{"id":25,"date":"2016-09-08T04:14:08","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T04:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/?p=25"},"modified":"2016-09-08T04:14:08","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T04:14:08","slug":"hipster-stalinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/?p=25","title":{"rendered":"Hipster Stalinism"},"content":{"rendered":"
One of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin\u2019s pet projects is a multi-billion-dollar revamp of the \u201cSoviet Versailles\u201d: an enormous ensemble of extravagant, mainly Stalin-era pavilions, fountains and statuary in Moscow\u2019s north-east. Sobyanin accompanied President Vladimir Putin last year on a visit to the site, known as VDNKh, to open a new oceanarium for 8,000 sea creatures, including killer whales.<\/p>\n

The regeneration of the sprawling park-cum-exhibition space is one of several large regeneration projects under way in the city of 12 million as planners and officials put behind them the urban experiments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The new approach is well funded, populist and in tune with a resurgent Russian nationalism, with some dubbing it \u201chipster Stalinism\u201d. Its scale has led some to draw parallels with the transformation of Moscow into the imperial capital of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

Most of the buildings at VDNKh, built as a paean to communism and visited by millions every year, are high Stalinist, and Sobyanin\u2019s team is working to adapt their totalitarianism to modern Russia \u2013 creating some bizarre juxtapositions.<\/p>\n

Near the new oceanarium is a huge, glass-domed building that once contained Soviet space rockets \u2013 but recently housed an exhibition of objects used in the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. In winter, paths are flooded to create Europe\u2019s biggest ice rink. There is a new museum of bombastic nationalist history, and an aging Soviet Yakovlev Yak-42 plane was rigged up by a Moscow electronic musician last year to \u201cplay\u201d her songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cArchitecture shouldn\u2019t be the hostage of the ideology that created it,\u201d says\u00a0Sergei Kuznetsov, Moscow\u2019s chief architect. \u201cDuring the Soviet Union\u2019s twilight years, its collapse, and the emergence of the new Russia as an extreme rejection of everything linked to the Soviet Union was very popular\u2026 the Vandals took Rome and defiled even the holy places. But now people are sobering up: it\u2019s not a time not to throw stones but to collect them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another major part of Sobyanin\u2019s regeneration of Moscow is a project called \u201cMy Street:\u201d A $1.9bn (\u00a31.5bn) programme to make the city more pedestrian-friendly. The hundreds of streets to be revamped include Moscow\u2019s Garden Ring, a traffic-clogged eight-lane highway circling the city centre, and Tverskaya, Moscow\u2019s main thoroughfare, which will both see their sidewalks widened and thousands of new trees. The changes will return Tverskaya to how it looked under the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to make a Muscovite happy, plant a tree,\u201d says\u00a0Mikhail Alekseevsky, an anthropologist working for Strelka KB, the design bureau hired by the city to oversee \u201cMy Street\u201d. Alekseevsky says\u00a0the project was the most ambitious of its kind since Stalin ordered the bulldozing of large swathes of old Moscow and the construction of a new, Communist capital in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

Moscow is also expanding its transport network, with 16 new metro stations expected to open this year and the relaunch of a 34-mile circular passenger railway. Dozens of municipal parks across the city have been revamped, and a huge abandoned site by Red Square in the heart of Moscow is due to be greened over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mayor is concerned about his voters and wants to be loved by them,\u201d says\u00a0Grigory Revzin, a prominent architecture critic and partner at Strelka KB. \u201cWe are building the infrastructure of public spaces,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is the infrastructure of a new economy.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin\u2019s pet projects is a multi-billion-dollar revamp of the \u201cSoviet Versailles\u201d: an enormous ensemble of extravagant, mainly Stalin-era pavilions, fountains and statuary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[24,25],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-style","tag-life-trending","tag-news","clearfix","overlay-wrapper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.exptheme.com\/nito\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}