The foyer of Turandot restaurant is full of devchonki—Russian girls in tiny skirts, hair tumbling down their backs, leaning on the arms of powerful men. It is cold outside, but from the restaurant comes a warm smell of oriental spices and the soft thrum of a harp being played by a girl in a teetering white 18th-century style wig. This is Moscow's latest fashionable restaurant, and the delight of Russia's ruling classes. My companions and I are placed near the entrance, and seconds after we sit down, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, strolls in with his wife Yelena Baturina, a property tycoon and Russia's first post-Soviet female billionaire. They are soon joined by several big businessmen and members of the presidential administration. I begin to feel as if I am at Satan's ball in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
Our waiter bobs over in his white wig. "I saw you looking at the décor," he oozes. "I just wanted to tell you it's all genuine." It is a brazen lie, for besides a few genuine oil paintings on the walls, it is nearly all imitation. Turandot came into existence following one of the most high-profile demolitions in Moscow in recent years. The site, on Tverskoi boulevard, was formerly occupied by a charming set of neoclassical buildings known as the Rimsky-Korsakov quarter, after a lover of Catherine the Great. The ensemble had been listed as a federal monument, but in 2002 the deputy culture minister, Natalya Dementyeva, declared that three of the six buildings on the site were to be removed from the list. Such a decision must be made at cabinet level, making Dementyeva's action illegal. Nevertheless, soon only façades were left.
The building is one of many replicas that have recently replaced historic constructions in Moscow. In the last five years alone, more than 1,000 historic buildings and some 200 architectural monuments have been demolished. Luzhkov is overseeing a building boom in a city that has been transformed, in the space of 15 years, from a badly lit, dirty Soviet capital into a gleaming monument to the petrodollar. In an increasingly nationalist Russia, Luzhkov is praised for reclaiming Moscow's history from the communists, but he is rewriting it in the process. These shiny sham re-creations of a glamorous Tsarist past are intended to blot out memories of the poverty of communism and coax us into forgetting the restless chaos of the 1990s. "Look," they seem to say. "We are a noble nation back on track!"
Luzhkov recently "finished" Tsaritsyno in southern Moscow. This 18th-century brick palace was started by Catherine the Great but never completed. The palace became a romantic ruin and monument to imperial whims, beloved of Muscovites who would ramble in its great park. Luzhkov, ignoring the advice of experts and sidestepping the required protocol, ordered that the building be finished off in reinforced concrete and that the park be re-landscaped into a kitsch fantasy. In a city that is changing so fast that many of its own inhabitants no longer recognise parts of it, such transformations are traumatic. Many Muscovites feel crushed by the megalomania of their mayor.
In May 2004, with two other foreign journalists, I formed MAPS (the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society), to draw international attention to the threats facing Moscow's built heritage. We knew that our foreignness was a powerful tool and we planned to use it for all it was worth, for despite Russia's nationalism and the authorities' insistence that they are impervious to international criticism, their skin is thin when it comes to their image. This May, along with British organisation SAVE Europe's Heritage, MAPS published a bilingual report, "Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point." Although the reaction in the Russian press was mainly favourable, we have had mud flung at us. Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, a Moscow Duma deputy, accused me of following the orders of Yabloko, Russia's liberal party, and another contributor of being in bed with a former opponent of Luzhkov.
The debate sparked by the report undid some of the harm done by a recent article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, which not only contained several factual howlers, but perversely held up Luzhkov's Moscow as an example for London to follow. It seems that Jenkins's campaign against modernism is reduced to praising Moscow's ersatz buildings. The piece was translated into Russian and is now quoted with glee by the authorities as justification for further desecration of historic buildings. Journalists like Jenkins appear not to realise just how political the issue of heritage is in Russia today—and what a vital role international pressure can play in the campaign to save its historic buildings.
As we sat in the Turandot, the words of Andrei Batalov, the chief architect of the Kremlin, came to mind: "The construction business is like a giant monster: the bigger it gets, the bigger the buildings it needs to consume." The powerful men surrounding us, waited on by men in 18th-century costumes, were basking in the fantasy of a past they never lived. Toying with our (not very good) soup, we wondered what part of Moscow's heritage our fellow diners would be devouring next.
