The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Reflections from a Moscow Diary, 1984–1994
ing place of truth and reason, Misha’s personal gift for the end of the millennium.
Far from representing the end of ideology, the pluralist ideal of history
became a cover for the emergence of the class that had won the battle
to control the means of communication. But media domination is never
enough for a ruling class—it must always return to stamp the skyline of the
capital in its own image, an infantile disorder manifest in making things
bigger and in outwitting the vanquished. The reconstruction of symbolic
buildings that had previously been destroyed, such as the Church of Christ
the Savior, is one such example. It was first built in 1869 as a grand project
to unite an insurgent people, financed by the imposition of a draconian system
of taxation; it towered over the city, an affirmation of the crisis of greedy
belief. This, combined with the lucrative seizure of church property, was
why Stalin had it destroyed in the 1930s, although in truth among the Muscovite
poor and secular it was never very popular.
As an allegory of the collision of church and state, it was intended
to be replaced, after an epic architectural competition, with Iofan’s Palace of
the Soviets, a monumental colossus that would dwarf the world. But a combination
of a cursed place and the death of its mentor left the site as a circular
open-air swimming pool named after the anarchist prince Kropotkin. As
if to prove how little their behavior could be distinguished from the actions
of those they had conquered, the new regime of virtuous bureaucrats closed
the popular pool and had the cathedral rebuilt. A symbolic anti-Soviet act,
its reconstruction in the 1990s marks a key point in the manufacture of a
new history that is deeply romantic in its nostalgia for a mythical Christian
prerevolutionary Russia.
Just as the icons of the Orthodox Church had been whitewashed after
1917, so now it was the turn for the murals of heroic workers on gable
end walls to be painted out of the city. The photographic displays of loyal
deputies on the roadsides grew dusty, and the bulbs blew in the hammerand-sickle
street lamps. Ladders went up and the camouflage of red banners
hanging across the boulevards were removed. In place of directives extolling
the virtues of the Party and the five-year plan, new banners were erected in
the same places, only this time offering stocks, shares, and instant cash. Images
and statues of former heroes and heroines of the Soviet state were demolished,
streets were renamed, and in a drunken orgy Dzershinsky was
removed from the front of the KGB building and dumped along with the
broken pieces of other leaders on a patch of grass next to the House of Art.
But Lenin still stands outside Oktyabraskaya metro, and however
hard the new bureaucrats try it will be impossible to erase the historical imprint
of the Soviet era on the city. The star is embossed too far up on the