Re: [A-List] Russia: Luzhkov the visionary?

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anatoly Lunacharsky, then Minister of Education and Enlightenment 
(sic) of the newly born Soviet regime, broke into the office of the 
head of the Red Army once, pale and deranged, requesting that some 
17th Century Cathedral was spared by the Red troops during the Civil 
War. The head of the Army, who collected the anecdote somewhere, also 
informed a couple of decades later that in his last days this man was 
eking out a hardest living as a tourist guide in Samarkand.

The head of the Red Army commented that the first anecdote showed a 
Lunacharsky who was unable to perceive the historical drama that was 
developing at his very sight but had all his sensitivity directed 
towards the glorious remains of the 17th Century. He had been close 
friend and political partner of Lunacharsky, indeed, and with 
Lunacharsky he had entered the Bolshevik party when his L.D.Trotsky's 
Mezhrayontsii ("Interdistricts") group -yes, for those who still did 
not realize it, this is the head of the Red Army we are talking about-
 decided that there existed no difference between Lenin and Trotsky 
on the tasks and actions due for the Revolution.

Afterwards, while Trotsky was chased away like a wild beast by the 
idiotic bureaucrats who under Stalin's leadership substituted 
swimming pools for jewels of the past, Lunacharsky was the head of 
the USSR delegation at the League of Nations. It must have been a 
hard and bitter job for the man who had defended cultural icons 
against the ravages of war: to defend the ravages of bureaucracy 
against the menaces of (imperialist-led) peace.

He seems to have died in utter and extreme poverty, an outcast in 
Samarkand.

This poverty of Lunacharsky is the same poverty of spirit that moved 
Stalin and his followers to raze cathedrals to the ground.

One would, however, wonder whether it is possible to "rebuild" the 
past in the sense Luzhkov wants it "rebuilt". Are the artifacts 
really the same, or they are -as most things in today's Russia seem 
to be- a sorry simulacre of old capitalist Russia? Would Lunacharsky 
have hailed this "reconstruction", at the cost of millions and 
millions of lives?

I dare doubt it.

