Authoritarian Postmodernism and Its Discontents
For the celebration of Moscow’s 850th anniversary, in 1997, Mayor Yuri Luzhkov ordered the clouds over the Russian capital to be dispersed. Dressed as Prince Yuri Dolgorukii, Moscow’s legendary founder, Mayor Luzhkov rode majestically through the streets of the city. The Soviet-era pop diva Alla Pugacheva, clad in virgin white and sporting an oversized cross on her bosom, blessed the nation. St. George, the patron saint of both Moscow and Luzhkov, triumphantly slew a dragon symbolizing the enemies of Russia in an exclusive Red Square performance choreographed by the ex-Soviet Hollywood director Andrei Konchalovsky. The program concluded with the “The Road to the Twenty-first Century: A Transmillennial Journey,” the world’s largest laser show ever, created by the French wizard Jean-Michel Jarre. The point of the show was to lead the way to the future via the past through a series of pulsating magical apparitions from Yuri Dolgorukii to Yuri Luzhkov, from the battleship Potemkin to the spaceship Sputnik, all beamed onto Muscovite skyscrapers from the Stalin era. And projected straight into the sky were images of famous Russian icons, including Byzantine religious images and the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
One rarely witnesses the creation of a myth. The ceremonies for Moscow’s 850th anniversary were one such occasion, at once reinventing Russian tradition and the Soviet grand style. This extravaganza was not an attempt to destabilize familiar monumental propaganda but instead to create its post-Soviet rival. Where Stalin had contemplated reversing the flow of rivers, the all-powerful Moscow mayor would attempt (at least for a day or two) to alter the course of the clouds. The forces of nature were to be orchestrated into a seamless mass spectacle. On the last day of the celebrations, ballerinas from the Bolshoi Theater performed scenes from Swan Lake in plein air, competing with real swans floating nearby. Minutes before the ballerinas were to begin “the dance of the little swans,” freezing rain began to fall. Temporarily subdued by technology, halted at the gates of the city for two days, the bad Russian weather had finally reached the capital. Slipping in puddles, the ballerinas trembled in the drizzle, while the real swans fluttered their wings to Tchaikovsky. In the end, the rain actually helped highlight the special effects. After all, most Muscovites watched the performance on television, where it looked perfectly choreographed. The only thing that the mayor of Moscow couldn’t control that weekend in August 1997 was an accident in a Paris tunnel that took the life of the Princess of Wales. Perhaps the only event that could have distracted attention from the spectacle in Moscow, the death of Diana prevented scheduled appearances by stars like Elton John. Rumors of an international conspiracy briefly surfaced but soon subsided. The show had to go on.
To appreciate the “economic miracle” of Moscow’s brief gilded age, which lasted from 1995 to 1998, one had to be either high up, enjoying panoramic views, or in motion, speeding through the streets in a traffic-defying BMW. The city in those early post-Soviet years did not move at the pace of the pedestrian. In the years of the economic miracle, Moscow was one of the world’s most exciting destinations. To a foreign visitor, it resembled a permanent fair of fun and conspicuous consumption, with Russian bistros and McDonald’s, honking Mercedes, bursting casinos, girls “without complexes” in micro-miniskirts, and advertisements everywhere, promising instant gratification. Featuring its very own mini-Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building in the Gorky Amusement Park, as well as the gigantic monument to Peter the Great and the world’s largest neo-Byzantine cathedral, Moscow devoured the dreams of other cities—of Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Rome, and Hong Kong. In the capital of the new Russia, you could fast-forward through 1,001 nights in a single evening. Everything seemed possible. The city was like a gigantic casino in which you could gamble forever.
