It was particularly renowned as the centre of Russian staretsdom.

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shed, overgrown with forest. Walking was the only option left: first along the dirt road belonging to the forestry office, then along the sleepers of a single-track railroad, after that along an unexpectedly good highway, on the side of which machines from the abandoned mines have been crowned by fairly tall birches. The forest is being pushed apart, and you can see the urban-type settlement of Sosensky,14 a kind of Heavenly Jerusalem rising in the glade in prefabricated panels. Judging by the quality of the road, the capacity of the fire brigade station, and the “artistic” signs, one can make the unmistaken conclusion that this town hidden in the forest is actually a child of the country’s military industrial complex, now experiencing not exactly its best days, despite the fact that about five mines are still functioning.

There are innumerable urban-type settlements in Russia housing about a quarter of the population and classified as towns in official statistics. However, these “unidentified non-flying objects” actually belong to a mysterious lost world.

They have the form of a city and they have the external characteristics of urban life. But they are more like company-towns in the most old-fashioned, nineteenth-century sense. The town of Sosensky, like thousands of its twins, emerged as part of the S ­ oviet industrial “business plan.” It was enrolled in the “core production” ensemble and to this day remains in the literally autocratic hands of industrial barons. There was a time when, with the loss of access to inexhaustible loans, the barons’ 14

Sosensky (Russian: Сосенский) is a town in the Kozelsky District of Kaluga

Region, population: 12,392 (2010 Census). It was founded in April 1952 as the coal-mining settlement of the Central Kozelsk Construction Directorate.

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self-confidence somewhat weakened, and small groups of town “democrats” tried to seize power from the Soviets. But the new government completely collapsed due to a lack of experience and long-awaited reforms, which the barons foolishly resisted.

Now Sosensky is ruled by a closed joint-stock company, so that the status quo can generally be considered restored. In terms of structure, urban-type settlements are not very different from the same old ubiquitous settlements of Yamskaya, Streltskaya or Pushkarskaya, although direct compulsory service in the new settlement is now replaced by total dependence on the monopoly employer, educated to a greater or lesser degree.

Of course, it would be unreasonable to equate the world of urban-type settlements with the world of military towns, both past and present. However, thanks to a lack of clear and articulated regulations, the former are if not freer then definitely more relaxed, at least from the outside. Still, the differences are less obvious than the similarities. In any case, my own experience with the world of military towns convinces me that the imitation of submission to the regulations has achieved the highest degree of sophistication. Such essential details as gaps in fences, which are used by any reasonable human being to avoid conflict with the local law, make you believe that the slogan of survival, first used by Yaroshenko15 in his painting There is Life Everywhere, remains the backbone of Russian non-urbanism.

It is pointless to focus on the special world of the military-industrial complex with its “closed” cities, especially 15

Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko (Russian: Николай Алекса́ндрович

Яроше́нко; 1846—1898) was a Russian painter and a leading member of a group of Russian painters called the Peredvizhniki (also known as the Itinerants or Wanderers).

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those created by the Ministry of Middle Engineering.

Its long-standing deputy head Mr Korotkov thought of himself as a modern David the Builder and therefore encouraged the architectural “excesses” of the cities of Navoi or Shevchenko (now Aktau), including planting trees in huge holes drilled in the cliff, and watering them with the help of a de-salter at the nuclear power plant. Despite the fact that this is a vast lost world, which until recently consisted of about fifty settlements, including ghost towns like Zhovti Vody16 inhabited only by tarantulas, the focus on such military towns is pointless because we are more interested in the general order of things, rather than in exceptions.

Started as urban-type settlements, many mono-industrial towns grew larger and larger, for example the Crimean Ordzhonikidze, lost between Feodossia and Koktebel, or the gigantic Togliatti and Naberezhnye Chelny.

These chimerical creations of Soviet planning, with half a million inhabitants each, are too large to fit completely into the mono-scheme. Thus, in Naberezhnye Chelny, there is still a difference between the “city” created in the 1950s for the construction of the state power plant and the sluice, and the Avtozavodsky district, inextricably linked to the nearby KAMAZ17 plant. Meanwhile, in Togliatti there is a contrast between the “old city” of the 1950s, which used to be called Stavropol, relo16

Zhovti Vody is a town in south-central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region. It is

a center for the extraction and processing of uranium ore.

17

KAMAZ is a Russian truck brand and engine manufacturer located in Naberezh-

nye Chelny, Tatarstan, the Russian Federation. It is famous for its cab over trucks. KAMAZ is a portmanteau which standsfor “the factory on the River Kama”. KAMAZ first opened in 1976.

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cated to a new location due to the construction of the Kuibyshev hydroelectric complex, and the “city” created by the AvtoVAZ18 complex. Paradoxically, “Stalin” cities, created mainly by slave labour, had a more human origin than the “cities” of the much more liberal Brezhnev times (1964–1982): the cities had houses of normal dimensions and courtyards of normal proportions.

It would be a mistake to search for an ideological reason behind this fact. The thing is that when the shape of the city is only imitated, and only a settlement is built, the decisions are naturally transferred to those who specialise in urban planning, to architects. The architects, however, fall victim to two extremes. One extreme is reproducing certain “urban” European stereotypes by inertia, while they consider themselves to be the successors of the historical form. The other extreme is being carried away by desperate abstractionism, when the connection with the culture of form is broken.

When imitating the shape of the city, the last traces of the reality of human existence naturally disappear, and composing on an almost cartographic scale is constrained almost by nothing. Since the dimensions of the architect’s body do not depend on this, and the layout is usually represented on the board, it becomes clear that working on a tablet larger than 2 x 3 metres is technically impossible. In order to place a super-settlement on such a tablet, we have to zoom out and draw the city plan on a scale of 1:10,000. On such a scale, an ordinary street with a width of 12-20 metres should be represented by a line of 1.5-2 millimetres. This means that when the city plan 18

AvtoVAZ, formerly known as VAZ, is a Russian automobile manufacturer.

The company is best known for its flagship series of Lada vehicles.

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is discussed with experts or shown at meetings with the big bosses, the streets are almost indistinguishable. It was quite natural to design an avenue which is 300 metres wide, and a square of corresponding dimensions. Only after that did a natural desire to design the government buildings appear, so that their dimensions corresponded to the space. Since more “public” constructions were never supported financially, with the exception of the house of the Communist Party and the “palace of culture”, needed for conferences, there appeared a wasteland in the huge settlement in a form of a desert or a “wild field”.

Nevertheless, here again there is no qualitative novelty. The redevelopment of settlements to copy the European “city shape” under Catherine II (1762–1796) and Nicholas I ­(1825–1855) was also carried out according to plans made only on a sheet of paper, often urgently and in absentia. Thus, in the glorious town of Tikhvin,19 the opposite sides of the main square turned out to have an altitude difference of 6.4 metres. This happened after they made a plan of the town in such haste that they neglected the absence of topographical survey data and put their faith in the mercy of the Creator and in their hopes that the Tsar would lose interest in the orders once he signed them.

Similarly, when they developed the main city squares of Poltava20 or Petrozavodsk,21 they draw a “square shape” which was a circle in the former, and an oval in the latter. While in Petrozavodsk the oval shape of the square is framed by the ad19

Tikhvin is a town and the administrative center of Tikhvinsky District in Len-

ingradskaya Oblast, 200 kilometres east of Saint Petersburg.

20

Poltava is a city in central Ukraine.

21

Petrozavodsk is a city on the western shore of Lake Onega, in northwest Russia.

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ministrative buildings and the governor’s palazzo, which, despite being a little bit lowered, nevertheless correspond to the surroundings, in Poltava the main square in the middle of the city looks like a field, reminiscent of the fact that our ancestors once went into the forests from the steppe, yielding the “field” to the onslaught of nomadic pastoralists.

