Moscow in the Middle

The view from Moscow’s newest passenger railroad is not picturesque.

The Moscow Central Ring Railroad snakes 34 miles past power stations, road junctions and abandoned industrial zones in a circle through Moscow’s middle – a former industrial belt between its historic center and the endless Soviet-era apartment blocks on the outskirts, where most people live.

Dilapidated buildings, construction sites and smokestacks are visible through the windows of the brand new trains, the same model as used to ferry guests around the Black Sea resort of Sochi for Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics.

But, actually, the railroad is not completely new. It is an upgrade of tracks first laid at the beginning of the twentieth century under Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II. Never really popular, as it was located in what was back then the city’s fringe, the service was stopped; in the post-war Soviet Union it was switched to carrying freight. When the refurbished line was unveiled in a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin on September 10 this year, it was the first time it had carried passengers for 80 years.

Trains whizz past the crumbing, but still elegant, tsarist-era stations without stopping. The $1.38 billion revamp included the electrification of the line and the construction of 31 new stations, 17 of which have connections to the metro network. Planners hope it will carry 75 million people in 2016. 

While many of those who first rode the trains this fall were joy riders, interested only in trying out the new line while it was free during the first month, several weeks later it is now being used by commuters and is fairly crowded during rush hour. At the end of September, construction workers were laboring intensively to finish many of the stations, which still lack escalators, windows and, in some cases, coats of paint.

The re-birth of the Moscow Central Ring is the most visible sign of the transformation of the capital’s infrastructure under Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who was appointed by the Kremlin in 2010, and reelected to the post in 2013. Other parts of the city have also been made over, with international architects attracted to help rejuvenate public spaces and stimulate the re-development of decaying industrial complexes.

The challenges facing Sobyanin’s planners are unique. With 12 million residents, Moscow is Europe’s largest city and notorious for its overcrowded public transport, heavily congested roads, and expensive housing. Problems accumulated rapidly under the previous mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who did relatively little to modernize the city’s infrastructure or accommodate the rising numbers of motorists – despite more than a decade of rapid economic growth. 

The Moscow Central Ring is expected to play a crucial role in developing the little-used rust-belt that once housed buzzing factories. One of the stations on the new line serves the site of the former ZIL Car Factory, currently undergoing reconstruction. (See the article in this issue on GON, page 28.) The once-flagship Soviet manufacturing complex is to be transformed into upmarket apartments, shops and schools.

“Industrial zones will start to develop in a very different way… In 10 or 20 years this project [Moscow Central Ring] will completely change the city center,” said Yaroslav Kovalchuk, a prominent Russian architect.

The city’s transformation began with the make-over of Moscow parks, starting with the iconic Gorky Park and its Moscow River waterfront, which was transformed in 2011 from a depressing backwater with weed-strewn paths, stray dogs, and aging fairground rides, into a well-tended and bustling space with trendy eateries, where people on Segways weave between mothers out for a stroll with their children. Many other parks across the capital have since received similar makeovers. 

Russia’s VDNKh park was initially built for a Soviet agricultural fair in the 1930s, but has come to be known as the “Soviet Versailles.” It is a huge ensemble of mainly Stalin-era pavilions, fountains and statuary in Moscow’s northeast that has also seen a multi-billion dollar revamp. (See Russian Life, March/April 2005.) Crumbling buildings have been renovated and a new aquarium, opened by Putin, contains 8,000 sea creatures, including killer whales. In the winter, it hosts Europe’s largest ice rink. 

Another symbolic public space is due to be unveiled next year when construction is completed on the Zaryade Park next to Red Square. The area has lain abandoned for a decade after the enormous Brezhnev-era Hotel Rossiya was demolished in 2006. New plans include a giant glass dome shielding thousands of trees and shrubs from across Russia’s different climate zones, and an ice cave.

Notable for sports fans, the iconic Moscow stadium and sporting complex around Luzhniki, built for the 1980 Olympics and tucked in a bend in the Moscow River, is being rebuilt ahead of Russia’s 2018 hosting of the soccer World Cup. 

A major part of Sobyanin’s regeneration of Moscow is a project called “My Street,” a $1.9 billion program to make the city more pedestrian friendly. Hundreds of streets are being re-vamped with wider sidewalks and more trees, including Moscow’s Garden Ring, a traffic-clogged eight-lane highway circling the city center, and Tverskaya, Moscow’s main thoroughfare. 

The scale of the work has led some to draw parallels with previous grandiose phases of city construction, including the vast works undertaken by Stalin in the 1930s. After the Bolsheviks moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, Stalin aimed to re-mold the city into an imperial capital befitting the Soviet Union and its Communist ideology. Huge swathes of the old city center were demolished to make way for imposing high-rise buildings and enormous, new streets, while underground, Soviet ideology was showcased in ornate stations of the city’s famous metro system.

