Zaryade: Moscow Quiet Nook

Everyone knows that there is a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below, and that they are two very different things. It is the same with Moscow.

In essence, Moscow is a rather hostile and unpleasant megalopolis with silly, new apartment blocks and massive transport problems. But from time to time you can glimpse here and there the shadow of another more peaceful, simpler city – seemingly a phantom city, yet undoubtedly genuine.

Moscow has never been an ideal city, yet at odd moments in its history, it has come close to being able to be called Moscow in the full sense of this proud name. In exactly the same way, individual neighborhoods of the city have sometimes achieved a peculiar similarity to their heavenly prototypes. They too are usually called nooks of the real Moscow.

For a long time I had Moscow pegged as being both of the present, yet also with a leg in the past; now, though, it seems to me that one of its most clearly expressed “nooks” was old Zaryade, cruelly trampled by Soviet town planners more than half a century ago.

The city’s old quarter was almost entirely torn down in several waves between the end of the 1930s and the early 1960s. The plan had actually been to pull down all Kitai-Gorod, and Zaryade, which faced the river, was the first section marked for demolition.

Originally, the plan was to build in place of Zaryade an enormous building for the Ministry for Heavy Industry, and then (after the war) the plan shifted to a 32-storey skyscraper that was to have “fit organically into the ensemble of the Kremlin and Red Square and lend it a more awe-inspiring resonance.” What was finally built, during the Khrushchev years, was the Rossiya Hotel – Europe’s largest. And then, two years ago, the hotel was brought down – it was morally obsolete. Now, the district is getting ready for a new rebirth. Only a few churches and towers along Varvarka street – amazingly spared from the multiple destructions – remain as reminders of old Zaryade’s former grandeur.

Although Zaryade disappeared relatively recently, surprisingly little is known about what it was like. Until recently, the general public only had access to a few published photographs and plans, but even these only allowed a vague guess at how enthralling were the labyrinths of the district’s gateways.

Zaryade was a complex and ambiguous place. From the point of view of urban history, it is one of the oldest trading quarters in the city, having appeared on the lower bank of the Moscow River in the 14th century at the latest. It was here that Velikaya Ulitsa (Great Street) ran, connecting the river landing stage with the gates of the Kremlin and the Torg, or market.

In the 16th century, Zaryade joined the Kitai-Gorod line of fortification and became one of the capital’s most prestigious districts. Here they built not just stone churches, but also great dwelling houses (a rarity in those days, when Moscow was still predominantly built of wood), including the estate of the Romanovs – the founders of the future imperial dynasty. By the end of the 17th century, Zaryade was fairly heavily built up with wealthy stone buildings – the town houses of eminent boyars, and church and government complexes.

In old photographs, you can see heavily leaning low-rise buildings that conceal the town houses of the pre-Petrine era. Only three old houses were fortunate enough to survive the 20th century, while researchers working in Zaryade in the 1940s and 1950s managed to find and photograph another half-dozen reconstructed town houses. We will now never know how many uncelebrated landmarks of the old days fell under the blades of Soviet bulldozers.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Zaryade gradually became impoverished and fell into charming disrepair. The quay vanished, and just as the rest of Kitai-Gorod was turning into the trading and administrative center, Zaryade’s Velikaya Ulitsa became plain old Mokrinsky Pereulok. Actually, this contrast between a glorious past, peeking out from behind a thick layer of later plasterwork, and the homely – or at least homemade – present was Zaryade’s main feature in the final years of its existence.

Just as remarkable was the location of the dusty district: in the very center of Moscow, beneath the walls of the Kremlin and right next to Red Square. Located behind the trading stalls (the name Zaryade means “behind the stalls”), stretching from time immemorial along the eastern wall of the Kremlin and dividing it from Veliky Posad. Above it and to the northwest rose the numerous towers of the city’s three main architectural symbols – the Ivan the Great Belltower, St. Basil’s and Spasskaya Tower. To the south was the Moscow River, where the flatlands of Zamoskvorechye with their dozens of church bell-towers bowed and scraped... And inside the quarter, enclosed by fortress walls, was a Gordian knot of twisting lanes leading down from a significant hill.

If Soviet town planners had for some reason not written the Zaryade page in Stalin’s general plan, then this spot could have given rise to a touristy Old Town in the proper European sense – not merely a concentration of architectural and historical landmarks, but an urban milieu binding them together.