So the reason was simple and purely instrumental: when depicting the quarters of the new “city shape” it was clear that the gap shown between the passages would in the future be three quarters filled with vegetable gardens, and one quarter with buildings. But the logic of the drawing and magic of the shape of the rectangle provided only one way to obtain the “shape of the square”: the secondary square took the place of the rectangle of the block of houses, and the main square took the place of two or four blocks of houses. It was that simple.

They approached the design of super-settlements in the same way. But while in Togliatti the size of a “block” on the plan was 1,000 x 1,000 m, in Naberezhnye Chelny they decided to create “groups of islands” called residential complexes. Later they even gave names to the passes, but they did not stick, and the postal addresses were designated simply as “Complex No. 23”, and so on. Under the playful hand of the architect who drew the shape of the city by inspiration, for there was no reason to do otherwise, there appeared a structure that became a breeding ground for youth gangs, the construction of which happened by itself, in accordance with the “complexes”.

A settlement that quite successfully imitates the shape of the city is the basis of the illusory materiality of Russian non-urbanism.

The situation with ancient and ever-expanding settle192

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ments, the form of which reflects the layers of many epochs and therefore creates many illusions, is somewhat more complicated than at first glance.

Of course, primacy here undoubtedly belongs to Moscow, which at the end of the 15th century was very successfully defined by the visiting Italian Ambrogio Contarini22 as terra di Moscovia or even il resto di terra, clearly distinguishing it from il Castello, i.e. the Kremlin. Note that only in the will of Ivan III (1462–1505) was Moscow identified as a royal inheritance, although in reality property relations were still intricate. During the building of the Uspensky Cathedral, the city was still a loose agglomeration of patrimonial estates, not only members of the vast Grand Duke’s household, but also serving princes, and the old school boyars, 23 and the new generation of boyars who had arrived in Moscow together with the former princes. Each of these princely or boyar households had its own sloboda or artesans’ settlement, not to mention fields, meadows and orchards. Later, step-by-step extrusion occurred, so the monopoly position of the Grand Duke and his court was fixed, not so much due to some radical redevelopment, as to a weaning or transfer of property, sometimes with compensation, often without.

In any case, even in the early days of the Romanov dynasty, 22

Ambrogio Contarini was a Venetian nobleman, merchant and diplomat known

for an account of his journey to Iran.

23

A boyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Bulgarian, Kievan,

Moscovian, Wallachian and Moldavian and later, Romanian aristocracies, second only to the ruling princes, from the 10th century to the 17th century.

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the capital city was an unusually spread out, not very dense concentration of villages, separated by fields and meadows.

While the Kitai-gorod24 became a sort of downtown within a few centuries, partly copying both the form and the content of a European city, the Bely Gorod25 became European-like only after the great Moscow fire which occurred during the war against Napoleon of 1812. It is interesting to trace how consistently the terra di Moscovia continued and continues to reproduce its own structure, despite the change of dynasties and regimes. The widespread opinion popular in the last century, that Moscow is a big village, is fundamentally incorrect.

It was and remains a loose concentration of villages partly agro-industrial, like Izmailovo or Kolomenskoye, and industrial, like Gonchary, or semi-industrial, generally occupying up to 40% of the area within the official city limits. It also contains “villages”, some of them residential, like for example Tyoply Stan and Bitza, and most recently Zhulebino and Yuzhnoye Butovo. Terra di Moscovia continues stretching over the Moscow region, obviously trying to fully absorb it without a trace.

Muscovites were townspeople in the same way as the inhabitants of other Russian cities, if not less so. And yet the 24

Kitai-gorod (Russian: Китай-город) in the 16th-17th centuries, was a cultural

and historical area within the central part of Moscow, defined by the remnants of now almost entirely razed fortifications, narrow streets and a very densely built cityscape. It is separated from the Moscow Kremlin by Red Square.

25

Bely Gorod (Russian: Бе́лый го́род, “White City”) was the central core area of

Moscow beyond the Kremlin and Kitai-gorod. The name comes from the colour of its defensive wall, which was erected in 1585–1593 at the behest of Tsars Fyodor I and Boris Godunov.

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question of the status of their existence is not so clear.

It seems that, in an effort to fully control the actions of each taxpayer, the Russian government absolutely did not want to accept the need to bear the costs of implementing its own policy. That was why it accepted quite a lot of independence from people, and passed the burden of expenses to some group of individuals, e.g. the rural “line” which was later renamed the “commune”. In addition to that, the natural inclination to retain the highly uncertain norms was and is a sine qua non condition of stable instability in the universe.

This kind of instability has a lot of advantages, because it excluded the very possibility of correlating subsequent actions with previous ones on the same basis and therefore excluding even the possibility of criticism. But this instability had and still has a downside in that, having verbally claimed the consistency of its decisions, the authorities secretly accepted, in the form of customary law, the uncertain nature of the duties which all the taxable population had to perform, beyond just paying taxes.

As was brilliantly depicted by M.Ye. Saltykov-Shchedrin,26 little came from the heroic efforts of the authorities to keep hold of the reins. In an effort to both keep the number of taxpayers up and to try to ultimately simplify accounting procedures, the authorities attempted to keep everyone engaged in their own strictly prescribed business. Peasants were forbidden to trade, although this didn’t work very well, as was obvious from the multiple threatening or26

Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) was a major Russian

satirist of the 19th century.

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ders to peasants engaged in trade. This seems to be a typical Russian spell, which is 100% repeated by Mayor Luzhkov27 these days. Streltsy28 were expected to improve their military skills, but as their salaries were regularly delayed, the streltsy were engaged in peaceful handicraft and trade activities and the authorities turned a blind eye to this. Naturally, the tax-paying handicraft villages loudly protested against, as we would call it today, unfair competition. Just as legal merchants currently protest commercial operations running under the guise of state, municipal or charitable activities. Merchants also had a tough life. As soon as they were listed in the “hundred”, they were in jeopardy of being elected foreman, which promised them nothing but troubles. And extra high taxes were just as predictable as current tax increases are.

It is interesting to mention that the only, and more or less reliable, type of property for Muscovites was space as such, because houses could burn like candles with only chimneys remaining, but you could always build a new house around the stove. While there was an obvious surplus of empty space, there was also never enough of it. Every lawful owner of 27

Yury Mikhailovich Luzhkov (born in 1936) is a Russian politician who was the

Mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010. He was also vice-chairman and one of the founders of the ruling United Russia party.

28

Streltsy (Russian: стрельцы́, lit. shooters) were the units of Russian firearms

infantry from the 16th to the early 18th centuries, as well as the social stratum from which personnel for Streltsy troops were traditionally recruited. They are also collectively known as the streletskoye voysko (стрелецкое войско). These infantry troops reinforced feudal levy horsemen or the pomestnoye voysko (поместное войско).

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a courtyard, i.e. a taxpayer, became a landlord of tenants and subtenants in Moscow, who were called “dvorniki” and provided the owner with a stable income. Again, a remarkable continuity of this situation still exists, perfectly known today to anyone looking for a hundred square metres in Moscow for the construction of their own office or workshop.

On the one hand, Muscovites had more difficult times than others, since every breath was overseen by a great many assorted bosses. On the other hand, the Muscovites had an easier life, because the close proximity of authorities and the constant confusion in the distribution of power between the imperial and city authorities led to a great number of discrepancies and delays. And that meant the inhabitants basically did what they wanted. Only in Bolshevik times, when the particular arithmetic of Mayakovsky,29 where one equals zero, prevailed over the traditional mathematics, wilfulness was always aligned with every single official person on the hierarchical ladder. At the same time, the number of such ladders gave self-will a sour taste of eternal risk.