Isn't it ironic that today's Moscow's mayor restores the past of the  
, 

Date sent:      	Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:19:24 +0300
From:           	Michael Keaney <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:        	[A-List] Russia: Luzhkov the visionary?
To:             	a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Send reply to:  	The A-List <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> The architect's ego is reconstructed as Moscow's mayor asserts the lay
> view
> 
> London has a lot to learn from a city that has not sold out to money
> and vulgarity and remains recognisably Russian
> 
> Simon Jenkins
> Friday April 27, 2007
> The Guardian
> 
> The funeral of Boris Yeltsin was remarkable not just for when it
> occurred, defying all medical forecasts, but for where. The
> magnificent white towers and onion domes of the Cathedral of Christ
> the Saviour stand high on the banks of the Moscow river upstream of
> the Kremlin, originally built to commemorate Napoleon's retreat from
> Moscow. Yeltsin was the first Russian leader to be celebrated here
> since Tsar Alexander III in 1894, one reason being that the cathedral
> ceased to exist after being blown up by Stalin in 1933 and replaced by
> a swimming pool. Rebuilt by Yeltsin in 1997 it is, in the minds of
> Russians, the same cathedral. It would not be so in Britain, and
> thereby hangs a tale.
> 
> Yeltsin and now Vladimir Putin presided from their adjacent Kremlin
> palace over a remarkable transformation. The entry to Red Square is
> now guarded by the twin towers of the 16th century Resurrection Gate,
> with its shrine to the Iberian virgin, kissed by ancient visitors to
> the city. They were razed by Stalin to get his tanks and missiles into
> the square. Rebuilt they restore a sense of medieval enclosure and
> drama to the square's approach, as if the Holbein Gate had been
> re-erected across Whitehall. Next door is the strawberry-coloured
> Kazan Cathedral, replaced by Stalin with a public lavatory. It was
> rebuilt in 1993 to plans made secretly by the architect charged with
> its destruction.
> 
> Across Moscow dozens of churches and monasteries wiped out by Stalin
> have been rebuilt facsimile. Brutalist boxes and towers such as the
> Rossiya and Intourist hotels have been demolished, the latter replaced
> by a facsimile of an old tsarist palace. The mayor of Moscow for the
> last 15 years, Yuri Luzhkov, wants Moscow architecture of all periods
> to grace his city. The Stalinist/art deco Moskva Hotel next to the
> Kremlin is being rebuilt as a copy, at least outside. The neo-Gothic
> ministries, the decrepit facades of the old Chinese quarter next to
> Red Square and the once grim facade of the Lubyanka have been restored
> and carefully lit.
> 
> Lord Foster was curiously commissioned to rebuild the Rossiya site on
> the former grid of low-rise streets and courtyards, hardly his forte.
> When he presented his usual glass boxes 10 storeys high, Luzhkov
> retorted that "this is not Moscow" and told him to try again,
> something his lordship is not in the habit of hearing. Foster's new
> plan comprises a crisscross of streets and blocks, still bland and
> uniform, but doubtless this too will change. The evolution of this
> exciting site under the walls of the Kremlin will be a true test of
> whether Foster is an architect of cities, rather than of monuments.
> 
> This frenetic activity - Luzhkov has only until he retires next year
> to create his new Moscow - comes at a price. His wife is a developer,
> and ominously owner of Moscow's cement monopoly. The outskirts of
> Moscow are an architectural disaster area, while even restorations do
> not respect normal standards of conservation. Backhanders talk. Some
> 400 of the city's registered historic buildings have been destroyed
> since the fall of communism, its poverty a great conservationist.
> 
> The Luzhkov style of romantic historicism is derided by western
> critics. To the Times's Marcus Binney it wavers from "ersatz replica
> to bloated postmodernism". To the New York Times it is pastiche "theme
> park Russia". The guidebooks refer to kitsch and Disneyland. Yet they
> do not deride the reproduction Palladian mansions of the tsarist
> suburb of Arbatz, let alone the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, almost
> all of them in whole or part 19th century. Are the post-Reformation
> north and west fronts of Westminster Abbey "pastiches"?
> 
> Some of this criticism is valid. Luzhkov's activities are about to be
> damned in a devastating report by the valiant Moscow Architectural
> Preservation Society, cataloguing the loss not just of major monuments
> under his regime but of hundreds of courtyards, terraces and
> quaysides. The mayor is said to have staged nothing less than "an
> assault on the dense and delicate fabric" of Moscow, a far more
> interesting city architecturally than St Petersburg.
> 
> Less worthy of criticism is the Moscow that Luzhkov has struggled to
> create. He at least cares, and thank goodness he is a man in a hurry,
> given what may follow him. The pressure to mimic Ken Livingstone in
> London and seek a pastiche Manhattan to enrich the oligarchs must have
> been strong. The result would have been the "edifice egotism" that is
> now pepper-potting the London skyline, and turned post-reunification
> Berlin into a joyless architectural gallery.
> 
> Luzhkov's architecture council meetings, conducted in public, reflect
> a stylistic self-confidence not seen in European cities since
> Victorian Britain, a culling of the language of the past to enhance
> and glorify the present. This past is to Russians not the foreign
> country so feared by British planners. It is a vivid component of the
> present, from which war, ideology, religion, wealth and poverty cannot
> be eliminated. It seeks a Moscow that is recognisably Russian,
> tsarist, Stalinist as well as modern, in appearance as well as in
> spirit. Those who want modernity can find it aplenty in Moscow's
> rampant commercialism, in its garish neon billboards, its bombastic
> street furniture and its helpless traffic, created by too much
> parking. But I prefer even this to the obliteration of all that is old
> in Beijing to pander to the pretensions of the International Olympic
> Committee.
> 
> British critics may insult the outcome, though I sense that if the
> British people were asked, they would embrace Luzhkov's vision rather
> than Livingstone's. The campaign to rebuild the prime monument to the
> railway age, Euston Arch, in the new Euston has been ridiculed by the
> authorities. Any suggestion to recreate the facades of Nash's Regent
> Street or Adam's Portland Place would be laughed out of court. News
> International's Wapping printworks, replacing the finest set of
> 18th-century warehouses not just in Britain but in Europe, are shortly
> to be vacated. Luzhkov would rebuild the old London Docks - and highly
> profitable they would be. Tower Hamlets, or any London council, would
> not have the guts.
> 
> It is London, not Moscow, that has sold out architecturally to money
> and vulgarity. We can save the old and declare it "authentic", as we
> did Piccadilly Circus, St Pancras and Covent Garden. But when we
> destroy the old, as at Spitalfields or along the Thames, we do not
> insist on replacements evocative of their history or location. Modern
> architects recognise no obligation to the city and its history. They
> want only to make personal "statements". Like lawyers and doctors,
> they regard it as their professional right to dictate the framework in
> which they operate. Political interference is insufferable. If that
> means brain-dead glass boxes from some American computer programme,
> too bad.
> 
> For all his corruption and disregard for conservation, Luzhkov has
> asserted the dominance of a lay view in determining how a modern city
> might look, and done so with bravura, style and a sense of place. One
> day London will treat its banal glass boxes as their creators have
> treated the banal concrete slabs they are mostly replacing. I suspect
> that Luzhkov's Moscow will be regarded with greater affection and
> respect by its citizens. 
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.
> 
> 



Este correo lo ha enviado
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[No necesariamente es su autor]
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"La patria tiene que ser la dignidad arriba y el regocijo abajo".
Aparicio Saravia
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