The Oligarchs (44 page)

Gaidar later called attention to just one of the many ways Luzhkov exploited Moscow's unique position. Russian law required companies to pay taxes where they were officially registered. The far-flung national monopoly networks all registered in Moscow. Rostelecom was in charge of telephones over all of Russia, but it paid taxes to Moscow. Unified Energy Systems, the electricity monopoly, generated power and distributed it over all Russia, but it paid taxes to Moscow. The same was true of Gazprom, the mammoth natural gas monopoly, and Transneft, the oil pipeline company, both of which spanned not
only Russia but parts of Europe. They too paid taxes in Moscow.
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“Moscow happens to sit next to a fountain spouting gold,” Gaidar declared. It's a city with “money to burn.”
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When I asked Luzhkov about this, he took issue with the claim and insisted that the big companies brought no more than 12–15 percent of the city budget. Luzhkov said the Moscow miracle was not the result of its status as the capital, but the way he managed it. He was a pragmatic
khozyain
with the riches he inherited. He paid the doctors and teachers on time, and pensioners rode city transport for free. “We say that we are going to build 3 million square meters of housing, and we do,” Luzhkov insisted. “We say that 5 million square meters of roads will be repaired, and we do the repairing.” And the best evidence, Luzhkov recalled, was that business flooded the capital. If he had been a bad
khozyain
, business would have fled.
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Wearing his trademark leather cap, Luzhkov jaunted about the city on Saturdays, touring construction sites, trailing journalists, aides, and petitioners, demanding explanations, poking into blueprints, and dressing down his lieutenants. Luzhkov's visits never provoked soaring rhetoric, just a staccato of short, sparse, blunt sentences, not unlike the bricks and mortar around him. Luzhkov was not a philosopher king; he spoke the language of construction, engineering, and chemistry. He thought in terms of goals set, approached, and achieved, and, if not achieved, he angrily demanded to know why. He resembled, more than any Russian politician of the age, the visionary Robert Moses, who built the great complex of parks, beaches, apartment houses, bridges, parkways, and roads of modern New York City. Like Moses strolling through Central Park or Coney Island, Luzhkov roamed his domain, dreaming of public works large and small. He meddled in everything from the largest covered stadium in Europe to the tiny details of a fast-food menu.

In these years, Moscow was a city of 8.6 million people, although by some estimates there were another million or more unofficial residents or visitors at any moment. The city, spread out over 1,091 square kilometers, suffered from aging and decrepit infrastructure. The most dramatic examples came very suddenly on a cold winter day when the massive underground heating pipes melted the frozen ground above, and grotesque chasms opened up—swallowing cars and
people. Everywhere, the city was hurting from years of neglect: roads with enormous potholes, chipped and slippery steps, invisible traffic lights, trees choking from pollution, streets groaning with auto gridlock, and always those smelly, dark, forbidding entrances to residential apartment blocks.

But in Luzhkov's day, the city became cleaner, and more functional, than at any time in memory. Luzhkov opened new subway stations, paved rutted roads, created outdoor markets, built playgrounds, installed public fountains, and, most importantly, alleviated the pent-up demand for housing. He built between 3.0 and 3.4 million square meters of new apartment space each year. He sold apartments to the rich and used the proceeds to pay for fresh housing for tens of thousands of families who had been on municipal waiting lists for years. To his credit, whenever there was a city emergency, a bridge collapsed, or some other disaster erupted, Luzhkov showed up and took charge.