It was at this remarkable time that the tradition of replacing the city with the “form of a city,” brilliantly proved by Saint Petersburg, became truly absolute. The entire space of the USSR was lined up in a system of concentric circles, denoting the victory of the “form of the country” over the country. The notion of proximity to the ideal center of the new universe had little in common with geography. Leningrad 29

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893 –1930) was a Russian Soviet poet,

playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure.

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was “closer” than Mozhaisk, for it was a “city of three revolutions”. Magnitogorsk was “closer” than Vologda because it was the “construction site of the five-year plan” and therefore it was as if it was in Moscow itself. Tbilisi was “closer” than Tashkent, but not because of its natural affinity, but in connection with the kinship with the totemic progenitor.

Stalingrad was even more “close”. These concentric circles entered the physical limits of Moscow, because the Kremlin was the real center of the universe. And in the center of the Kremlin was the Leader’s own office or even just a lamp on his desk, and its German “modernist” style lost its meaning completely, because it was the Light.

The game with putting the figure of the Founder crowning the huge plinth of the Palace of Soviets, in the center of the universe, ended, as is known, with its mystical embodiment in several films, the last of which was, as far as I remember, At Six O’Clock In The Evening After The War (1944).

On the contrary, the seven pyramidal high-rise buildings30 became another frame conceivable and visible around the famous office, where the Master31 no longer dared to show up, having locked himself away in Kuntsevo32 and thereby once 30

A referance to the Seven Sisters (“Stalin’s high-rises”), a group of seven sky-

scrapers in Moscow designed in the Stalinist style.

31

Here: Iosif Stalin.

32

The Kuntsevo Dacha was Stalin’s personal residence near the former town of

Kuntsevo (then Moscow Oblast, now part of Moscow’s Fili district), where he lived for the last two decades of his life and died on 5th March 1953, although he also spent much time inside the Kremlin, where he possessed living quarters next to his offices. The dacha is located inside a forest not far from the modern-day Victory Park.

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again resembled the former sovereigns.

What was finally fully expressed out loud in the imperial dreams of the Romanovs was quite weak, drawn by their home-romantic aspirations outside the center (Peterhof, Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo) and indistinctive, whether it was the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, or the Admiralty, or the Angel on the top of the Pillar. The Bolsheviks inherited their dislike for big cities from the Romanovs, but instead of fleeing to the pleasant emptiness of Gatchina or Tsarskoye Selo and their suburban palaces, they preferred to put the “form of the city” on the city, like a tight muzzle. Just to remind you, until 1936 there were no city councils, there were only the provincial councils, as if they also wanted to flatten and smear the city itself across the vast territory. The city councils were established together with the district councils, immediately making the face of the government divided into fragments. The significance of these districts was also extremely symbolic: Stalin personally voted in Baumansky district, the name of the Stalin district was self-evident, the Leningrad district was consecrated by the city which itself was a symbol. Moscow was divided into wedges whose points converged on the Kremlin, and the “central” areas were divided the from the peripheral areas.

At the same time, the Muscovites could be found in the cellars of the Center and in the variety of barracks, in the blocks of flats given to them in accordance with strictly administered rules, which included forcibly evicting them from housing suddenly taken over by the state. The existence of physical Moscow meant that it nevertheless had an ideal “form of the city”, and a dozen new administrative buildings along the former Tverskaya Street and Bolshaya The “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike

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Kaluzhskaya Street fully replaced the reconstruction. The universal and complete belonging of the human being to the government also removed the border between the city and non-city, keeping only a semi-legal world of the “bottom” for the city. At the same time, the presence or absence of a passport clearly divided the country into “urban” and “rural” parts. And every passport holder could potentially be a “Muscovite”. This in turn made the notion of the Pale of Settlement return in its purity.

The fact that the city was an inseparable part of the country was also indicated by the apologia of the symbolic Path to the Five Seas. This was physically marked by extended granite embankments reminiscent of Peter the Great’s work and in a chain of water locks that represented triumphal arches on the way to the Kremlin and the Cabinet, whether it was the Moskva-Volga Canal33 or the Volga-Don Canal34 after the war.

33

The Moscow Canal (Russian: Кана́л и́мени Москвы́), named the Moskva-Vol-

ga Canal until 1947, is a canal that connects the River Moskva with the River Volga. It is located in Moscow itself and in the Moscow Region. The canal connects to the Moskva in Tushino (an area in the north-west of Moscow), from which it runs approximately north to meet the Volga in the town of Dubna, just upstream of the dam of the Ivankovo Reservoir.

The length of the canal is 128 km. It was constructed between 1932 and 1937 with 200,000 slave labourers under the direction of the Soviet secret police and Matvei Berman.

34

The Lenin Volga-Don Shipping Canal (Russian: Волго-Донской судоходный

канал имени В. И. Ленина, abbreviated VDSK) connects the Volga and the Don at their closest points. Opened in 1952, the length of the waterway is 101 km (63 miles), 45 km (28 miles) through rivers and reservoirs. The canal forms a part of the Unified Deep Water System of European Russia. Together with the lower Volga and the lower Don, the Volga-Don Canal provides the most direct navigable connection between the Caspian Sea

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Reproduction of the totem statues of the Leader also worked for the alignment of the entire country, as if the monument was somehow invisibly connected with its living source behind the Kremlin wall. That actually made it completely logical that there were no Leader statues in the Kremlin or on Red Square.

We are currently talking only about Moscow, or rather, about the “form of Moscow”, ignoring all other settlements, and we do so for good reason. There were no other settlements in the symbolic world of the Soviets. Or rather, there were, but they were only shadows, the weakened alien substances of Moscow. They had nothing to do with the real Moscow or the real cities, apart from the fact that an emanation of power should have been inevitably reflected in the “kremlins” of each Soviet town and city. The post-Stalinist time not only failed to weaken this tendency, but actually strengthened it, reproducing objects and names, like cheryomushki or “palaces of congresses”.

Finally, there was another seemingly non-existent circumstance that led to the removal of the border between the city and the non-urban part of the country. Alexander Solzhenitsyn35 quickly mentioned it and spoke about the all-pervasive character of the “forced labor camp” (zona), the metastases of which one could find in every third gateway, and the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, and thus the world’s oceans.

35

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918—2008) was a Russian novelist, histo-

rian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labour camp system.

He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

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behind every second fence, behind every facade, and in every state building. By 1953, the boundaries between the “zona” or “oprichnina”36 and the new “zemshchina”37 were more and more difficult to identify. Although a fair amount of ruthlessness of this phenomenon disappeared in the Khrushchyov era (1953–1964), yet the all-pervasive “mailbox” system (at the end of the day, what else can better equate individual locations than the postal code?) has remained implanted in the body of the social space for a very long time. In the side facade of the Historical Museum, opposite the memorial plaque to Radishchev38, the truth-seeker and passion-bearer, there was a room with two dozen screens showing the whole space and every square metre of Red Square and the road36

The oprichnina (Russian: опри́чнина) was a state policy implemented by

Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia between 1565 and 1572. The policy included the institution of a secret police force, mass repressions, public executions, and confiscation of land from Russian aristocrats. The six thousand political police were called oprichniki, and the term oprichnina also applies to the secret police organisation, to the corresponding period of Russian history, and to the territory in which, during that period, the Tsar ruled directly and in which his oprichniki operated.

37

During Ivan the Terrible’s reign the country was divided into a subordinate

land, called the Zemshchina, and a predatory, dominant inner circle of chosen men, called the Oprichnina.

38

Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич

Ради́щев; 1749 - 1802) was a Russian author and social critic who was arrested and exiled under Catherine the Great. He brought the tradition of radicalism in Russian literature to prominence with the publication in 1790 of his Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow. His depiction of socio-economic conditions in Russia earned him exile to Siberia until 1797.

