Ruin Russia. A Documentary Art Project
Stas Polnarev, photo; Dmitry Likin, video
Curator: Vladimir Levashov
52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Collateral Event
Scuola dell'arte deo Tiraoro e Battioro, Campo San Stae, Venice
June 7 - August 25, 2007
The project is centered on the Hotel Russia once the biggest hotel in Europe. This building stood next to Kremlin and Red Square for nearly 40 years and was
demolished in 2006-2007 in
the context of the reconstruction of Zariadye, one of the districts of downtown
Moscow. Its
structure survived some major transformations and witnessed several periods in
the nation's history, from the first years of Brezhnev's rule to the last
presidential term of Vladimir Putin.
Hotel Russia
was neither the first nor the largest building planned for construction at this
particular site during Soviet period. The first "candidate", in 1936, was a
House of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry, with many outstanding
Soviet architects of the time entering their designs in a closed competition.
Then, in 1940, another competition was held. This time the candidate was the
Second House of the Council of People's Commissars, but the outbreak of the
Great Patriotic War in 1941 suspended all the architectural projects for a long
time. In was only in 1956, under Nikita Khrushchev, that a decision was taken
to build a hotel at this location of Zariadye district. The actual
construction, based on a project by Dmitry Chechulin, a key figure in urban
development at the Stalin period, was only launched in 1964, right after Leonid
Brezhnev came to power. The construction was completed by 1967, the 50th
anniversary of the October revolution. The number of guests in the Russia
(4,753) was planned according to the number of the delegates of the Communist
Party congresses gathering in Moscow,
which since 1961 were invariably held in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, a
6,000-seat structure built specifically for that purpose. The Russia
occupied a land plot of nearly 13 hectares and featured 2,722 rooms in four
12-storey buildings. It was famed for its restaurants, a cinema and concert
hall, being in all the other respects, despite its colossal size, a very
standard 3-star hotel. Throughout its entire history the hotel accommodated
over 10 million people, including guests of international film festivals,
congresses, governmental meetings, etc.
The history of the Russia hotel brings to mind the events around
an even more monumental architectural project, the famous Palace of Soviets,
launched during the 1930s on the other side of the Kremlin. To "clean up" space
for this grandiose construction project, the huge Cathedral of Christ the
Saviour was demolished and the foundations of the new building laid. (This act
was later repeated with the demolition of most pre-revolutionary buildings in
Zariadye to clean up the construction site for the hotel). However, during the
war, the parts of the palace that had already been built were dismantled and
used in defense works. (Similarly, parts of the dismantled hotel, according to
one of the reconstruction plans, were to be used to build houses for low-income
Muskovites).In the post-war period the foundations of the Palace of Soviets
were eventually used to build Moskva
swimming pool in its place. Similar lowering of the grandeur affected the Zariadye
project, which, after the initial plans for the construction of offices of two
major governmental institutions were abandoned, was used to build for a hotel -
a project that only resembled all the previous ones in size, not in importance.
In 1990s, after the dissolution of the USSR,
the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was rebuilt at the site of the Moskva swimming pool, and now the city
planners intend to restore the architectural image of the old Zariadye district
destroyed with the Russia
hotel project.
Compared to the Palace of Soviets,
the central architectural project of the Soviet utopia, the Hotel Russia symbolizes the erosion of
the totalitarian idea. And, much as the swimming pool served for a long time as
a caricatured memory of the unfulfilled communist paradise, the massive Russia
mass carried within it the vague memories of two other virtual colossi of the
Stalinist empire, whose bold and clear-cut project outlines were rubbed away,
as it were, by the sands of the routine. The hotel's best years were the last
years of the Soviet communism, subsequently called the "era of
stagnation". It was the time of a prolonged decay of the sociopolitical
system and, yet, a time characterized by an existence of quite an original
culture and an inimitable life feeling, the years of childhood and youth of
several generations that now compose a considerable part of the current Russian
population.
This is at least one of the reasons why many
people feel a very distinct nostalgia for these times. In retrospect, they do
not appear as an era of the Communist Party's drawn-out demise but rather as a
sort of a quiet provincial paradise, a space of peaceful sleep, where tough
pressures of reality are simply
non-existent. As any image of a paradise or a dream, this time appears as a uniform anonymous
space whose real emptiness is filled by a collective feeling devoid of any
distinct feature.
The principal aim of the Ruin Russia project is to try and show something that is normally
absent from the visual arts: the volatility of the emotional space of the ordinary, as opposed to specific events,
objects, personal realms or interpretations of reality. The emotional space of
this sort exists most naturally in the mode of the past, as a reminiscence. Its
most representative configuration and memorial symbol is a ruin, the last
material trace of the past in the present lending itself to immediate
contemplation by its contemporaries, but already enveloped in the sheen of
retrospective fantasies. Of course, this sort of ruin doesn't exist either - it
has only survived in images.
The core of the Ruin Russia project is a series of large-scale photos by young
photographer Stas Polnarev taken
during the last year in the life of the Russia
hotel, when the building was being dismantled by construction workers. This
cycle is part of an audiovisual installation created from archive film clips
with the assistance of Dmitry Likin,
a well-known artist and designer.
Vladimir Levashov
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