Needless to say, Sobyanin’s changes have not been free of criticism.

Opponents allege the authorities make decisions quickly and without proper consultation. Preservationists have decried hurried renovations and demolitions, including the tearing down of the Constructivist Taganskaya telephone station earlier this year. Locals have also rallied against the shrinking of parks and clearing of trees around massive projects like the Luzhniki Stadium revamp.

What is more, the extensive – and expensive – building work is taking place during Russia’s longest recession since the 1990s, as the government faces a growing budget deficit and ordinary people have watched their real incomes fall. Many regions are struggling to make ends meet while Moscow enjoys a glitzy makeover. 

Others are disturbed by the contradictions: at the same time as they are creating inviting public spaces, the government has cracked down on personal freedoms and public protest. Official permission for political demonstrations is now often only given for specially designated areas outside the center – politics or activism appears to have been banned from the city’s expansive new pavements, squares and boulevards. 

Experts also criticize the city planners’ lack of a broad-ranging vision. It is alleged they do not coordinate major projects and are often driven by politically imposed time-frames. “In the 1930s and the 1960s, there were General Plans and an understanding of where the city was heading, but now there is no strategy,” said architect Kovalchuk. 

On top of all that, the rapid pace of the transformation – faster than what would be possible in most Western capitals – means Muscovites spend much of the summer coughing in building dust and skirting trenches and piles of debris on the city’s streets. 

“The new mayor [Sobyanin] is a thief, but not as big a thief as the old one,” said Roman Kollegov, a broker taking a walk in central Moscow who said he generally approved of the building work. “We’re supposed to be a European country, but [before] Moscow looked as though the Mongol horde had just swept through,” he said.

While the near-continuous construction causes resentment among some residents, particularly on social media, others see it as a passing problem. “It’s just temporary,” said Kollegov. 

Sobyanin has invested significantly in giving Moscow this dramatic face-lift, and it may well be aimed at pleasing his political support base in the capital. In the 2013 mayoral election, Sobyanin faced a significant challenge from opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Sobyanin won – but it was a rare Russian example of a vigorously contested election. 
 

When it comes down to it, the overhaul of the transportation network has arguably been the most successful of the recent changes in the city.

“Moscow was faced with a real transport collapse… if Sobyanin had not taken these steps, by all forecasts Moscow would not have had hour-long traffic jams but day-long traffic jams,” said Mikhail Blinkin, an expert on transportation at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

Much of the work on improving the city’s transport system was done by Deputy Moscow Mayor Maksim Liksutov, who was recruited from the private sector by Sobyanin in 2011. Before joining City Hall, Liksutov was head of Aeroexpress, which operates the city’s efficient new rail connections to its three major airports. 

Together, Sobyanin and Liksutov introduced parking controls and launched the biggest metro enlargement scheme since the underground transit system was built back in the 1930s. A total of 16 new metro stations are slated to open in 2016. Money has also been invested in the city’s buses and trams, and in a program to integrate suburban train lines into the capital’s wider transport network.

While the transport reforms have been hailed by experts as some of the Moscow authorities’ most far-sighted moves, they, too, have provoked opposition.

Motorists angry at parking restrictions have staged demonstrations, and many commuters were hit by a decision to ban privately-operated minivans. A social media campaign was organized this year by people trying to save the city’s large network of trolleybuses, set to be phased out by City Hall completely before 2020.

Given the legacy of population growth after the Second World War – which makes Moscow historically more similar to some Asian cities rather than Western European ones – the vast majority of Muscovites live in high-rise districts built in the 1960s and 1970s, and located on the city outskirts. As a result, almost all of the city’s roads, metro and rail links were designed to ferry people in and out of the center. This was magnified in the 1960s, when a wave of re-building, including the outer MKAD ring road, made Moscow more car-friendly. 

Experts estimate that one third of Moscow’s jobs are based in the center and that as many as 40 percent of the city’s population travel through the center every day. It is the dream of city planners to weaken Moscow’s extreme centralization and to make the mono-functionality of the spalnye rayony (literally “sleeping districts”) on its outskirts a thing of the past. 

A second ring line for the Moscow metro, which will encircle the city at the end of its eight major radial metro lines – even further out than the Moscow Central Ring – is currently under construction. It is scheduled to be finished in 2020. 

With projects like the new circle line for the metro and the Moscow Central Ring, City Hall is taking its first steps towards realizing a less-centralized Moscow. But it will not happen overnight, and Muscovites face many more summers of building dust and pneumatic drills before it becomes a reality.  RL