As the most spectacular commemoration of the post-Soviet era, Moscow’s 850th anniversary celebration had a complex political and psychological agenda: it was intended to put an end to the work of memory and grief, of spontaneous urban transformation. The time of change, of perestroika, of cultural cleansing, of debating the present and future—all this appeared to be irretrievably over. Indeed, in the final years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, street life in the capital had been unpredictable and fascinating, “more exciting than fiction,” as people would say. Organized ceremonies had begun to lose their authority; disorganized events flourished. In the historic center of Moscow, one encountered impromptu Hyde Park Corners, where citizen-orators openly and passionately debated issues from the beginning of democracy to the end of the world. Nearby was the nascent postcommunist market, a bustling extemporaneous shopping fair where one could buy almost everything, from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago to Turkish underwear, from exotic pets to Matreshka dolls representing diverse aspects of Russian culture from the slain royal family to the Soviet Writer’s Union, from great Russian novelists to Soviet politicians. In those years the wounds of Soviet history were being opened up rather than covered over, eventually to be healed (everyone hoped). Moscow-in-transition defied easy synthesis or the inner determinism that one imposes only in hindsight.
The urban culture of perestroika ended with two violent outbursts of very different political significance: the barricading of the “White House” in downtown Moscow, a unique act of popular resistance to the August 1991 coup d’état and the siege of this same building, which houses the Russian Parliament, two years later by government troops, a controversial action that shook citizens’ belief in the government’s commitment to democracy. A few years later, Mayor Luzhkov wanted to forget the barricades. It was then that he built the largest underground shopping mall in Europe, a complex beneath Manezh Square near the Kremlin, which had once been a rallying ground for popular demonstrations. Luzhkov hoped that leisurely strolls in the gardens and grottoes of conspicuous consumption would supersede politics and protest. The new official nostalgia was thus bound up with the collective forgetting that was considered healthy, necessary to the forging of a new identity. As contemporary wisdom put it, “In Russia the past has become more unpredictable than the future.”
The tradition of celebrating the city’s anniversary is recent. And as it turns out, Moscow’s legendary past is a retrospective invention. The chronicles for the year 1147 make only the briefest mention of the fact that during the reign of Yuri Dolgorukii—Yuri the Long-Armed—a “new and larger fortress was built in Moscow.” We do not know with any certainty that the legendary prince Yuri was the founder of the city; we know only that in the middle of the 12th century, he and his warriors camped on the banks of the Moscow River and, apparently, had a decent meal. In fact, the “founding of the city” did not enter the Russian consciousness until 1847, when Tsar Alexander II decided to celebrate Moscow’s 700th anniversary with great pomp. In 1947 Stalin revived the tsarist tradition and celebrated Moscow’s 800th anniversary. This grand event occurred during Mayor Luzhkov’s boyhood, and he remembers it with great affection. Continuing the tradition, Luzhkov is thus doubly nostalgic—nostalgic for Russian and Soviet glory and for his own postwar youth.
Nostalgia—from the Greek nostos, or “return home,” and algia, “longing”—is the longing for a home that no longer exists or that never existed. Post-Soviet nostalgia is the perfect counterpoint to the future-oriented utopias of the early days of the Soviet Union. In fact, nostalgia itself is somewhat utopian—except that it is not focused on the future; and sometimes nostalgia is directed toward no specific time but instead toward some ideal of the past, of a past perfect and, as such, alluring and notoriously elusive. Nostalgia seems at first a longing for a place, a home; but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, of the imaginary historical past, some distant age of stability and normality. Those who are nostalgic want to obliterate history and replace it with a private or collective mythology, to revisit time as one revisits place, to restore the lost paradise. Nostalgia is double-edged: it can work as a kind of emotional antidote to politics, but as such it is one of the best of political tools.
In the official vision that has guided recent architecture in Moscow, the grand restorations will allow citizens to escape confrontation with the Soviet past. They will discourage the critical and ironic explorations of memory and history that have informed the work of certain contemporary Moscow architects—work ignored by the city establishment. Luzhkov’s projects appeal to the common denominator of collective nostalgia. It is not by chance that post-Soviet Moscow architecture seems somewhat childish. Working within the mythology of Moscow as the “third Rome” and the “big village,” it is at once authoritarian and intimate, cosmological and cozy. The architecture of the new Moscow is a kind of vernacular postmodernism of toy towers, gilded cupolas, fountains, and fairy-tale bears. As such it is not unfamiliar—it is part of the current global vernacular, of the late-20th-century fascination with local historical styles. What is exceptional is the way it works vis-à-vis institutional functions and power structures. There is no written directive, no manifesto directing its development. New Moscow architecture is