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ways leading to it.

With such a powerful perfection, the new administrative form of the city could easily have been inherited from the old regime. Until July 1917, when the Provisional Government tried to reform the city administration, and again in the spring of 1918, the social body of the city was divided into police units. Due to the small police force, the janitors (or courtyard keepers) worked as a civilian auxiliary corps. This dual structure existed for so long and so firmly that probably one in a thousand actually understood the strange ideas of civil rights articulated by the reformers of the Provisional Government. The proverbial corruptness of this dual structure did not in the least interfere with the relative freedom of movement, although it kept everyone in a state of alertness.

The police unit was a natural “monad” of urban life, and actually provided a good means of information exchange and collected statistics for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

It is interesting to note that, despite the existence of a diocesan division into parishes, this had only one meaning for the church, in that it indicated inherited and vacant places for priests and deacons. Residual traces of some kind of importance of the parish grid can, if necessary, be traced in the address system, where the church was a landmark and, as a rule, a navigation beacon with which you can find particular houses. However, it seemed to be nothing more than a simple orientation convenience for the police and fire brigades. The parochial network was barely discernable next to the police unit structure, which was natural, because through the efforts of the Provisional Government, the Synod held full disciplinary authority until the resuscitation of the Patriarchate, The “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike

203

or rather the “form of the Patriarchate”. The system of parishes did not have any social or cultural meaning, and manifested itself only in the habit of going to the nearest church.

The Soviet authorities thought the established system was sound and therefore only expanded it by a factor of ten. The police units were divided into much smaller police stations, and the daily ritual of the local policeman’s check b ­ ecame an integral part of the life of every communal apartment. At the same time the surviving janitors corps was strengthened a hundredfold by the corps of household managers and trusted tenants. At this point, the development of the city’s social form stopped and, starting from Khrushchyov’s time, it steadily degraded, and its magnificent ­decadence happened during the wonderful days of almost complete freedom of expression of raw power.

There is one continuity which allows us to talk about the relative stability of the “city structure” for all its truly suburban nature. Just like in all the rest of Europe and probably due to the lack of independent guilds in the Russian cities, miserable huts, medium wealth households and relatively luxurious houses always stood side by side. Being equalised and averaged out by a lengthy thick fence, these houses testified to a kind of urban egalitarianism. There were no clear rules regarding which classes lived where, but illegal actions to oust or eliminate unwanted neighbours often took place. The old structure was not destroyed during the boom times of Russian capitalism, and its remains are still visible in the central parts of the cities, including the capital city. However, when the phenomenon of apartment blocks for rent was created, a remarkable Westernisation occurred, 204

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during which the social structure of the city unexpectedly acquired three-dimensions: changing its status from the facade facing the main street, to the third inner yard and from the mezzanine to the attic or its substitute.

Early Bolshevik uplotneniye39 brought a new class-based structure inside the communal flats, having built, albeit not immediately, a complex system of priorities for the location of rooms relative to the corridor, telephone, bathroom and back door. But this was an obvious workaround, and the mature urban-planning of Stalin’s time gravitated toward the creation of completely closed structures of “specialists’ houses”, but, with rare exceptions (the House of Government in Moscow, the City of Chekists40 in Sverdlovsk, Lesnaya Street in Leningrad, and so on) the scope of these houses was not sufficient, and it was impossible to avoid neighbouring with other houses. The violent destruction of wooden houses in the era of the great Khrushchyovian resettlement broke the stereotype to some extent and created an unprecedented egalitarianism, but by the end of the sixties the old order had been restored.

So, the “houses of improved planning” began to emerge in a direct and open neighbourhood with five- and nine-storey houses. A decade later, these houses again, à la Stalin, began to group together away from the general population.

And finally, in our times we can find a normal and rec39

Uplotneniye is the withdrawal of “surplus living space” in favour of (as a rule) the

proletariat in Soviet Russia in 1918-1920, which led to the emergence of communal flats.

40

Chekist in its narrower meaning refers to an agent of the Cheka (ChK, or Ex-

traordinary Commission), while its broader usage can refer to an agent of the Cheka and its descendants the NKVD, KGB, FSB, and the Lubyanka.

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ognised process of dividing the citizens property-wise by quarters and groups of quarters. The economic principle, pressed round by the traditional privilege principle, clearly appears, and this perhaps opens the chapter of urban existence, which is unthinkable outside of economic grounds.

We can leave aside many elements of what is usually called urban infrastructure, from the water pipe system to the transport system and street lighting. In this respect, Russia, rather consistently keeping up with world progress, retained a distinctly paternalistic behavioural pattern.

Whether oil, gas, kerosene or electric lanterns could or could not be given to the city dwellers, this had nothing to do with the city dwellers themselves, who could only wait, hope and express delight, when their hopes suddenly came true. It is all about the same old “form of the city”, which, of course, affected the life of the townsfolk, but only passively. The only thing that was not forbidden under all the regimes, was to write complaints and petitions, provided that these did not go beyond the patience of the authorities. There was nothing for a long time that distinguished the city’s inhabitants from those of the villages, settlements or auls41.

Here, we can finally free ourselves from the burden of primary empiricism with its numerous curious details that do not bring us any closer to the understanding of the whole. Apparently, the most interesting thing is to understand how the cities, or rather the intensive living spaces, in the land of Gardarike correlated with what should be recognised as, or at least called 41

An aul (Chechen: oil, Russian: аул, Turkic: awıl) is a type of fortified village

found throughout the Caucasus Mountains.

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the culture.

In semi-legendary pre-Mongol times one could talk about some kind of culture of the prince’s court, borrowed in forms and literary plots from their north-western and western neighbours. Meanwhile, in the time of Moscow and especially after the triumph of the Josephites over the Non-possessors42, we are dealing only with the state form of cultural institutions. At the same time, there is no reason to talk about any confrontation between this “higher” culture and everyday life, because the latter was almost completely absorbed by the former (the characteristics of Elizabeth I (1741 - 1762), given by Klyuchevsky, remain relevant today). The households swallowed the settlements, including the neighbouring ones. No wonder all the countless volosts (districts) were managed in accordance with one and the same Royal Command, which did not allow them to attain a privileged position, even if they were well-off and educated. The records about the persecution of the “smart ones”, who were almost heretics, are sparse, yet speak volumes. It is also important to note that the only surviving authoritative sources belong to the “Laodicean Message” by a chancery clerk Theodosius Kuritsyn, or to a Duma clerk Kotoshikhin, or to an educated peasant Pososhkov, while the philistines remain silent.

The self-contained position and backward nature of the Orthodox monastic system, which kept itself completely 42

Non-possessors (Russian: нестяжатели, nestyazhateli) belonged to a 16th-cen-

tury movement in the Russian Orthodox Church that arose in opposition to ecclesiastical land-ownership. It was opposed by the Josephites led by Joseph of Volokolamsk and later Archbishop Theodosius II of Novgorod, and was finally defeated at the Stoglav Council in 1551.

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fenced off from “Hellenic wisdom”, deprived it of any chance for independent cultural work, as evidenced by the turbulent history of the Solovetsky Monastery, 43 fully developed economically, but not intellectually, even in its best times under Metropolitan Kolychev. Kukuy, a German settlement in Moscow, was, of course, a fairly mature colony, but in the space of a city-state it was an “anti-space”, a black hole, into which only Peter the Great dared look. His heroic efforts to instil Western engineering skills into the powerful core of the local dolce far niente, gave rise to the first, even if only external, signs of urban characteristics, a proper “urban common living spaces” such as assemblies, theatres, the regularity of construction, the unprecedented daring spires standing over military non-religious buildings, triumphal arches and fireworks, regular gardens, where it was ordered to have fun with zeal, and so on and so forth.

