Shadow of the Gulag

Posted on May 23, 2014 by malnare

One day I was in the center of the city and decided to get away from it, heading in the direction of Taganskaya Station to meet our group there. This wandering took me circuitously through the region of Kitai-Gorod. It was a nice walk and nice day, but due to the casual nature of the place today, I never quite grasped what lie there until looking for information (and translation) later.

The Lubyanka Building as it was originally made for an insurance company.

Passing through Lubyanka Square actually brought me closer to the legendary, fearful KGB than I even would have hoped. Meaning “Committee for State Security,” this group acted as the defence, intelligence, and secret police branch of the Soviet Union regime from 1954-1991, today broken up into other organizations such as the Inter-republican Security Service. The Lubyanka Building had been the central headquarters of the secret since its creation as the Cheka. For nearly a century this place would inspire fear in passers-by, doubt at whatever is foreign or dangerous, anxiety about being dragged in and imprisoned inside the building.

The Solovetsky Stone, a simple but powerful memorial for those many victims; flowers appear like this on most memorials year round.

But today the square feels like just another part of the city. A monument 2002 monument placed on the square provided a simple reminder of past ills, a stone with a plaque honoring victims of the Gulags. Reading about it connected a few dots in my head, for I have heard of undesirable monuments being moved, changed, or hauled away (not unlike various victims of the KGB in the past). Many Russians today balance pride and shame in a miraculous way, bearing fond memories of the Soviet state while remembering, or perhaps trying to forget, its flaws. Some of the statues of Soviet leaders currently standing in a tight cluster near one developing area of Muzeon Park southwest of the center have caused long conflicts, continuing even today. The legacy of government oppression remains a dark side to the security and hope of a peaceful and safe life that the KGB was meant to provide. 2012 protestors chose this site as a place to hold an anti-Putin rally, connected his former KGB service to oppressive leadership.

The KGB Crest. Since I neglected to take pictures that day, pictures in this post appear courtesy WikiCommons.

I have had the chance to speak with several older Russians, all of whom remember the bitter past of Soviet enforcement: each one knew or was related to a victim of Stalin’s purges. It is with respect to painful memories like these that many want to remove connections to their perpetrators. This does not mean forgetting, for who can forget the loss of family or friend with no warning, that lifestyle of fear? Instead, the goal is to remove the honor associated with monuments, to draw a contrast between those great Russians worth remembering, and those who are remembered with infamy.
Information found at the following sites, having located the place per Google Maps:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Здание_органов_госбезопасности_на_Лубянке
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB

Patriarch's Ponds

Posted on May 13, 2014 by fernholzg

One fateful day at Patriarch’s Ponds, a mysterious stranger sat down on a bench and began talking to those few already seated. So begins Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel The Master and Margarita, and so began our Sunday afternoon when Sahree, Almeda, and I were reading the book in question at that very same location.

My intrepid travel companions.

Our mysterious stranger was a harmless reveler from Victory Day, which had transpired the day prior. He held a can of beer in one hand and with the other pointed at some distant building across the pond. “That’s where Bulgakov lived when he was working on The Master and Margarita,” he said. “It’s a museum now. You can go there to get professional tours…”

A view of the pond.

“And over there, beyond those trees is a statue of [author Ivan Andreevich] Krylov. Everyone thinks it should be Bulgakov instead. And see that children’s playground? The mayor of Moscow had that just built because he or one of his friends wanted it. Imagine what Bulgakov would have thought of that!”

Krylov sculpture and the playground.

The man, with his sandy beard, light-colored eyes, and sailor’s cap, told us that he gave lessons to school-aged children. Given his knowledge about the area and Bulgakov, he himself probably dabbled in tours at some point. He lit up a cigarette even though his voice was already hoarse and went on to state a few sad reflections about his personal life. We sat and listened, not knowing exactly what to say. I don’t know that he was looking for conversation though. Sometimes people just need to know that their voice is being heard. He received a phone call and began talking to a friend. We said goodbye to him and took our leave.
The actual beginning of The Master and Margarita goes like this: Two journalists are sitting on a bench on a hot spring day when a strangely-dressed foreigner sits down next to them. This foreigner is actually Woland, the Devil himself, come to visit Moscow in order to evaluate its people. He tells one of the seated gentlemen, Berlioz, exactly how his death will come to pass. Indeed, Berlioz meets his end at the hands of a trolley bus just a few minutes after their strange, frightful conversation. This introductory chapter is entitled “Don’t Talk to Strangers.” A humorous sign at Patriarch’s Ponds pays homage to this message, and it wasn’t until we saw it that we realized the irony of our situation. Certainly it was a memorable one.

It is forbidden to converse with strangers!

[Disclaimer: The accuracy of the gentleman’s quotes above may be questionable, due to poor comprehension/translation on my part. No trickery intended!]

Bells in Kitai-Gorod

Posted on May 7, 2014 by moreesandersa

On my Kitai-Gorod tour, we saw a lot of interesting things, but the most memorable part for me was actually a sound.
My tour was on the Monday after Easter, and as we walked, we could hear church bells constantly ringing. At first, I assumed there was a wedding or something going on, but the praktikantki explained that the Russian Orthodox Church has a tradition that during Easter week, anyone who wants to can ring the church bells.

The bell tower of the John the Baptist convent. Photo credit: Darya Ogranovich, 2010.

