It is inconvenient to live next to a fortress, especially in the twenty-first century. Moscow’s radial structure suited the Tsar’s forays in the sixteenth century, but not today’s million cars; hence the city’s traffic problem. Most journeys in the city one way or another go through the centre, just as 70 per cent of all cargo in Russia goes through Moscow, because all the customs terminals are here. Sooner or later the fortress will be choked by this flow of resources. Living next to the centre of power pushes up the price of real estate and creates familiar problems, from the shutting off of main roads so that the country’s leaders can pass by, to the closure of whole areas of the city for reasons of security. For example, on behalf of the Presidential Administration, the Federal Protection Service (FSO) demanded that a whole historic part of Kitai-Gorod alongside the Kremlin between Varvarka and Ilyinka Streets be shut off, enclosed by ‘a Great Chinese Fence’, thus creating in the centre of Moscow something like Beijing’s Forbidden City.
When the powers-that-be decide to come closer to the people, it causes havoc, such as when the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, chose to step outside the walls of the Kremlin. When he visited the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow University, they cancelled all classes and banned students from the building. When he went to the reopening of the Bolshoi Theatre, the police stopped rehearsals that were taking place in theatres nearby, and even destroyed scenery in the neighbouring Maly Theatre. It seemed that he was going just a couple of hundred metres outside the Kremlin, but the living body of the city was torn apart by the intrusion of the state.
There is only one solution: the city and the state have to get a divorce. The state should no longer be the main idea and the mystical purpose of life in Moscow. The trading quarter has grown so much that the fortress has become a burden on it. In modern theories of governance, the state has lost its sacred origins, and power has become a mere function, just another production line, like the factories and the municipal economy. Manufacturing has today been moved outside the city boundaries, and the old factory workshops are going through a process of gentrification, being converted into museums, artists’ studios and university campuses. The old industrial areas are being given back to society.
In just the same way, the implementation of the functions of state power with all its costs – the emergency flashing lights on the cars, the government cortèges, the restricted areas – should be taken outside the city boundaries. The Kremlin must be given back to the people, to the nation, to society. Ten years ago, in an interview with the Vedomosti newspaper, the writer Vasily Aksyonov proposed a plan to clean up the Kremlin: ‘There’s an unhealthy aura there’, he said. ‘The President and his administration shouldn’t be in there. Instead, there should be a museum of the centuries, a museum of Russian history. The Kremlin should be a cultural and historical memorial area.’[6]
The Kremlin could be turned into a beautiful historic park, where all the gates are open twenty-four hours a day, like in the Old City in Jerusalem. People should be able to have romantic encounters there at nighttime; to touch the ancient walls and sit on the Red Steps, the parade entrance to the Kremlin Palace; to stroll with a friend on the raised bank above the Moskva River.
Where can state power be relocated? There are plenty of ideas, including the latest plan for expanding Moscow, according to which the state could have its own little city somewhere in the far reaches of the Moscow Region. The state could be configured in a Eurasian manner, setting up its new capital somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe, from where it would be easy for the government cortèges to switch on their flashing lights and call on brotherly Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. But the idea I like the best is that dreamt up by the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute, which I saw recently in a competition of student work in the Architecture Museum. It was called, ‘The Mobile Government’, and it was based on a sound Russian principle: wherever the leadership goes, life improves dramatically. The students suggested constructing a mobile model of the government, based on a special train. Travelling all over the country, the train would travel under its own cloud of abundance, and everywhere it went life would automatically improve.
And then there would be absolutely no need for it to return to Moscow.
THE ELITE AVENUE… TO DEATH
Yet another routine bloody harvest occurred on Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt: on the night of 2–3 October 2015, at the widest part of the road, where it crosses the third ring road, two accidents happened almost simultaneously. First, a BMW-X5 was flying down the middle of the road when the driver lost control, crossed the central lane and drove into a Range Rover and a Porsche Cayenne coming in the other direction. Then a four-by-four travelling at high speed rammed into the traffic jam that had formed after the first accident. As a result, two drivers died, three people were taken to hospital with serious injuries and three more suffered minor injuries. Witnesses reported that a lot of drivers got out of their cars and ran to look at the burning vehicles, thus preventing the ambulances from reaching the scene of the crash.
Two years earlier, in December 2013, the influential Deputy Prime Minister of Dagestan (a Russian region in the Caucasus), Gaji Makhachov, died at exactly the same spot on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Rushing along in the central lane in his Mercedes GL four-by-four with his wife and three children he caught the edge of a plastic block around some roadworks, spun into the oncoming traffic and hit a minibus. In that accident, three people died and six others were injured. And on the night of 8 November 2014, just half a kilometre from that spot, a BMW-M5, travelling at more than two hundred kilometres per hour, also crossed the central lane into the oncoming traffic and hit a taxi, killing the driver and his female passenger. On this occasion, five people died and a further six were injured.
One can go on forever about fatal accidents on Kutuzovsky. According to both official and unofficial statistics, it is the most accident-prone stretch of road in the capital. In 2011 alone, there were eighty-six accidents there, resulting in fourteen deaths and ninety-six injuries. Various urban legends try to explain this: from its being a geopathogenic zone, to the existence of a magnetic anomaly; all the way through to the ‘graveyard theory’, which says that when they were laying down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in the 1950s, a number of cemeteries that lay outside the city’s boundary were destroyed, and now the restless dead are taking their revenge on the living.
I grew up close to these spots, and I remember how, when my friends and I were playing in the dip that now houses the third ring road, we used to find broken slabs with indecipherable writing on them. It was only later, when I was studying old maps of Moscow, that I understood that these were tombstones from the ruined Jewish cemetery which was once situated there. But going to school in the mornings I noticed something else: how black government Chaika and Volga cars with little curtains over the rear windows would emerge from the courtyards of smart apartment blocks built in the style of Stalinist architecture. These carried the Communist Party nomenklatura who lived on Kutuzovsky and were on their way to work. In block number twenty-six on Kutuzovsky Prospekt lived two General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev and his successor, Yury Andropov. At the time we guessed this because of the rumours that were circulating and also because of the guys in identical coats who would be stamping their feet while waiting around in the courtyards; nowadays, there are memorial plaques bearing their names.
6
https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2008/03/14/stalinskij-proekt-u-stola-vlasti. ‘The Stalinist Project: At the Table of Power’ (in Russian), 14 March 2008.