Just like saying smile, please! sooner or later develops a habit of polite smiling, the military parades and other similar city celebrations, the habit of reading a newspaper and watching the shows, the habit of neatness taken from foreigners who open their windows early in the morning— all these things gave rise to a completely new geometry of the cultural space at an extraordinary speed within a cou43

The Solovetsky Monastery (Russian: Солове́цкий монасты́рь) is a fortified

monastery located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. It was one of the largest Christian citadels in northern Russia before its conversion into a Soviet prison and labour camp in 1926–39, and served as a prototype for the camps of the Gulag system. The monastery has experienced several major changes and military sieges. Its most important structures date from the 16th century.

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ple of generations. Whether you like it or not, one had to get used to the fact that in the center of the country there was a Saint Petersburg court and a crowd of servants and philistines who were taking care of it, who were learning about new fashions in all spheres of life. Philip Philippovich Vigel44 has left us incomparably sarcastic and accurate descriptions about the change of interior style in salons and living rooms in the times of Catherine the Great (1762 – 1796) to Paul I (1796 – 1801) and later to Alexander I (1801 – 1825) (especially regarding how the tailcoat and round hat popular during Paul’s reign I were interpreted as punishable revolutionary behaviour) or about the funny reflection of the capital in the houses of the Penza gentry. The number of memoirs grew bigger and bigger each decade throughout the 19th century.

All this rich information showed that, through the mechanical repetition of court customs, there appeared individual imitation of secular rituals, decorations, music, ­painting, and literature. All these things, however, were distributed in space in an interesting way: for example, the household as a reality or a remote ideal of a manor house, which with the Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility,45 became in some ways very close to its English analogue, while the city estate remained rather a sea44

Filipp Filippovich Vigel (1786-1856) (also spelt: Philip Philipovich Weigel) was

a Russian noble of Swedish origins who served in the foreign ministry, accompanied Count Golovkin on his mission to China, presided over the department of foreign religions, and governed the town of Kerch.

45

The Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility was perhaps the most notable act

of Peter III’s reign, who ruled for six months in 1762, and brought an end to compulsory state service for the nobility.

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sonal urban apartment, nothing more.

Now, for the first time, we touch upon the subject that needs our close attention, since the previous epochs were poorly documented and semi-legendary. Cultural values are broadcast in a special, complexly organised space. One structure can be called official where the relationships between individuals and families are built in accordance with the Table of Ranks and rules of the game set by the Court.

These are officially secular relationships; formalised and formed in Saint Petersburg as the only center (in other words, Pushkin is important here more as a Kammerjunker.)

Another structure can be called neighbourhood, where the relationships between individuals and families are built in accordance to the physical neighbourhood of the noble estates in an immense space (Pushkin here is important more as the owner of the Mikhailovskoye estate).

It seems as though there is nothing special about the educated class moving from one city to another depending on the season, which was the norm throughout Europe until the triumph of time-hating capitalism. However, the fact that the movements were over-stretched in space, the usual process nevertheless had some very peculiar characteristics. If you carefully read the Bagrov’s Grandson book by Aksakov46 or Memoria by Prince Kropotkin, 47 you will be able 46

Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov (Russian: Серге́й Тимофе́евич Акса́ков)

1791– 1859) was a 19th-century Russian literary figure remembered for his semi-autobiographical tales of family life, as well as his books on hunting and fishing.

47

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин; 1842 -

1921) was a Russian activist, revolutionary, scientist and philosopher who advocated an-

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to understand the full significance of the great seasonal migrations to distant estates and back. The transition from one world order to another was so extended in time that we are dealing not so much with overcoming space as with the dissolution in it through a multi-level metamorphosis that began outside the city gates.

The interaction between the two structures was natural and inevitable, because individuals played the main role in it.

In the official structure, there was the scheme of subordination to the single Pater Patriae which was also Pater Familia (remember Nicholas I, who personally checked whether the sentry was sleeping on duty). Whereas in the neighbourhood structure the relationships were also developed personally. In the first structure, the distance from the plebs was the more absolute the stronger the “nationality” was proclaimed.

Whereas in the second structure there was no distancing, and the translation of values was carried out in both directions, from the landlords to the servants and their peasant relatives and back. To sum it up, in the urban manor-apartment, overcrowded with servants, the two structures inevitably came into contact and interacted with each other, and laid the foundations for an explosive kind of cultural and genetic mixing.

With considerable difficulty, the masters of serfs managed to copy the furniture of Roentgen, Gambs or Chippendale. The details of “antique” decor later were wonderfully reproduced with an axe to decorate the houses of the peasantry, and countless Saxon figurines were “copied” in the form of painted clay whistles. The number of libraries and portrait archo-communism.

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galleries grew, the collection of which also had touching pieces from the provinces, which nowadays are lovingly restored and exhibited in museums. All these things could be found in the country estate, whereas in the city estate, which stubbornly remained secondary, everything was more standard and poorer, as brilliantly described in the notes of Prince Kropotkin about the Prechistenka neighbourhoods of his childhood and youth.

Perhaps the emergence of the raznochintsy, 48 a strange mixture of school prejudices and fragmental assimilation of the examples of the nobility, can be explained as a rejection of a phantom of the urban bourgeois gemütlichkeit, which was both hated and welcomed abroad (see the memories of Athanasy Fet49). Such a rejection came easily also because the hated ghost somehow, in the minds of “critical realists,” united with a very real image of a country clerk-boor, who would later become a Black-Hundreds member on Okhotny Ryad Street. An amusing fact is that while in Europe coffee houses and bakeries were the haven for traditional philistines, in Saint Petersburg or Moscow they became beau monde places, and raznochintsy crowded in taverns together with coachmen and seasonal builders, not psychologically however, but 48 Raznochintsy (literally “people of miscellaneous ranks”) was an official term introduced in the Code of Law of the Russian Empire in the 17th century to define a social estate that included the lower court and governmental ranks, children of nobility, and discharged military.

49

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (Russian: Афана́сий Афана́сьевич Фет), 1820 -

1892), was a renowned Russian poet regarded as the finest master of lyric verse in Russian literature.

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in a desire to unite spiritually with them. The city and the countryside were always equal and identical in the “physiological” prose writings, in particular, of second-rate writers who lacked writing talent. That was why the reality was shown more prominently in their books than in the books of great writers, albeit as if in a somewhat worn oleograph. In a number of essays by N. Leskov and especially by G. Uspensky and A. Scheller-Mikhailov, this is shown with peculiar clarity.

After the Great Reforms of Alexander II,50 civil feelings started somehow building up, which manifested not only in new legal proceedings, but also in the longing of the emerging local communities to supplement their usual balls with theatre, both amateur and professional. Public libraries were being created or donated, as well as schools and colleges, against the typical desperate resistance from the authorities. Due to the irregular and ephemeral nature of existence, it reminded more of a club stretched out both to withering country estates in the neighbourhood and being unthinkable without them, and in a huge, totally underestimated degree, to the junior officers of the regiments, housed throughout the cities. In other words, the nascent cultural movement had an overwhelmingly belatedly noble character, while the heirs of the raznochintsy began to dress up in peasant costume and rush out into the villages.

Again, we are confronted with the unpredictable originality of the Russian cultural space. In its main components, 50

Alexander II’s most significant reform as emperor was his emancipation of

Russia’s serfs in 1861, for which he is known as Alexander the Liberator.

