RUSSIA’S PLAN TO REBUILD ANCIENT CAPITAL OF CZARS

Northern Advocate, 11 June 1938, Page 12

RUSSIA’S PLAN TO REBUILD ANCIENT CAPITAL OF CZARS

WHAT is described as the mos spectacular and grandiose town-planning scheme evei taken in hand, is now under way in Russia, where Moscow ■the ancient capital c-f the Czars, is being rebuilt. Money, says Mr E. R. Yarham in r recent article, is being poured out like water in this effort of the Soviet Government to fulfil its boast that it will transform Moscow from a collection of straggling buildings into “the most cultured and most beautiful city in the world.” The total outlay will be gigantic, probably running into the neighbourhood c" £250,000,000, for in a single year £32,000.000 was spent on the improvement of transport, water and drainage, systems. The authorities plan to complete the undertaking by 1945. The “Great Village” c-f Pest Years. It is hard for foreigners to conceive what Moscow was like in the past cr the place it held in Russian eyes. The “great village” of travellers’ tales in the past remained a great village until towards the close of the nineteenth century. It epitomised the progress of the vast plains of forest and steppe that were the Russian land, developing new features only insofar as a thousand smaller villages cf the Russian countryside shewed a similar development. As an authority on the country wrote: “Its growth expressed the essential conservatism of rural Eussia.” In Muscovite eyes St. Petersburg, - fashioned as the “window” from which Russia could lock out upon Europe, might be a Western city, nourished by contact with foreign culture and industry; but it could never impose its standards upon the peasant who had built it at Pete l ''., bidding. St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, was foreign and cosmopolitan, aristocratic and plebian, the empty shell cf Russian officialdom, the upstart city which snatches! from the great village more than two centuries ago the honour of being capital. Centre of Slavonic World. But Moscow was what it had always been —the centre of the Slavonic world, the “third Rome” of Slavophil faith, the heart of peasant and commercial Russia. For nearly a thousand years of stormy and tragic history the heart of Russia has dwelt there in “Little” or “Holy Mother” Moscow, as it is still called by the Russian peasants, who loved ft in spite of its cruelties, its terrors, and its bloodstained stones. The semi-barbaric fort of the Kremlin, once the citadel and palace of the Czars, is as crowded with tragic memories as

any in Europe. It is the very keystone of Russian history. Almost Oriental City. Last century, says Mr Yarham, Moscow was still almost wholly Oriental. Despite the enormous growth of the textile industry from the ‘sixties onwards, the outward appearance of the city underwent little alteration. The factory chimneys belched smoke on

the opposite side of the city to the Kremlin; trams appeared on the streets; the fashionable shopping centre, the Kuznetsky Most —from which the smith’s forges that had given the street its name had disappeared in the middle of the previous century—became still more luxurious. Yet the likeness of an enormous village persisted in the sprawling confusion of narrow lanes and teeming courtyards, of churches and cathedrals and still more churches, of merchant houses and innumerable small workshops and' magnificent palaces and peasant markets.

Now “Holy Mother” Moscow is being altered and revolutionised. It is to be a “model” city of 5.000.000 inhabitants. The plan embraces enlarging the city area from 70,000 to 150,000 acres, but the population is to be allowed to increase by approximately a million and a quarter only—that is, from 3,700,000 to 5,000,000. The authorities aim at a standard of building

which will allow at least 120 square feet per person. ; The Moscow of Tomorrow. When completed, the city will have five concentric green rings, in the innermost of which will stand the Kremlin. There are two partial rings at present, the Boulevard Ring and the Garden Ring, which are to be completed. Outside these will come a second Boulevard Ring, a Park Ring, and a great Green Forest Belt. The distance of the last will be seven miles from the centre of the city. Six great arterial roads, crossing at a point

near the Kremlin, will connect with the countryside. The carrying out of this immense plan involves the demolition of great numbers of the old straggling buildings. Fine new residences will rise upon the sites of the slums, and a large number of communal buildings will be built as well. Among them are to be six new hotels, and no fewer than

539 schools, of which 390 will be completed by 1939. By 1943, two years before the completion of the reconstruction programme, ‘ the population has been promised that it will have seventeen new hospitals, twenty-seven dispensaries, fifty cinemas, three adult recreational centres and seven children’s centres. Easily the most conspicuous and gigantic of the new buildings will be the colossal “Palace of the Soviets.” It was planned ten years ago, but not until last year was anything heard of it. When completed, upon its summit will stand a huge statue of Lenin, 260