The central street of the quarter remained Mokrinsky Pereulok, along which were strung the Churches of the Immaculate Conception of Anna (dating from the 16th century, and the only construction to have survived on the lower, river-bank part of Zaryade, which later formed an “effective” contrast to the Soviet hotel heaving above it) and Nikola Mokry, called the Sirens Church (a reminder of the district’s merrymaking past as a port). The lane was closed off by the golden towers of Ivan the Great, sparkling away up into the heavens. To the left was the squat arch of the Prolomnye Gates in the Kitai-Gorod wall that led to the river. The houses here crowded up close to the gate, and from the windows of the second floor one could walk straight out onto the battlements of the ancient fortress. As one witness wrote: “The layer of earth covers the wall so thickly that trees grow on it, and the residents of the adjacent yards plant flowers on it.”

Through the Prolomnye Gates one could reach the embankment, stretching along the long and low-slung Kitai-Gorod wall. The wall was built in the 1530s, thanks to the zeal of the mother of Ivan the Terrible, Tsaritsa Yelena Glinskaya, and was one of the principal sights of old Moscow. Before the Revolution, the wall was embellished with stalls and merchants’ shops in the Empire style, the entire arcade broken only by the clumsy Glukhaya Tower, dwarfed on all sides by heavy-set brick buttresses. In the 1920s, not long before being torn down, the wall was restored and the traders’ lean-tos dismantled. The previously lively embankment now became a thoroughfare where few people went, with an avenue of lime trees stretching along the wall.

In the 19th century this embankment was the setting for popular festivals held by Moscow’s Jewish community, since at that time Zaryade played the role of Jewish ghetto of the type that existed in the majority of Europe’s major cities. In 1826, the Moscow authorities made an exception to the Law of Settlement that had been in effect since the end of the 18th century and allowed Jews to settle here on the territory of the St. Gleb coaching inn. Later there was a relaxation of the restrictions in other regions too, but the Jews preferred to settle close together, and, as a result, 50 years later they made up about half of the population of Zaryade. There were two places of worship (one of them side by side with St. Basil’s itself!) and a huge variety of workshops and trading establishments. In 1891, however, the emperor’s brother, Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, became governor, having taken it upon himself to restore the previous order of things and “protect Moscow from the Jews.” In a relatively short space of time, some 30,000 Jewish families were forcibly resettled out of Moscow, and the newly built synagogue was closed. Only merchants of the first guild, industrialists, diploma-holding specialists, reserve soldiers and – of course – converts, were allowed to remain in the city. These groups could afford to live in more prosperous districts of the city, and by the time the Revolution came, Zaryade had finally started to grow mold – that, at least, was how Soviet essayists described it.

Here, for example, is a quotation from Leonid Leonov’s The Badgers, from a chapter entitled Zaryade:

Life here is harsh and tough. In the stone cracks, with no way out, a disparate people – dime-store tribe; a petty anthill – had carved out a home, plying all sorts of trades. The windows in the house are tiny, they tenaciously hold in the heat. Pigeons live on the rafters, and sparrows hop around in hordes. The noise and bustle of the city doesn’t enter here; Zaryaders respect the cleanliness of quiet. Silent and solemn, like under the waters of a great river. Only the domestic chattering of pigeons, only the shrill piping of the barrel organ, only the evening peal of the church bells. Quiet and snowy. Life here is like a slow-turning wheel, only all the spokes are splayed.

Yet they say that poverty and dirtiness had been features of this place as far back as anyone can remember – it was from here that the horrendous pestilence of plague broke out in 1771. In Zaryadninsky Pereulok was the district’s communal bath, which drew water from places where people had emptied their slop buckets. Picturesque details can be discerned on photographs from the 1920s too: the deep courtyards surrounded on each side by galleries on brick pillars; “Yurka’s an idiot” scrawled on the wall; a cap-wearing rabble straight out of Mayakovsky, posing for the photographer and thronging the galleries; a plate hanging on the wall that bears the surnames of dozens and dozens of families living there. In the center of the yard rises a kind of dungeon with slit windows, a little wooden bridge thrown over to it from each floor. Without a hint it is difficult to guess what the tower is – actually it is simply a communal toilet, the only specialized facility for each floor. But then again… well, lots of people lived like that at the time.