The sound was coming from the Иоанно-Предтеченский (John the Baptist) convent, which is also called the Ivanovsky convent. People were filing up to the top of the bell tower for their chance to ring them, and the result was an endless chorus of bells. It was a little harder to hear the praktikantki giving their tour, but the sound was soothing and atmospheric for our tour, as we discussed the way the area had changed over time.
The convent was built in the fifteenth century, and for many years was a working convent, with a prison for noblewomen in the basement. Like much of Moscow, the convent burned down in 1812, and it was rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century, only to be closed down by the soviet government a few decades later. Part of the state archives and a police academy were moved into some of the convent’s buildings, and when the monastery was reopened in 2002, these organizations remained, making the monastery an interesting representation of different facets of Russian life. You can read about the convent in English here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanovsky_Convent.

Khitrov Market (Khitrovka)

Posted on May 5, 2014 by kaspers

This market was mentioned during my praktikantki’s Kitai-gorod tour. Apparently it was a hangout for people looking for work as well as criminals.

From The Moscow News. Published August 18 2011.

After my professor pointed me in the right direction, I found a few interesting facts about the place. In the book Moscow: A Cultural History by Caroline Brooke, there is a section about this notorious district. Although founded as a market in the 1820s by Major General Khitrovo, it became a location infamous for its poverty and high rate of crime. It was home of “the poorest of Moscow’s poor”, who gathered in hopes of making money, whether it be honest or not.

M. Shabelnikov. From The Moscow News.

The Khitrov district featured impoverished workers, merchants, and criminals and had gambling houses, cheap housing for workers, brothels, and bars. The sanitary conditions were horrible, and people feared that the rampant diseases in the Khitrov district would spread to the rest of the city.
During the early 20^th century, a few attempts had been made to improve the district’s conditions. In the end, the Soviets destroyed the heart of the district, building an apartment in its place.

From wikimedia commons.

Around 2009, the apartment was demolished. Now all that remains on the original location of the Khitrov market are a few bricks, fenced off on all sides.

From Yandex. 28 October 2011.

The Walls of Kitai-gorod

Posted on April 29, 2014 by browninj

The shape of modern day Moscow has largely been determined by that which is no longer there. From the first wooden fortress built by Yuri Dolguruky on Borovitsky hill at the confluence of the Neglinnaya and Moscow rivers, the city has crawled outward in an ever expanding circle that was once punctuated at various points by defensive walls. Aside from the walls of the Kremlin most of these walls are now gone, but they have left their mark in the form of wide ring boulevards and the concentric growth patterns of the city.

Part of the Kitai-gorod wall along the Kitaigorodskii proezd. The wall was designed by the Italian architect Petrok Maly and was often as thick as it was high.

Kitai-gorod, an area of the city located to the immediate east of Red Square and originally inhabited by those merchants and tradesmen not fortunate enough to reside within the Kremlin, is perhaps the best example of the lasting effect of walls on Moscow’s present form. The Kitai-gorod wall, originally built in the 1530s, survived largely intact until the 1930s when much of this “relic of savage and medieval times” was destroyed to facilitate access to the city center.¹ After all, the idea of a wall is anathema to a modern city struggling with congestion.

The view from the Kitai-gorod metro station along ulitsa Varvarka towards the Kremlin.

But the wall’s 400 year presence is still felt. Kitai-gorod developed into the wonderful collision of architectural styles, narrow streets, and densely constructed buildings dating from the 1500s to the 2000s because of the limited, but desirable space behind the wall. Walking down Ulitsa Varvarka, one of the area’s three main streets, you find a string of five or six churches dating from the 17^th and 18^th centuries along with the Old English Embassy from the 1500s and the 16^th century residence of the Romanov Boyars all leading up to Red Square and the Kremlin. Across the street lies the Gostiny dvor, originally constructed in 1830 following Quarenghi’s designs, but extensively renovated in 1995 so that it now looks like a modern glass and steel structure thinly veiled by neoclassical trappings. Interestingly the wall has slowly been creeping back, old sections and towers have been resurrected and there are now ideas floating about to restore it fully so as to prevent automobile access and to turn Kitai-gorod into a fashionable pedestrian zone.

Qtd. Caroline Brooke, Moscow: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14.

A sobering monument at Kitai Gorod…

Posted on April 21, 2014 by akgundud

Everywhere I go here, I see охрана (security) guarding buildings or the полиция roaming the metro, keeping an eye on the public. Since I feel as safe here as I do in Chicago, I sometimes forget why the Russian government feels the need to deploy a high amount of security to central Moscow.
When I went to Kitai Gorod on a tour with a fellow classmate and a praktikantka, we came upon a monument to those 334 people who died during the siege of Beslan, a school in Russia’s North Ossetia Republic. I was in elementary school when it happened, but I still remember the news coverage, the pictures, and my parents talking about it over dinner. The monument is located in front of an old church that is currently being restored, and it’s hard to miss it since the monument is on a corner that juts out into the road.
Terrorism has affected the lives of every single Russian citizen as much as it has in the United States. While the politics on the reasons behind the siege of Beslan is very convoluted, the fact remains that people still put flowers on the monument. Schools are supposed to be safe places for children. I felt uncomfortable taking pictures of the monument since there were people selling kulich (Russian Easter bread) there the day I visited it, but I found an article online about the monument and have attached the picture from the article to this post. The monument is very sobering about the dangerous world we live in and how hard it is for people to agree over their differences. No country, anywhere in the world, should have to have its children fall victim to violence.

The monument a little less than a year ago…

Carleton Moscow & Beyond 2014

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Category Archives: Kitai-Gorod