Let me lead you through the streets of Moscow

by Anni Pelmeni

With this post I will start my new project dedicated to Moscow architecture. Moscow was founded 860 years ago and with 9 centuries of history one might expect quite a versatile architecture. However, most of Moscow was burnt down during Napoleon invasion in 1812, therefore what we see now in Moscow is relatively modern. There are buildings that date back till 19^th century but the nowadays Moscow was mainly built after the Revolution of 1917.

The Soviet Moscow might be familiar from the breaking news of Khrushchev era and from some tourist brochures of Soviet time. This will be the starting point of this project.

It is easy to distinguish 5 periods of urban development of Moscow which coincide with the ruling period of particular Soviet and then post-Soviet leaders. One may speak of architecture of

• Lenin period
• Stalin Period
• Khrushchev period
• Brezhnev period
• Luzhkov period (the first post-Soviet benchmark)

Where in all this is Gorbachev period one may ask? Well, we are talking here about CONSTRUCTIVE development of Moscow, while most of Gorbachev era is marked with DE-CONSTRUCTION, there is not much created at that time to speak of.

Another thing which might seem inconsistent in this typology is the last Luzhkov period. For the last 15 years Moscow politics and development was shaped by the mayor Luzhkov and that had both positive and negative sides. Luzhkov has never been Russian political leader, he is somewhat more important – he has been Moscow mayor since 1992 and the one who rules Moscow is actually has many power resources to define Russian domestic politics. One the one hand side, it has always been this way in the whole Russian history, but on the other side the recent 20 years of transition brought something new and unaccustomed to the role of Moscow. I will come back to this phenomena when I will discuss Luzhkov’s period in more details.

The next post in this project will dedicated to Lenin period of Moscow architecture and as the preview, here are 2 of my favourite spots in Moscow: both impressive and with national character.

The most impressive view on Kremlin is one from the Moscow River.

The residential area Taganka: you can see old buildings from 19th century (at the left), one of the famous Stalin high-rise buildings - Vysotka na Kotelnecheskoy naberezhnoy (in the center), and a new residential construction built in the last decade.

Stumbe it!