Zaryade was separated from the Kremlin by Vasilyevsky Spusk, a tightly knit and motley district of houses, shops and churches comprised of Moskvoretskaya Ulitsa and Vasilyevskaya Ploshchad next to the Kremlin. Above the dark roofs rose the cupolas of St. Basil’s, forming a classic Middle Ages contrast: the huge cathedral growing out of the chaotic urban landscape clustered round it. In the Middle Ages there was a wide moat here; now there is a desert-like square used as a venue for holiday concerts by chanson singers. Under Ivan the Terrible, on the site of the present-day dance floor was the Saints Konstantin and Yelena strelnitsa – that is, a tower in front of the bridge, a fortified gateway that the tsar used as a torture chamber. In the mornings, the relatives of those who had been arrested gathered here; every day, through the doors emerged litters with bodies to be identified…

Above Mokrinsky Pereulok, meanwhile, a tangled web of ancient side streets – Zaryadninsky, Znamensky, Ershov, Pskovsky – wove its way up the side of the hill. Looking over the old plans and collating them against the few photographs available, we can only guess: here a crooked gateway, behind it another, between them a narrow yard that manages to turn a right-angle three times; in such places one instantly loses one’s bearings. And here, on Pskovsky Pereulok, the famous Boat House with its slanting, ramped galleries and little cast-iron bridges thrown across the yard. And here we have three archways, beyond them is a fence, and if we imagine that there’s a panel or at least a board missing, we can go through further, to Varvarka itself. Muscovite old timers can still remember the mysterious staircases leading down the hill from the street above, down into the dark and dank labyrinths of Zaryade’s courtyards, hung about with never-ending garlands of washing lines…

The memories of Zaryade’s old-timers is today our most valuable source of information, since Zaryade, strange though it may seem, is in many ways a blank spot on our historical map of the city. Even those of Varvarka’s proverbial landmarks which survived provoke countless questions for the researcher. Fortunately for us, there are still Muscovites who clearly remember the appearance and character of old Zaryade. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to understand the phenomenon – the amazing miracle of nature, at once terrifying and majestic – that was Old Moscow.

Alina Mikhailovna is a modest old-time resident who asked that her surname not be used. “Why would you want to?” she asked. “I won’t tell you anything interesting anyway.” But for us serious time travelers, there can be no such thing as an inconsequential or uninteresting detail. For example:

We didn’t live in Zaryade, but on the other side of the Kitai-Gorod wall, in the yard of what is now the Culture Ministry. There were barracks there, and in the 1950s people still kept pigs in sheds outside – it was really quite something. My first school was in Zaryade, on Krivoy Pereulok. The lane was built up with fairly substantial houses and the schoolhouse was also a four-storey building, with ceilings almost four meters high and an elevator. The first two storeys were residential; there was the boys’ school on the third floor and one for girls on the fourth floor. When you got out of the lift, to the left of the stairwell were the corridors of the school and to the right was a door. And when the bell rang, our teacher would come straight out of her apartment with our schoolbooks and go to the lesson.

In the lanes further on and lower down, there were decrepit and dirty shacks, and our parents told us not to go there. But on the other side of Varvarka, at the very end, there were endless societies and clubs – we used to go to the cinema there.

And along the Kitai-Gorod wall there was a huge alley – it went down along the thoroughfare and turned along the embankment. When they started to take the wall down, it was brought down right onto the thoroughfare, where children used to be out playing. That I remember very well, because it was the first time I’d been to funerals…

The forgotten tragedies of a city that no longer exists. There are only a few witnesses remaining who remember its existence and how it disappeared. Particularly valuable are the memories of those who accompanied Zaryade on its last journey – the architects who measured its ancient buildings before they were torn down. Inessa Ivanovna Kazakevich, the capital’s oldest and most authoritative restorer, can lead an authentic virtual tour around the non-existent quarter. She researched Zaryade in the 1950s, and since then has been involved in the restoration of the landmarks left intact on Varvarka.

The first time I came here was when I was six years old and my parents took me to the Romanov town-house museum. It made a very strong impression on me, you know, like Eisenstein in Ivan the Terrible – stone staircases and shadows on the vaults. Then, many years later, when we were restoring these houses, I suggested that we purposely ‘muffle’ the color and preserve this enigmatic half-darkness in the interiors. You see how everything in life is connected like in a good novel – it goes on and on and again comes back to the start.

Not long before the war, my father took me with him to Zaryade again to show me this incredible district – dying, falling silent, but utterly unique for Moscow. We walked along the lanes and I remembered about the Zaryade galereyki, or buildings with outside staircases. All of that was still there, but it was already so dark, and no one was around. Then he decided to show me the Immaculate Conception church, because at that time they made blankets there from little scraps, from cut-up rags [Zaryade was a center of local industry, with local co-operatives and small workshops]. My father was amazed that the church and all the sheds surrounding it were hung all about with these rags.