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the multi-national city culture (even in its super patriotic manifestations, like Tenisheva’s51 estate of Talashkino) is formed and develops not in the city, but in the dachas (summer houses) of both capitals. We are dealing with the little-studied phenomenon of a pure “dacha” culture, from which truly independent cultural movements have grown, starting from Chekhov to the members of Mir Iskusstva52 and all the avant-gardists of the beginning of this century, except the futurists. It is quite an interesting fact that it was actually the raznochinny young people who with particular passion opposed this rural world, indulging themselves in the sin of escapism in a variety of forms: from the “Versailles” by A. Benois to the “Parisian” by K. Korovin, through the “Saint Petersburg” by M. Dobuzhinsky, Lansere, A. Ostroumova-Lebedeva or A. Akhmatova and up till the “ballet”

by L. Bakst or A. Golovin. The dacha was a world of voluntary temporary neighbourhoods made up of individuals. It created a phantom world of freedom of everyday communication, a spontaneous exchange of values. Back in the city in winter time, the community continued its existence, but was free from the inevitable compulsion to communicate caused 51

Maria Klavdiyevna Tenisheva (1858 - 1928), Russian Princess, a public figure,

artist, educator, philanthropist and collector. Famous as the founder of the Art Studio in Saint Petersburg, and the Drawing School at the Museum of Russian Antiquity in Smolensk, a handicrafts college in the town of Bezhitsa, and the artistic and industrial workshops held on her own estate of Talashkino.

52

Mir iskusstva (Russian: «Мир искусства», World of Art) was a Russian magazine

and the artistic movement it inspired and embodied, which was a major influence on the Russians who helped revolutionise European art during the first decade of the 20th century.

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by the fact of physical proximity and its cultural meaning.

A sad paradox was the fact that at the very moment when the national culture acquired quite distinct urban characteristics, the rural-based Bolshevik counter-revolution struck this culture so hard that only in the glorious age of stagnation did it manage to recover.

The urban environment more often appeared in coexistence with the new Kremlin “court”, its “estates” that were separated from the houses of the mortals, and the suburban world of industrial life full of illegal migrants. However, this culture as a whole was quite uneven, and did not have enough time to get stronger and take set forms, therefore allowing the existence of private life.

In so far as the kitchen in an apartment has replaced or supplemented the dacha, so “urban” culture owes its existence to this strange combination of kitchen and dacha.

In the early days of its birth, this vulnerable new urban culture came into contact with the reality of world culture, and started awkwardly interfering and dissolving itself in that world culture, allowing true philistine culture to sprout, characterised by purely external features of urban-civilised ritual behaviour.

So once again, the “urban” world, being weakly connected with the rural world, is perceived as the embodiment of universal vice. Anti-Westernism and anti-urbanism (which is a strange form of opposition to something that doesn’t exist) merge in the national culture long before the perestroika fiasco. A thorough analysis of one of the most neutral magazines, “The New World”, for the last twenty years yielded a very interesting result. Firstly, the urban environment was presentThe “Settlementation” of the Land of Gardarike

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ed only in one publication out of seven. Secondly, in only two publications in two decades was this topic discussed at least in a sympathetic tone, and the overwhelming majority of articles talk about the city in very general terms and were based rather on “Red Kalina” by V. Shukshin53 than on “Shurka and Prosvirnyak” by M. Roshchin.54 Thirdly, a typical substitution is most clearly manifested in the choir of lamentations about the inhumanity of urban life: the dislike of the social and mental world structure is safely transferred to the “city”.

Rural consciousness does not like itself, and hates everything non-rural. This hatred many years later, in the 1990s, finally revealed itself in the journalism of A. Prokhanov55 and Yu. Vlasov,56 nd in the metaphorical speeches of S. Govorukhin.57 The world of settlements is fundamentally unrooted, has no historical reasons for existence, except for its own sake, and 53

Vasily Makarovich Shukshin (Russian: Васи́лий Мака́рович Шукши́н;

1929 – 1974) was a Soviet actor, writer, screenwriter and movie director from the Altai region who specialised in rural themes.

54

Mikhail Mikhailovich Roshchin (Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Ро́щин;

1933 –2010) was a Russian playwright, screenwriter and short story writer.

55

Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Андре́евич

Проха́нов; 1938) is a Russian writer, a member of the secretariat of the Writers Union of the Russian Federation and the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections.

He is the editor-in-chief of Russia’s far-right newspaper Zavtra («Завтра», Tomorrow), which combines ultranationalist and anti-capitalist views.

56

Yury Petrovich Vlasov (Russian: Юрий Петрович Власов; 1935) is a Soviet

writer and retired heavyweight weightlifter and politician.

57

Stanislav Sergeyevich Govorukhin (Russian: Станислав Серге́евич Говорухин;

1936) has been one of the most popular Soviet and Russian film directors since the 1960s.

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has few memories of “Rasteryayeva Street”.58 When, after the Great Reform, the boundaries between the cities and suburbs were freshly rebuilt, the country-side settlements usually remained “no-man’s land”. It was hardly by chance that in the police reports on the state of affairs in the unsettled zone at the junction of the Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod provinces, the Ivanovskaya settlement, the present regional center, was persistently called “wild America”. Due to the specifics of early industrialisation, which was under way primarily outside the cities, there was a rather consistent slobodisation or “settlementation” of industrial villages, such as Kimry59 with its shoe industry, and then the development of powerful factory settlements in the outskirts of large cities, like the Vyborg side of Saint Petersburg or Sukino Boloto behind the Rogozhskaya outpost of Moscow.

The world of settlements certainly meant something temporary, something that was ready for exile, demolition and displacement at any time, something that was poorly settled just to last for a day or two, something fundamentally alien and even hostile to every shade of stability, heritability, and rootedness. You can hardly say that the concept of property was completely alien to the settlements, but somehow it extended exclusively to small movable property, meagre objects that almost 58

The Manners of Rasteryayeva Street (1866) is a novel by Gleb Ivanovich Uspen-

sky (1843 – 1902), a Russian writer and prominent figure of the Narodniki (“Populists”) movement.

59

Kimry (Russian: Ки́мры), formerly Kimra (Кимра), is a town in the south of

Tver Oblast, located on the River Volga at its confluence with the Kimrka 133 kilometres (83 miles) to the east of Tver. Population: 49,628 (2010 Census).

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entirely could be put in a couple of “fibre” suitcases. Meanwhile, behind a badly mended fence there was immediately “the wild field”. We also cannot say that the world of settlements was completely devoid of the sense of beauty, but this only related to clothes and indispensable pictures from the “Niva” magazine (in Soviet times it was “Ogonyok” magazine), and never extending to the exterior of houses.

The total “settlementation” unfolded intensively in Russia in the post-reform period, and covered villages that regularly supplied seasonal migrants or peasants to Petersburg and Moscow—men such as S. Yesenin’s father, who lived on Myasnitskaya Street for twenty years—and villages along the main highways. The great uplotneniye after the October Revolution led to, among other things, a massive migration of people from the outskirts of the suburbs into the city centers.

That was why in the times of Stalin, Khrushchyov and Brezhnev, it was important to push the world of settlements back, this time into the new large panel-built houses on the city outskirts, therefore freeing up the center for a new elite.

Finally, the Soviet industrialisation generated only industrial settlements, the structure of which had absolutely no idea of urban, resident, or bourgeois self-development, and there was nowhere for this idea to come from in the first place.

It seemed that the Great Reform had created certain prospects for the creation of an autonomous city government.

However, from the very beginning, in the 1860s, and especially after the reforms of Alexander III, the property qual-

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ification laws were so strict that for all of Moscow, with its 2 million residents in 1904, there were only about 7,000 people with the right to vote. Moreover, the central government completely deprived the Duma of any serious powers and an independent economic base. For example, any decision of the Duma required approval from the governor-general, and the municipal rates did not make up even 3% of the city’s budget.

So it was not surprising that out of the small electorate only half actually voted.