But at some point Luzhkov hungered for more. Vladimir Yevtushenkov, a one-time plastics engineer who was a close friend of Luzhkov and became one of Russia's richest men, told me that Luzhkov grew restless and hankered for something more creative than building apartment blocks and paving roads. “He wanted to try things of a larger scale,” Yevtushenkov said.
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Luzhkov's wife, Yelena Baturina, recalled that he saw construction as an ideology, a beacon that could inspire people, keep them from losing faith. Luzhkov “understood the most important thing,” she said, “that at such destructive times, it was important to find an idea that would unite people. In Moscow, building became an idea that united Muscovites.”
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On Luzhkov's birthday one year, his wife was wondering what to give him. She spotted an excavator by the roadside. She had the shovel filled with roses and delivered it to Luzhkov. The perfect present for The Builder.
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When I interviewed Luzhkov, after a long wait, I wanted to know: what was his great vision or inspiration as a builder? I had long assumed that Luzhkov's ambition was defined and expressed by construction—the new city squares, the parks and highways, the towering new apartment buildings that were his trademark. But his answer was less visionary than I had expected. Luzhkov told me his real “ideology” was not so much construction for its own sake but making the city more livable. This was a street-level, populist perspective, not quite the soaring motive that I had once assumed. “In 1995 I couldn't
speak about it because life in Moscow was so revolting,” he said. “Moscow was so dirty that if I had spoken about comfort, I would have been told, you are mad, you are crazy. Now I say it fearlessly and openly and frequently: we must make our city more comfortable.” Luzhkov's definition of comfort was broad, embracing symbols of “spirituality,” such as the cathedral, as well as more mundane affairs like the Ring Road.
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The Ring Road was a Luzhkov project that virtually reshaped the city. A beltway encircling Moscow, the 109-kilometer road was known in Soviet times as a dangerous, rock-strewn, potholed mess. Over five years, at a cost of 18 billion rubles, Luzhkov rebuilt the entire route into a eight-lane superhighway, complete with on-ramps, rest stops, pedestrian overpasses, gas stations, and radar speed traps. Luzhkov also dreamed of turning Moscow into a year-round sports capital. Once a week, Luzhkov played soccer with his staff at the Luzhniki stadium along the Moscow River, and he also played tennis there with his wife. Soon, tall construction cranes hoisted into place a 10,000-ton steel ring supporting a 140-foot-high, 12-acre sliding roof of glass-reinforced plastic, making it Europe's largest domed stadium. The $230 million renovation included replacement of the seats. Luzhkov's wife, Yelena Baturina, won a contract to replace old wooden benches in the 85,000-seat stadium with new plastic seats that met European standards for matches to be held there.
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One of the great pieces of unfinished business of the Soviet era was Poklonnaya Gora, or the Bowing Hill, a historic site that derived its name from an old tradition in which travelers coming to Moscow bowed to the capital. It was also said that by tradition soldiers departed for war from the hill, and to it they returned victorious. From here, Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov yielded Moscow to Napoleon in 1812, vowing not to lose Russia. After World War II, a sporadic effort was made to build a war memorial on the hill, and in the 1980s the chosen design was a central monument of red granite, cast in the shape of a massive curling banner topped with a star. During
perestroika,
the design became bogged down in debate and protests, and when Luzhkov became mayor, it was unfinished, although a spacious war museum behind the monument was partly complete. Luzhkov retooled the project and, in a crash construction effort, finished it in 1995, in time for celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the victory over Germany. Luzhkov constructed a Russian Orthodox chapel, a
synagogue, and a mosque on the grounds of the park. He was widely known for encouraging religious tolerance and revival, except for Chechens, who suffered on the streets of his city. Near the park, Luzhkov began construction of a giant international business and trade center with a pedestrian bridge spanning the Moscow River.

When Yeltsin was worried in 1993 about demonstrations outside the Kremlin walls in Manezh Square, Luzhkov threw up fences around the spot, which kept all the demonstrators away. The fences were ostensibly for a construction project. But only later did Luzhkov actually come up with the project—to build an underground shopping mall. The mall would be three stories deep, with 23,408 square meters of retail space. Typically, Luzhkov set stiff deadlines and demanded round-the-clock construction but then disrupted the plans with his own personal whims. According to one engineer, three months before the opening, Luzhkov ordered drywall ceilings to be replaced with brass strips. Mistakes by the architect resulted in part of the mall being unrentable. In the early years, the mall was a commercial disaster: the rents were so high that it was mostly vacant. The Manezh turned into a $110 million white elephant.
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Luzhkov preferred, and imposed, a kitschy, baroque aesthetic on his Moscow monuments and buildings. Sometimes it was no more than an extra frill, such as functionless turrets atop a modern glassfacade office building to spice it up.
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Other times, it was more profound, especially when the aesthetic decision was left to Luzhkov's friend and prolific sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, a Georgian-born artist whose impact on the cityscape rivaled that of Luzhkov. The gregarious Tsereteli had a penchant for Soviet monumentalism, but his style was sentimental and sugary. Tsereteli, president of the Russian Academy of Art, received a large portion of municipal art commissions in the Luzhkov years, and his flamboyant work left an indelible impression. For the Manezh shopping mall, Tsereteli designed a simulated voyage through Russian centuries, set in marble, chrome, and brass. Outside, he arranged a fountain decorated with bronzes of animals from Russian fairy tales. At the Moscow Zoo, Tsereteli designed a cavelike fantasy entrance with a waterfall and clock. Instead of the Soviet red granite banner on Poklonnaya Gora, Tsereteli designed a 141.8-meter-high obelisk that supported a 24-ton likeness of the Greek goddess Nika, accompanied by two trumpeting angels. Critics called it a “grasshopper on a stick.” My own impression is that the sculpture
was peculiar, but the park itself, with a broad promenade, forest, and a small hill for sledding, was a city dwellers' delight, an example of how Luzhkov understood that a population packed into tiny apartments needed functional, pleasant outdoor spaces. In the afternoon and evening, from early spring through late autumn, the park was often full, despite the artistic oddities.