And then I came back here after [graduating from] the Architectural Institute, in 1950. As a young architect, I was included in a group that was fixing the Kitai-Gorod wall before it was taken down. We dug an exploring trench, uncovered the bricked-up gates and found some very complex ways out onto the wall. Extremely precise measurements were made. We knew that at some point the wall would be rebuilt, even if only in part, so everything was done so precisely.

Notice that the wall that stood along the embankment and the thoroughfare until the 1950s was a later one; it was rebuilt in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1714, when the Swedes were advancing on Moscow (see Russian Calendar, page 26), fearsome bastions were built around the Kremlin and Kitai-Gorod. This was because of the flourishing of artillery, so stone walls had to be completely hidden from the canons. Then the bastions were taken down, but the level of the earth kept on coming up and the wall had to be added to. We found the authentic foundations of the 1530s, with their beautiful deep-set stoves, in our exploratory trenches. Today they’re still preserved below the level of the earth, just like the lower levels of the towers that were previously at semi-basement level. So the wall has not disappeared; it’s still there – it’s just waiting…

And I’ve remembered another detail. In the tower that stood along the Kitai-Gorod Proyezd, a fox was living in the basement. The local residents would leave a saucer of milk out for it in the mornings. How it got there nobody really knows.

And the final brush stroke for today in our portrait of Zaryade may be the most important. The district is today often remembered as a dirty, gloomy slum, and getting rid of it is seen as an inevitable public-health measure. Vladimir Bronislavovich Muravyov, the president of the Old Moscow society, has a local resident’s memories of Zaryade – he was born and grew up not far away, on Solyanka. As he tells it, the picture of everyday life in Zaryade is much more pleasant.

My biggest impression of Zaryade was that it was very cozy. A quiet provincial town in the very center of the capital, untouched by the rebuilding of socialist planning. The tallest buildings were four or five storeys high and very solid – merchants’ houses. The streets weren’t straight, but ran slantwise. Trees were allowed to grow, although they weren’t planted specially; there was grass between the cobblestones. It was particularly nice there in the spring, when little streams ran along the stones, washing everything clean, and the first green shoots appeared.

The first time I was there was before the war. But even afterward, when the gradual resettlement of its residents started, Zaryade never gave the impression of having been ruined or neglected. The houses were of good quality, and demolishing them was no easy task. What Leonov and others have written about Zaryade looks more like the impressions of a party-political columnist and the revolutionary literature of denunciation. People in Zaryade lived normal lives, like people everywhere. And it was quite a clean place – actually, it was just clean, because everything was washed away in the spring. There were no fences, you could walk anywhere; we used to go sunbathing on the Kitai-Gorod wall, which was already half ruined, because the sun there was better. These places produced the impression not of urban streets, but of a lived-in, communal yard, where people knew each other. I never heard about one street fighting with another, as seemed to be the accepted practice back then. Not like round our way on Solyanka, where everything was strictly divided up. Later I defined on a map of the Yauzskiye Gates the borders of our sphere of influence, and they were approximately the same as they had been in the 17th century – settlements, hundreds and half-hundreds. But I never heard about fights in Zaryade; it was a sleepy province. They even filmed one of the episodes of Alexei Tolstoi’s The Road to Calvary here – there was a shot of the roofs from above, it looked like a pretty little provincial town. And that was actually already the 1950s…

That is probably a good place to stop; why disturb our peace of mind for no good reason?

For today’s researcher, Zaryade would be an unopened wellspring of hidden knowledge; for artists and film directors a highly colorful old Moscow shooting location; and for investors still that same old hateful Old Testament junkyard. In Kitai-Gorod there can still be found a series of yards of Zaryadan picturesequeness, but their future is not certain in the face of orange bulldozers, underground parking lots, the restoration of buildings’ facades, PVC windows and cheap gloss.

All we can do now is remember. RL

Originally, the House of Heavy Industry was slated to loom over Red Square, sweeping away GUM and the middle trading rows in its wake. But the suicide of industrial boss Sergo Ordzhonokidze scotched that plan, and the House of Heavy Industry – riginally planned to be 46-stories high – as instead to be sited in Zaryade. It did not come to be, but it was the first step in Zaryade’s destruction by Soviet planners. (Moscow, Timothy Colton, Belknap).

When, in 1954, Khrushchev halted further work on the massive House of Heavy Industry being built in the leveled Zaryade, its steel skeleton was moved and used in Lenin Stadium (Moscow, Timothy Colton, Belknap).