And yet in the natural course of events the sprouts of self-government began to take root, usually not in the city but “at dachas”. This, for example, was well illustrated by “The Charter of the Society for Levashovo Village Development”, which was dutifully put at #11 in “The Registry of Societies and Unions of Saint Petersburg Region by the Saint Petersburg Regional Decree on the Presidency Societies of April 14, 1912” and approved by the Governor Count A.V. Adlerberg. By the beginning of the First World War, the efforts of experts who had gained considerable experience in Europe were already beginning to cumulate into a certain social effect, and the Provisional Government had all the materials to begin the work of radical city reform. By an irony typical of Russian history, the draft of this reform was ready for consideration in October 1917 and included a fairly extensive model of the city charter in several variations.

Due to inertia and a lack of interest on the part of the authorities working on the charters, the information base and

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training courses for the city managers continued well into the period of the New Economic Policy until it all literally came to an end with the execution of the members of the regional zemstvo60 movement.

Due to the dual nature of the guiding doctrine, according to which, on the one hand, it was expected to increase the number of the industrial urban population in every possible way, and on the other hand, any autonomy of the city as a social institution was denied per se, nothing could prevent the triumphant settlementation of the country.

And that was exactly what happened.

Culture discovered the ability to exist and reproduce in pan-settlement space, which does not fit into the classical dichotomous pattern of the world history of civilisation. The pan-settlement world is a denial of civilisation, but it did not bring an end to a culture of urban orientation in any way.

It is interesting to note that the democratic or quasi-democratic movements of the perestroika and post-perestroika periods, although born in the cities, were completely deprived of any orientation towards the city. Typically, Russian revolutions from above did not have the slightest need for municipal support, and were not at all worried by the 60

Zemstvo (Russian: земство) was an institution of local government set up

during the great emancipation reform of 1861 by Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Nikolai Milyutin elaborated the idea of the zemstva, and the first zemstvo laws went into effect in 1864. After the October Revolution of 1917, the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced by a system of workers’ councils (“soviets”).

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fact that municipal government was completely cut off from the transformation process. The 1989 elections pushed out a number of “democrats” into the city elite, who then without a moment’s hesitation left the issues of city government that were of little interest to them to the mercy of the traditional bureaucracy, which was anti-urban in its essence. As a result, the habitual industry-based management model was not shaken in the slightest; on the contrary, it became stronger and discovered new possibilities for using administrative institutions for its own purposes.

The liquidation of the districts and new surveying in the administrative and municipal districts was the most radical transformation that happened in Moscow. These changes happened solely for the purpose of liquidating the core of political resistance to the new mayor. The administration by definition did not view the city as a single institution and the backbone of urban society. The new government built up its importance as soon as it got rid of the Party network which had integrated the city on a territorial basis. Four of the five Moscow vice premiers represented the interests of the construction industry, a record worthy of the Guinness Book.

The establishing of municipal districts and at the same time stripping their leaders of clear legitimate powers and the means of management, gave unprecedented freedom of action for a centralised bureaucracy. The Department of the Mayor, created by G. Popov as an obvious counterweight to the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the Moscow City Government, and, in theory, developing some general urban policies, did not have a separate budget line and could not claim to have an independent political role.

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The self-government committees, often frail and ugly, but still real centers of some sort of democratic mechanism for control over the urban environment, were so inappropriate in the conditions of bureaucratic arbitrariness that Mr Luzhkov had nothing else to do but take advantage of the coup in October 1993 and suspend the activities of these committees under the pretext of support for the dictator. Finally, the preparation of the Provisional Policy on the City Duma before the Duma elections was carried out by the mayor exactly as the reforms of Alexander III had been, with the Duma’s decisions first requiring alignment with the mayoralty and only then receiving approval.

The only thing left is to complete the draft City Charter in such a way as to exclude any chance for urban self-government mechanisms to emerge in the conditions of total control by the authoritarian or oligarchic model. One cannot but admit that the “settlementation” of the city has won out, and will remain in force for a long time to come. Based on the old Russian traditions, the Bolsheviks managed to disintegrate and atomise society to such a level that any kind of city associations or communities were blocked. This happened not so much because of the malice of the authorities as because of the absence of the corporate embryo, which made urban civilisation impossible.

In these conditions, there are no obstacles to the creation of either a new “urban planning legislation”, or the continuation in its previous forms of “urban planning”, or the adoption of a non-urban City Charter.

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the establishment of at least mafia and corporate relations; and that this process will begin, if it has not already begun, not in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but in the middle-sized provincial cities, which are destined, just like in the past, to lead the zemstvo movement. No one, however, can give guarantees that this zemstvo process will take the form of a secondary or genuine, i.e. Western, urbanisation.

Obviously, the urban principle together with the Western civilisational standard will not be able to spontaneously grow from the self-movement of the rural continuum of Russian culture. Surely, the ability of culture to develop in the countryside, which is indifferent if not hostile to it, depends entirely on the connection of the Russian cultural mechanisms to global cultural mechanisms. The real question is whether the pattern of the “slobodisation” of culture in Russia is eternal, whether the “islands” of urban culture are sustainable or they will inevitably dissolve within the overall “settlementation”.

There are no logical grounds to answer this question.

Publisher’s note: This text was received from the artist Yuri Palmin, source: http://www.glazychev.ru/books/slobodizatsia.htm.

Several attempts were made by the publisher to obtain the rights to publish this text.

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Alexander Burenkov Curator of KHODYNKA gallery, writer and art director based in Moscow.

Teacher at Sreda Obuchenia school and RMA art management school (Russia)

Former curator at the V-A-C Foundation (2013–2016), chief curator at the experimental project space ISSMAG gallery (2016–2017) and chief specialist of the Regional Development Directorate of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (ROSIZO-NCCA) ­(2017–2018). A recipient of Russia’s Innovation Art Prize (2017) as Curator of the Year for the exhibition “Planned obsolescence” at the Miltronic body/ digital gym center, as part of the parallel programme of the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2016.

A member of the Expert Council of the 6th Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (2018). Expert of the GARAGE museum’s grant programme for young artists working in the field of contemporary art (2018).

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Alina Gutkina Artist (Russia)

Alina was born in 1985 in Moscow, Russia, where she currently lives and works. As an artist, she looks into the topic of street subculture, exploring the psychology and genderbased agenda of the dormitory suburbs’ underground: radical youth and teenage scenes. Her main interest lies in the theme of “identity search” among the generation born in the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She conducts research into how a subculture originates in the underground and moves into the masses, how resistance becomes a commodity, as well as the issue of the cult of masculinity in subculture.

Project Participants

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Vyacheslav Leonidovich Glazychev Academic, urbanist and publicist (1940–2012, Russia)

A Russian scholar and public figure, researcher into project creativity and architectural heritage, a critic, translator and publicist. Candidate of Philosophy, Doctor of Arts, professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute and member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation. Member of the International Academy of Architecture and the Salzburg Workshop of City Planners.

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Kirill Golovkin Author at Strelka Mag (Russia)

Kirill was born in 1989 in Moscow and grew up in the southwestern Belyayevo district of the capital. A linguist by training, he has a master’s degree in media communications.

In 2008, he moved into journalism, collaborating with Strelka Mag from 2017, and becoming a full-time author of the magazine in 2018. One of his main hobbies in recent years has been the study of Moscow’s suburbs, including his native district of Belyayevo and its history.

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Martin Leidenfrost Freelance writer (Austria)

Born in 1972, raised in Lower Austria, and educated in a Catholic convent school, Martin studied Film and Slavic Studies in Vienna and Babelsberg. He has lived in Vienna, Berlin, Kiev, and Brussels, working as a screenwriter since 1992, a journalist since 2000, and a columnist since 2006. He currently lives and works in Devínska Nová Ves, Slovakia.

