The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat

5. Preserving the Past, Empowering the Public

141 C H A P T E R F I V E z preserving the past, Empowering the public One of the most beloved casualties of the Novyi Arbat demolition was Sobachʹe Square, a small triangle created by the intersection of three lanes a few blocks north of Arbat Street. Before its destruction, Sobachʹe Square was the site of a nineteenth-century fountain commemorating the “Lord’s Dogs,” a reference to the tsar’s kennel that once stood on the spot. The fountain sat in a small park, fenced with wrought-iron, which had been built for the Sixth International Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. The one and two-story buildings that surrounded the square were some of the best examples in Moscow of the neoclassical, empire style that had been popular in the decades following the fire of 1812. Like so many places in the Arbat, Sobachʹe Square had longstanding ties with the intelligentsia. After returning from exile at his mother’s estate in northern Russia in 1826, Alexander Pushkin lived on the square at the house of his friend, the humorist and book collector Sergei Sobolevskii. In the 1830s and ’40s, many of Russia’s most influential minds—socialists , Westernizers, and Slavophiles—gathered at the house of Aleksei Khomiakov, one of the founders of Slavophilism. Khomiakov, the Westernizer Petr Chaadaev, and the writer Ivan Turgenev sometimes visited another neighbor, Mikhail Orlov, a general who had been implicated in the Decembrist revolt in 1825. After Orlov’s brother, a friend of Tsar Nicholas, appealed for mercy, Orlov was sentenced to a life of idleness and police surveillance on Sobachʹe Square. Leo Tolstoy’s friend V. P. Perfilʹev, supposedly the model for Stiva Oblonskii in Anna Karenina, Preserving the Past, Empowering the Public 142 also lived nearby. In their novels Tarantass and Smoke, Vladimir Sollogub and Ivan Turgenev wrote about Sobachʹe Square’s aristocratic refinement . Conversely, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky ridiculed a “little scum” who lived on the square named “Petr Burzhuichikov,” or Peter Petite-Bourgeoisie.1 Whatever values were attached to it, Sobachʹe Square objectified the centrality of the Arbat in the history of the Russian intelligentsia. According to a 1917 guidebook, it was a place where “the old look of bygone Moscow was preserved, and where its spirit wafted.”2 The buildings that surrounded Sobachʹe Square comprised only a small percentage of the 150 structures that were razed to accommodate Novyi Arbat, but critics thought that their fate epitomized what was odious about the project.3 Novyi Arbat threatened the intimate, historic, and unplanned spaces that were increasingly rare in central Moscow. It replaced the quirky, narrow, and heterogeneous lanes that reflected traffic patterns at the time of Ivan the Terrible with a massive empty space lined by skyscrapers, what Jane Jacobs, the great critic of American urban renewal, would have called a “Great Blight of Dullness.”4 And Novyi Arbat necessitated the resettlement of thousands of lifelong residents to new developments on the periphery of Moscow. When Novyi Arbat was built atop Sobachʹe Square, residents of the neighborhood lost something far more precious than old buildings and a fountain. Novyi Arbat “demolished not only the buildings and green spaces,” Sigurd Shmidt wrote, “but also the peculiarity of the ‘Arbat’ way of life, which led to the destruction of the way of thinking characteristic of ‘arbattsy,’ and their manner of interaction.”5 Despite rumors that Novyi Arbat was Khrushchev’s pet project, Shmidt held Mikhail Posokhin and his architects wholly responsible for the 1. S. O. Shmidt, “Arbat v istorii i kulʹture Rossii,” in Arbatskii arkhiv, vyp. 1, ed. S. O. Shmidt (Moscow, 1997), 81–84; Oleg Volkov, Kazhdyi kamenʹ v nei zhivoi: iz istorii Moskovskikh ulits (Moscow, 1985), 163–73; S. K. Romaniuk, Moskva. Utraty (Moscow, 1992), 182–86; and Nikolai Malinin, “Sobachʹe ploshchadka (mysli i tsitaty),” Arkhitektura i stroitelʹstvo Moskvy 11 (November 1989): 25–26. 2. N. A. Geinike, N. S. Elagin, E. A. Efimov, and I. I. Shitts, Po Moskve: progulki po Moskve i eia khudozhestvennym i prosvetitelʹnym uchrezhdeniiam (Moscow, 1917; reprint, Moscow, 1991), 342n1. 3. On the number of buildings demolished, see TsMAM, f. 150, o. 1, d. 2773, ll. 423–33; and f. 773, o. 1, d. 23, ll. 75–87. 4. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961), 144. 5. Shmidt, “Arbat v istorii i kulture Rossii,” 116. For a photographic...