Post by Bozur on Oct 3, 2005 17:50:19 GMT -5
Moscow Journal
A New Russia Leaves the Old in the Dust
By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 27, 2005
MOSCOW - Emilie Souptel keeps the door to her restaurant locked and, lifting a small lace curtain to peer out, will not open it to anyone who frightens her.
James Hill for The New York Times
Emilie Souptel at her restaurant, Stanislavskogo 2. The restaurant is in a building now set for demolition.
James Hill for The New York Times
From left, Ms. Souptel and her mother, Rosalie Korodzievskaya, with one of their neighbors, Sergei Dvoryantsev, inside Stanislavskogo 2.
Inside the little restaurant, named Stanislavskogo 2 for an old address, drapes and paintings, fringed lampshades and classical music played on an upright piano invite a diner into a warm corner of old Russia.
On the streets outside, an aggressive new Moscow is closing in, led by well-connected developers who are devouring old buildings like the one that houses Stanislavskogo 2, using force and arson if payoffs and legal sleight of hand fail them.
The restaurant is under threat now, and when they hear loud voices outside the door at night, Ms. Souptel, 38, her mother, Rosalie Korodziyevskaya, and their two dogs all raise their heads nervously.
With stunning speed in the last few years, the developers have torn down scores of buildings in the city center, ripping the soul out of much of this stolid, quirky city.
They have left those who love the old Moscow in stunned despair, raising small voices against the force of money and politics, mostly ignored by a public that has become increasingly cowed and passive at the feet of those with power.
"I'm sad about this, but after five years I'm going to stop being sad because there's going to be nothing left to lose," said Aleksei I. Komech, director of the State Institute of Arts Research, a part of the Ministry of Culture, as wreckers hacked away at a classic building just outside his window.
Last year the city's central district announced plans to knock down or renovate up to 1,200 buildings. Preservationists say "renovation" is often a cover for destruction.
In August, the first deputy mayor of Moscow, Vladimir Resin, said the city planned to build 60 skyscrapers in the next 10 years, some of them as many as 50 stories high.
"This tiger always needs meat," Mr. Komech said. "So we know that from now on we can expect new projects, new ring roads, new tunnels. There's more money than you can imagine in Moscow now."
Ms. Souptel and her mother are holdouts, the last of 12 families in the 250-year-old building where they live and work, a few blocks from the Kremlin. On the crooked, narrow lanes behind them, cranes and wrecking balls are at work and gigantic, lumbering structures are replacing buildings like theirs.
The women are battling in court against a developer who wants to put up a luxury apartment building in a city that now has some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
They stand little chance. Moscow's history is hurtling forward like a racing troika, and Ms. Souptel and her mother belong to the past.
The modern Moscow that is emerging on the ruins of the old is a city of its time, heedless, flashy, kitschy, shallow. It is being produced by the rich - and many would say the shameless and the corrupt - the new Russians who are riding high in the country's conversion from Communist privation to a winner-loser casino of privilege and poverty.
"They have no sense of their own identity," Mr. Komech said of the creators of the new Moscow. "They not only want to get as rich as the people in the West; they want to live in the same kind of buildings and drive the same kinds of cars."
In self-doubting Russia, bigger has always been better, Mr. Komech said. "You know the joke from Soviet times - our dwarf is the tallest in the world."
Across society, in entertainment, literature, dress and humor as well as in architecture, old Russians say, the country is sinking in a morass of bad taste.
"Russia is in the midst of a collapse of culture, and there is nothing we can do about it," said David A. Sarkisyan, director of the State Museum of Architecture. "It is a horrible crime. The old generation of cultivated people is dying off. No one is coming to replace them."
The voice of the future - and apparently the voice of the majority - comes from people like Katrina Semikhatova, 27, a public relations representative for a major Moscow developer.
"I don't think Moscow is a beautiful city," she said as she surveyed a vast construction site where a new commercial and residential center is being built on the banks of the Moscow River.
"I think Moscow must be better. For me, Moscow has very few beautiful landscapes on the average. There is always something ugly. Today we have a chance to build a whole new city."
In the next two months, an arbitrage court is to decide whether Ms. Souptel and her mother can stay in the apartment where they have lived for 35 years and to which they have a post-Soviet deed of ownership.
The developer has his own grievance. He spent good money for what he thought was a condemned building.
"They just want us out of here," Ms. Souptel said. "They said to me, 'What the hell are you doing here? Who are you? You are not in our plans, Mrs. Emilie.' "
She has won two rounds in lower courts. But she said she was afraid that money and connections would tip the balance against her in the final legal round in a flawed and corrupt judicial system.
Even if she wins in court, she said, she fears the developer could turn to more direct methods of eviction.
"Now, he is still hoping that he will deal with us officially," she said. "If we win, he'll get very, very angry."