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Sergei Kuznetsov Chief Architect of Moscow, First Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning (Russia)

Born in 1977 in Moscow. 1995-2001—a student at the Moscow Architectural Institute’s faculty of Housing and Public Works Construction, under Professors V.A. Shulrikhter and A.A. Velikanov, where he earned his Architect’s Diploma.

In 2006, his S. P. Proyekt Bureau entered a merger to form part of the SPEECH Choban & Kuznetsov architectural corporation. From 2006 to 2012—a senior partner at SPEECH Choban & Kuznetsov, Moscow. Since 2008—co-founder of the architectural magazine speech:, along with Sergei Choban. In 2010, he participated in the “Factory Russia” Project for the exposition of the Russian Pavilion at the 12th Architectural Biennale in Venice, and in 2012 he was cocurator of the “i-city/i-land” exposition for the Russian Pavilion’s “Skolkovo” project at the 13th Biennale. In 2012, he was appointed Chief Architect of Moscow and First Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Architecture Committee.

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Sergei Nikitin A Moscow historian, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, head of the MosKultProg arts group, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor (Russia)

A city historian, culturologist, organiser of art and educational events, and the originator of courtyard studies—the comparative study of courtyards and global courtyard culture. A history graduate of Moscow State University, Ph.D., associate professor of the theory and history of culture, and senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow. He has worked as scientific editor for the Moscow Heritage magazine. Author of various courses for the Higher School of Economics, the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN), Moscow State University and the University of Verona. Author of the books Walks in Rome: A Historical and Toponymic Investigation and The Land of Names: The Way We Name Streets, Villages and Cities in Russia, along with over 100 scientific and popular articles on culture and art. Founder of the MosKultProg (“Moscow Cultural Walks”) group, and author of more than 100 walking routes in Moscow. He conceived and oversees the international city project VeloNotte™, which conducts nocturnal cycle tours with scientists and architects. Author of the Ballo del Culo project at the Venice Carnival (2013–2020). He works in Moscow and Verona.

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Simon Mraz Curator, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow (Russia/Austria)

Born 1977 in Vienna. A graduate of Vienna University, with a master’s in Art History. Herr Mraz has worked in several famous auction houses and museums, such as Sotheby’s in Munich, department for old masters (2002), Tajan auction house in Paris, departments for modern art and old masters (2003), the Dorotheum in Milan (2005), the Dorotheum in Vienna, head of department for business with Russia and the CIS countries and deputy head of the department for old masters (2007–2009). Since 2009 he has served as the Cultural Attaché of the Austrian Embassy in Moscow and Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow.

Project Participants

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Christian Schantl Head of marketing and communication at Wiener Wohnen, Head of the City of Vienna international relations department (Austria)

Born 1959 in Carinthia, Austria, Christian studied physical education and literature. Before joining Wiener Wohnen he held various positions in the areas of marketing and communication. Among other things, he has worked as managing director of the Festspielhaus St. Pölten and the Lower Austrian Danube Festival, head of marketing of the Austrian Railway Company ÖBB and executive partner of the Viennese Public Relations agency Conter PR. For the past eight years he has occupied the position of head of marketing and communication at Wiener Wohnen, heading the international relations department of the City of Vienna since August 2019.

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Special thanks by the publisher to:

Alexander Schallenberg, Federal Minister for European and International Affairs of the Republic of Austria Ernst Woller, First President of the Landtag of Vienna Andrea Mayer, Secretary of State for Culture and the Arts, Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport of the Republic of Austria Mikhail Shvydkoy, Special Envoy of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cultural Cooperation Sergei Cheryomin, Minister of the Moscow City Government, Head of the Department of Foreign Economic and International Relations of Moscow Johannes Eigner, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Austria to the Russian Federation Teresa Indjein, Ambassador, Director of the Department of Culture at the Republic of Austria Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs Karin Zimmer, International Cultural Projects, Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria

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Robert Gerschner, deputy head of mission of the Austrian Embassy in Moscow Ulla Krauss-Nussbaumer, vice-director of the department of culture at the Republic of Austria Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs Valerie Hagg, head of the exhibitions and digital media department at the Republic of Austria Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs Sergei Kuznetsov, Chief Architect of Moscow Employees of the Austrian Embassy Moscow: Maximilian Wohlgemuth, Andreas Garber, Waltraud Stroblmaier The Team of the Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow: Anna Nozhenko, Julia Tauber, Doris Rabl, Aldar Zhamyanov, Daria Gusarova Rafael Skokanic, intern at ACF Moscow Eva Kvasnicka, intern at ACF Moscow Alexander Burenkov, curator Kirill Golovkin, author at Strelka Mag Alina Gutkina, artist Acknowledgements

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The City of Moscow Department of Culture Ekaterina Perventseva, councillor, curator of special projects of the City of Moscow Department of Culture Anna Kaganovich, employee of the City of Moscow Department of Culture Venera Antoshina, employee of the City of Moscow Department of Culture The Moscow City Department of Foreign Economic and International Relations Olga Nikolaeva, employee of the Department of Foreign Economic and International Relations of Moscow Martin Leidenfrost, independent writer Sergei Nikitin, Moscow historian, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, head of the MosKultProg arts group, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor (Russia)

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Christian Schantl, Head of marketing and communication at Wiener Wohnen, Head of the City of Vienna international relations department Yuri Palmin, photographer Danila Stratovich Polina Tkach, project manager Sergei Monin, Chairman of the Board, AO Raiffeisenbank Maxim Selivanov, Head of Marketing, AO Raiffeisenbank Julia Kurtua, Project Manager Marketing, AO Raiffeisenbank

To all the artists, text contributors and journalists who have contributed their works and articles to our project.

To all the cultural institutions which have contributed to all “NA RAJONE” projects.

Acknowledgements

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This publication consists of various texts about Moscow districts and periphery within the project— “NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center. Cultural dynamics and artistic power between the central districts and peripheries of Moscow and Vienna” Curators: Simon Mraz Project management: Anna Nozhenko, Aldar Zhamyanov, Doris Rabl, Daria Gusarova (team of ACF Moscow) Texts by: Simon Mraz, director of the Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow and culture attaché (Russia/Austria) Sergei Kuznetsov, Chief Architect of Moscow (Russia) Christian Schantl, head of marketing and communication at Wiener Wohnen, Head of the City of Vienna international relations department (Austria) Kirill Golovkin, Author at Strelka Mag (Russia) Sergei Nikitin, Moscow historian, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow, head of the MosKultProg arts group, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor (Russia) Alexander Burenkov, curator (Russia) Alina Gutkina, artist (Russia) Martin Leidenfrost, freelance writer (Austria) Vyacheslav Leonidovich Glazychev, academic, urbanist and publicist (1940-2012, Russia)

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Imprints Publisher: Simon Mraz, Austrian Cultural Forum Concept: Simon Mraz Design: Natasha Shendrik Editors: Daria Gusarova, Anna Nozhenko, Aldar Zhamyanov Translations: Ben McGarr, Leo Stutin Proof-readers: Anna Selezneva, Marina Shaposhnikova A joint editing project of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow and Artguide Editions (Art Guide Ltd)

Starokonyushenny Pereulok 1 119034 Moscow Tel.: +7 (495) 780 60 66 Fax: +7 (495) 937 42 69 E-mail: moskau-kf@bmeia.gv.at www.akfmo.org www.facebook.com/austrian.cultural.forum

SPECIAL THANKS BY THE PUBLISHER TO:

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© Texts: the authors ©P hotographs: Rights with the photographers contributing © Design: Natalia Shendrik © Austrian Сultural Forum, Moscow, 2020 © Art Guide Ltd, 2020

Within the project “NA RAJONE. Art and life beyond the center.

Cultural dynamics and artistic power between the central districts and peripheries of Moscow and Vienna