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105 C H A P T E R F O U R z Remembering the Avant-garde In the early 1960s, bulldozers and wrecking cranes cleared a vast, kilometer-long corridor in the densely built alleys between Arbat Square in the east and the Moscow River in the west. By 1968, nine shiny glass and concrete skyscrapers, each more than twenty stories tall, lined the void that had been carved out of the Arbat neighborhood. The four towers on the south side were designed to look like open books that had been propped upright; they sat atop a two-story gallery of stores and offices that ran nearly the entire length of the corridor. The more conventional towers on the north side resembled five pairs of vertical rectangles that were offset but conjoined along part of one side. They shared space with a new movie theater, a post office, Moscow’s largest bookstore, and even a few pre-revolutionary buildings that had been spared demolition. Between the towers, a new radial street linked the center of Moscow to Kutuzovskii Avenue, famous for its concentration of ornate Stalin-era buildings, and to the elite dacha communities west of the city. By the standards of Moscow’s medieval layout, the street was immense. It accommodated six lanes of traffic, two of which were reserved for the black Volgas and ZIL limousines that ferried important persons to and from the Kremlin and other points in central Moscow. In commemoration of Mikhail Kalinin, the old Bolshevik and Soviet head of state who died in 1946, the new street was named Kalininskii Avenue. But Muscovites were more apt to call it Novyi (New) Arbat, the name that urban planners attached to it in the 1930s when they first began to discuss proposals for its construction. Remembering the Avant-garde 106 Novyi Arbat reinforced the sense of irreversible change in the Arbat. During the Stalin period, the Arbat had been spared the sweeping reconstruction projects that transformed the layout of Gorky (Tverskaia) Street, Marx Avenue (Hunter’s Row), and other places. Consequently, a map of the Arbat in 1917 largely resembled a map of the Arbat in 1960. Spatial continuity made it easy for residents to believe that they were walking in the footsteps of earlier generations of writers and artists; in a literal sense, they were. This is what the essayist Oleg Volkov had in mind when he lamented the Arbat’s imperiled architecture and streetscape in 1968: “The quiet residence on the Arbat lane whispers, ‘[the writer Nikolai] Gogol’s penetrating gaze once lay upon me.’”1 Novyi Arbat, however, necessitated the destruction of huge swaths of the neighborhood. It isolated the areas near Malaia and Bol’shaia Molchanovka Streets and Vorovskii (Povarskaia) Street, essential parts of priarbat’e, from the heart of the neighborhood. And on a scale that was unprecedented in post-Stalinist Moscow, it introduced into the Arbat a type of architecture that many persons thought inappropriate, foreign, and destructive to what made the neighborhood unique. From the safe vantage point of the 1990s, Okudzhava penned a sarcastic ditty for the architects who were the Arbat’s “destroyers”: “Let the Arbat look foreign,” he sang, “so we can win an award.”2 Yet there was more to the Novyi Arbat project than the construction of skyscrapers of questionable taste in the middle of a nineteenthcentury neighborhood. This and the following chapter show how Novyi Arbat and the buildings that were demolished to accommodate it became contested “sites of memory,” where different people discerned different and often contradictory understandings of the past. This chapter begins with the historical meanings ascribed to the towers themselves, whose designs generated a great deal of enthusiasm at the Moscow Section of the Union of Architects (MOSA). Like the actors at the Vakhtangov Theater who tried to recover the cultural dynamism of the 1920s by restaging Princess Turandot, architects and architectural historians at MOSA saw in the modern shapes of Novyi Arbat a chance to rehabilitate the constructivist architecture of the early-Soviet period. The obstacles they faced were formidable. During the 1920s, constructivist theorists like Moisei Ginzburg argued that the clean lines and conspicuous lack of ornamentation in their buildings revealed the social meaning and transformative power of socialist architecture. Their imaginative designs 1. Oleg Volkov, Vse v otvete: publitsistika (Moscow, 1986), 420. 2. Bulat Okudzhava, “Pesenka razrushitelei Arbata,” in Arbatskii arkhiv, vyp. 1, ed. S. O. Shmidt (Moscow, 1997), 134. [3.140.242.165] Project...

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