The mayor patiently tolerated criticism of Tsereteli's style. Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn fumed that “Moscow is being recklessly disfigured” and dismissed Tsereteli's works as “massive and third-rate memorials.” One grim, bulky Tsereteli sculpture about genocide, titled
Tragedy of the Peoples
—a monument showing a line of starved, naked figures collapsing into a cluster of tombstones—was originally placed at the opening of Poklonnaya Hill. After complaints that it was too depressing, mobile cranes came one day and hauled it away to a spot behind the museum.

Tsereteli sparked his greatest outcry with a 165-foot-high, $15 million statue of Peter the Great erected on the Moscow River, not far from the cathedral, in 1997. The very idea of the sculpture is absurd: Peter the Great, founder of the Russian navy, moved the Russian capital to St. Petersburg to escape Moscow's dark intrigues. But what really triggered protests was the actual sculpture itself, which depicts an awkward tsar astride a galleon, holding a golden map, as little metallic flags flutter in the breeze. Critics said the proportions were wrong; the statue looked like a big toy soldier. Despite protests, Luzhkov backed Tsereteli, and the monument remained. A visitor cruising down the Moscow River in a tour boat would see, in short order, Gorky Park and a model of the discarded Soviet space shuttle; Tsereteli's Peter the Great; and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. At times Moscow could seem like a very strange post-Soviet Disneyland.

But it was also true that Tsereteli played a serious role in the painstaking, complex job of duplicating the original paintings inside the cathedral. He oversaw 360 painters working intensely over an eight-month period—often 200 of them at any one time were on the scaffolding—using computer-enhanced images to visualize depth and dimension from old photographs.
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Of all the buildings, parks, and monuments, the cathedral became Luzhkov's most famous contribution to the city skyline. Ogorodnikov recalled the storied history of the original structure—Tsar Alexander I blessed it, three more Russian emperors took forty-four years to erect
it. “And Luzhkov did it in five years,” he said. “It was important for his career. He built a monument to himself.”

 

I remember my own first impressions of Moscow in the winter of 1990: a dark and closeted city slumbering under a gray fog. The barren high-rise apartment blocks were forbidding towers in the night, their entrances threatening and foul-smelling. Grimy store windows featured faded cardboard cutouts of nonexistent groceries. Moscow was described once as a “dysfunctional dystopia that somehow kept on barely functioning.”
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But the Moscow I came to know in the Luzhkov years fairly crackled with light and an energetic if superficial brashness. It became a city of extremes, of generous and garish gestures, of wealth gained and spent obscenely, of casinos, discos, restaurants, electronics, gastronomes, mobile phones, billboards, boutiques, and a nascent middle class. A real estate boom sent prime office rents to levels higher than the most prestigious buildings in New York and Tokyo. More than 150 casinos, nearly half of them unlicensed, opened in the mid-1990s. At the Cherry Casino on the New Arbat, my
Washington Post
colleague Lee Hockstader found hundreds of Russians thronging to the blackjack and roulette tables on weekend nights, but the slot machines were practically ignored. The manager was quick to explain. “You can't show off to a slot machine,” he said. “These people don't just come to gamble. They come to show off their money, flash it around. And a slot machine doesn't care if you have a big roll of $100 bills in your pocket.”
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