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EIGHT The Ruin as Alternative Reality Paper Architects and the Vitality of Decay t Stalinist wedding-cake architecture, such as the main building of Moscow State University on Sparrow Hills or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Smolenskaia Square, features numerous neoclassical ornamentations on its facades and roofs, which signaled the Stalinist state’s claims to subsume history and to exist in a glorious timeless present that had absorbed all the greatness of the past. While not explicitly ruinous, these decorative elements implied a selective de- and re-contextualization of history, as if the ruined and the new had merged into one. In contrast with Albert Speer’s belief in the ruin-value of fascist architecture—the construction of monumental buildings with an eye to their future attractiveness as picturesque, Roman-looking vestiges of the Nazi state—Stalinist architecture could envision only a future in no way distinct from the present.1 In his Culture 2 Vladimir Paperny discusses the Stalinist “idea of an eternal structure”: “People,” he quotes N.S. Atarov as saying, “will be born—generation after generation—live a happy life, age gradually, but the Palace of the Soviets, familiar to them from their dear childhood books, will stand there looking exactly the same as you and I will see it in the next few years. Centuries will not leave their mark on it; we will build it so that it will stand without aging, forever.”2 As Paperny puts it, “the future, having become eternity, was so homogeneous and unchanging that it was pointless even to look there—there was nothing to be seen.”3 The Moscow Kremlin, insulated from human traffic by heavy walls and neatly preserved so that it would not reveal any traces of decay, likewise “paralyzed time” in its “autonomous historical zone.”4 In this mythological mindset, the confidence in the immutability of the future resulted from a logic of domination and assimilation: the past had been The Ruin as Alternative Reality 195 fully ingested and absorbed, its energy converted into the establishment of a timeless present.5 Ruins, in this mindset, could not exist, neither in the present, nor in the future, for they implied the aestheticization of historical difference, which the Stalinist state, as the inheritor and culmination of world civilization, had thought to abolish.6 Historical time returned with a vengeance in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. Architectural historian Grigorii Revzin argued that post-Stalinist architecture always aspired to a short life cycle, as if, one might surmise, to mark the abrupt re-eruption of history into the Soviet empire. The current dismantling of modernist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, perceived then as an emblem of Russia’s opening toward the West, was “laid in its very foundation. This is natural, because the technical characteristics of these buildings either explicitly factored in, or tacitly assumed, that they would be taken apart in twenty-five years.”7 It is only seemingly paradoxical that the new architecture erected in its place harks back to the same modernist stylistics. “I am convinced,” Revzin quotes prominent architect Mikhail Khazanov, “that everything we build is trash. Trash that will age morally in thirty years and physically in fifty. These are not the walls of classicism, not that, which must stand for ever, but the packaging of today’s life, which will be discarded when that life ends. And this is precisely what gives us the right to experiment and to make mistakes.”8 The construction of modernist ensembles, notably the destruction in the early 1960s of a significant segment of the Arbat neighborhood in Moscow to make room for Kalininskii Prospect, a sprawling avenue lined with concrete and glass towers, marked the abandonment of the Stalinist eclectic appropriation of the past and the return of the historical dialectic. Kalininskii Prospect necessitated the leveling of one of Moscow’s treasured urban squares, the Sobash’ia Ploshchadka (Dog’s Square)—a site famous in Russian literature, for example in the works of Andrei Belyi—which left wounds that continue to fester to this day. In his photographs of the destruction, exhibited in September 2002 to much acclaim, Aleksandr Potresov captured the ambivalence of the age: historical consciousness was torn between love for the familiar and cherished buildings, decrepit as they may well have been, and hope for the future, albeit tinged with the fear that it might be too alien and inhospitable for one to feel at home in it.9 The modernist...

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