some things I dislike about Moscow - smelly hallways

It is a sad but accurate fact about Moscow that almost all communal hallways in housing blocks smell bad. N suggested rotting potatoes as a description, to which I would add top notes of stale air, chemical paint and very elderly dust. This is not just in the more poorly built apartments; N lives in one of the Stalinist skyscrapers, built originally for the Soviet elite. And I recently had the honour of visiting the flat of Nikita Khruchshev's family on Tverskaya, which was very beautiful inside, but still had a relatively shabby communal staircase and hallway - and that smell. 

details

The older wooden houses in the centre are amazing. Easy to see these as picturesque ruins and to photograph their beautiful, lop-sided, hand-crafted details without thinking much about the occupants.

I was also shown rows and rows of wooden barracks on the outskirts of the city, still surviving from the 1920s, built in that optimistic moment in the belief that a the new type of worker would be formed who would not need a private kitchen or much domestic space. Again, still occupied and almost completely collapsed. 

festivals and more festivals

Following cities like Barcelona, Bilbao and Dublin, Perm (in the Urals) is trying to sell itself as a City of Culture.  This has even involved going to Brussels back in May to propose that that the European City of Culture title should be formally extended this far East.  However,  local opinion is clearly a little dubious about the motives of those in power. What everyone knows is that a Muscovite gallery owner, Marat Guelman has been invited in by the regional senator Sergei Gordeyev - or maybe by a regional governor, Oleg Chirkunov - and this can easily be read as a sign that the Moscow elite are taking over.

And, as usual, there are complicated gaps between appearances and actualities. I have been invited here to talk at one of the masses of festivals Perm now organises, in this case bringing together a craftt/household items fair with an architectural and interior design competition and festival (like a miniaturised Ideal Home Exhibition). Quite how these may improve the cultural or economic generation of the region is a little unclear. But there is plenty of energy and many good and creative conversations.

But in terms of other - more solid and long-term - projects, much is started and not completed, There has also been an international design competition for the Perm contemporary art gallery - marketed as PermMuseumXXI - a winner chosen, but then nothing; although now some plans for a much simpler glass extension. There are also proposals floating around for the Opera House (which nobody I talked to knew anything about) and last year some proposals for new wooden houses. So nobody really believes anything will happen.

ugly, ugly, ugly

V also deliberately took me on different routes to and from his dacha. On the way there we saw endless new high-rise apartment building (both on Moscow's outskirts and around the nearby 'satellite' city) being constructed and piled together in almost exactly Soviet-era industrial building fashion - save for some trivial gimmickry on the facades.  On the way back (thankfully after dark) we passed dozens of enclaves for the new Russians; estates of disneyland housing surrounded by tall ugly walls like you would have around a prison, enlivened - which is certainly not the right word - only by the occasional pastiche old-style gatehouse with its big fat gates and guard huts. Ugh.

domestic interiors of the Soviet 70s

There is also lots of very contemporary design work at ARCHMoscow, enough to make the small stand showing photographs and furniture from Moscow 70s domestic interiors (real flats - still unchanged) feel quite eccentric. So, of course, I loved it. Partly because it reflects the Soviet standard furniture sets that I have in my own flat here (and which remain ubiquitous in older apartments) and partly because it shows a kind of careful celebration of, and obsessive interest in, both the previous and continuing lives of Moscow residents.

spring-cleaning

Another sign of Spring for me, is the change in street cleaning utensils (about which both winter and summer versions I seem to have a strange obsession). As the sun begins to shine, the shovels and scrapers and ice-breaking crowbars are being replaced with little swish brooms and wheelbarrow variants.

We have also had a subbotnik* in the public outside areas at work - which I missed - and meanwhile the Mayor is talking about cleaning up the decaying entrances and yards of Moscow's housing blocks. This would be a massive investment as a huge amount of housing has been left to decay in the post-soviet period (and was not well looked after in soviet times) so I am not sure I believe it. And of course the public zones of stairs and entrances have suffered worse. A public campaigning group called чистый подбездChisty Podyezd/Clean Doorway has been getting people to post pictures to their website of bad examples, and giving prizes to the worse!

* to quote directly from Wikipedia - "Subbotnik and voskresnik (from Russian words суббота [suˈbotə] for Saturday and воскресенье [vəskrʲɪˈsʲenʲjɪ] for Sunday) were days of volunteer work following the Bolshevik seizure of power. The tradition is continued in modern Russia and some other former Soviet Republics.^[1] Subbotniks are mostly organized for cleaning the streets of garbage, fixing public amenities, collecting recyclable material, and other community services."

spring signs

After being - very briefly - in an extraordinarily sunny and blooming London, I have eagerly been looking for signs that Moscow is getting its own Spring. I remember this lady from when I moved into the block last September (although this is my first sighting this year). She always puts her foldaway chair in exactly the same place, and sits in it for most of the day at weekends - interspersed, as here, with short walks to the path. 

worked it out

Think I have worked out what the smell is.  In some kind of vague spring-clean operation, a woman had been going around filling cracks and covering  the base of the whole estate in thick grey paint. And it stinks. Maybe its an anti-infestation thing, I have no idea (and I am trying really hard not to mention the slapdash nature of the work).

I still need to find out more about how the whole post-Soviet housing situation works. With privatisation in the 1990s I guess many people - at least those officially registered in Moscow - were just handed over their flats. But now, how is maintenance paid for? Here, its a bit rough, but it seems to happen; I have been to other places where the apartment interiors may be beautifully done up, but the hallways and stairs are almost in ruins. And the stories about buying a flat, only to get into the (often fraudulent) quagmire around who owns and/or is registered to that particular apartment, are completely terrifying.

lift

And whilst I am grumbling, I had to avoid the film crew yet again on my block staircase putting up yet more mock graffitti (remember I live in a trendy slum) and the lift was broken as usual.

Actually, what really annoys me about the lift is that it exemplifies the problems of Soviet design (and, probably, post-Soviet maintenance). You will note the lift buttons go up to 9. This block has only ever had 7 floors. A small thing, but somehow immensely irritating.