A New Russia Leaves the Old in the Dust
By SETH MYDANS
Published: September 27, 2005
MOSCOW - Emilie Souptel keeps the door to her restaurant locked and, lifting a small lace curtain to peer out, will not open it to anyone who frightens her.
James Hill for The New York Times
Emilie Souptel at her restaurant, Stanislavskogo 2. The restaurant is in a building now set for demolition.
James Hill for The New York Times
From left, Ms. Souptel and her mother, Rosalie Korodzievskaya, with one of their neighbors, Sergei Dvoryantsev, inside Stanislavskogo 2.
Inside the little restaurant, named Stanislavskogo 2 for an old address, drapes and paintings, fringed lampshades and classical music played on an upright piano invite a diner into a warm corner of old Russia.
On the streets outside, an aggressive new Moscow is closing in, led by well-connected developers who are devouring old buildings like the one that houses Stanislavskogo 2, using force and arson if payoffs and legal sleight of hand fail them.
The restaurant is under threat now, and when they hear loud voices outside the door at night, Ms. Souptel, 38, her mother, Rosalie Korodziyevskaya, and their two dogs all raise their heads nervously.
With stunning speed in the last few years, the developers have torn down scores of buildings in the city center, ripping the soul out of much of this stolid, quirky city.
They have left those who love the old Moscow in stunned despair, raising small voices against the force of money and politics, mostly ignored by a public that has become increasingly cowed and passive at the feet of those with power.
"I'm sad about this, but after five years I'm going to stop being sad because there's going to be nothing left to lose," said Aleksei I. Komech, director of the State Institute of Arts Research, a part of the Ministry of Culture, as wreckers hacked away at a classic building just outside his window.
Last year the city's central district announced plans to knock down or renovate up to 1,200 buildings. Preservationists say "renovation" is often a cover for destruction.
In August, the first deputy mayor of Moscow, Vladimir Resin, said the city planned to build 60 skyscrapers in the next 10 years, some of them as many as 50 stories high.
"This tiger always needs meat," Mr. Komech said. "So we know that from now on we can expect new projects, new ring roads, new tunnels. There's more money than you can imagine in Moscow now."
Ms. Souptel and her mother are holdouts, the last of 12 families in the 250-year-old building where they live and work, a few blocks from the Kremlin. On the crooked, narrow lanes behind them, cranes and wrecking balls are at work and gigantic, lumbering structures are replacing buildings like theirs.
The women are battling in court against a developer who wants to put up a luxury apartment building in a city that now has some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
They stand little chance. Moscow's history is hurtling forward like a racing troika, and Ms. Souptel and her mother belong to the past.
The modern Moscow that is emerging on the ruins of the old is a city of its time, heedless, flashy, kitschy, shallow. It is being produced by the rich - and many would say the shameless and the corrupt - the new Russians who are riding high in the country's conversion from Communist privation to a winner-loser casino of privilege and poverty.
"They have no sense of their own identity," Mr. Komech said of the creators of the new Moscow. "They not only want to get as rich as the people in the West; they want to live in the same kind of buildings and drive the same kinds of cars."
In self-doubting Russia, bigger has always been better, Mr. Komech said. "You know the joke from Soviet times - our dwarf is the tallest in the world."
Across society, in entertainment, literature, dress and humor as well as in architecture, old Russians say, the country is sinking in a morass of bad taste.
"Russia is in the midst of a collapse of culture, and there is nothing we can do about it," said David A. Sarkisyan, director of the State Museum of Architecture. "It is a horrible crime. The old generation of cultivated people is dying off. No one is coming to replace them."
The voice of the future - and apparently the voice of the majority - comes from people like Katrina Semikhatova, 27, a public relations representative for a major Moscow developer.
"I don't think Moscow is a beautiful city," she said as she surveyed a vast construction site where a new commercial and residential center is being built on the banks of the Moscow River.
"I think Moscow must be better. For me, Moscow has very few beautiful landscapes on the average. There is always something ugly. Today we have a chance to build a whole new city."
In the next two months, an arbitrage court is to decide whether Ms. Souptel and her mother can stay in the apartment where they have lived for 35 years and to which they have a post-Soviet deed of ownership.
The developer has his own grievance. He spent good money for what he thought was a condemned building.
"They just want us out of here," Ms. Souptel said. "They said to me, 'What the hell are you doing here? Who are you? You are not in our plans, Mrs. Emilie.' "
She has won two rounds in lower courts. But she said she was afraid that money and connections would tip the balance against her in the final legal round in a flawed and corrupt judicial system.
Even if she wins in court, she said, she fears the developer could turn to more direct methods of eviction.
"Now, he is still hoping that he will deal with us officially," she said. "If we win, he'll get very, very angry."