'Paradise' 5-Story Meets the Wrecking Ball
Features
Front Page
News
Business
Opinion
Arts & Ideas
Nightlife
Travel Guide
Stock Market
Latest Wires
Current issue
Forum
Services
Jobs & Careers
Job Opportunities
Career Center
Jobs & Careers
Real Estate
Classifieds
Conferences
Photobook
Tools
Archive Search
PDF Edition
Full PDF Archive
PDA Edition
RSS Feed
My Account
Subscriptions
Print Edition
Article Archive
PDF Edition
E-mail News
Advertising
Media Kit [eng]
Media Kit [rus]
The Moscow Times
Special Reports
Classifieds
Job Opportunities
Mini Guide
Online
Jobs & Careers
Real Estate Catalog
Real Estate Quarterly
Moscow Guide
Direct Mail
Reprints
Information
Past Issues
Global Eye
FAQ
Request Form
Agreement
Contact us
Archive
January February March April May June July August September
October November December 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
MoTuWeThFrSaSu
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
<< Aug.
Archive search
Advanced search...
Market Matters
Stronger Ruble Could Devour Firms' Profits
Buy supermarket stocks and sell metals and mining stocks --
before it's too late. That's the advice of economists ...>>
Special Reports
A Race for Renewal All Across the Sector
A revolution is under way in the hospitality industry, as old
properties are transformed from economy to elite. >> Currency
Exchange Rate
USD RF CB - 26.80
Stock Market >>
Moscow Weather
Today
Foggy
Av: 10oC
Hi: 15oCLo: 9oC
RSS >> PDA >>
Tuesday, September 12, 2006 / Updated Moscow Time
Business / Real Estate
A A A Tuesday, September 12, 2006. Issue 3495. Page 1.
5-Story 'Paradise' Meets the Wrecking Ball
By Dan Shea
Staff Writer
Vladimir Filonov / MT
By 2010, all khrushchyovki will be removed from Moscow.
Residents are being resettled to large apartment towers.
Galina Nikitina is quite content with the apartment she's lived in
at 113 Volgogradsky Prospekt for the past 33 years, thank you very
much.
Compared to life in the old Army housing she'd been in, an apartment
in a five-story pyatietazhki was paradise for Nikitina, her husband
and 5-year-old daughter when they moved in -- as it was for millions
who had never had their own home until Nikita Khrushchev decided it
was about time.
"When we left the barracks and came here, it was like we had come
into a kingdom," Nikitina, now 80, recalled. "In the barracks, we
drank and washed with water that collected on the roof. We don't
want to leave."
About 1,600 so-called khrushchyovki were built in Moscow from 1956
to 1963, including dozens along Volgogradsky Prospekt. Thousands of
veterans with young families who had lived in dilapidated communal
apartments and dank cellars filled with cockroaches flooded the
apartment blocs.
Now, nearly every khrushchyovka in Moscow is coming down.
Under a city plan, the once-ubiquitous khrushchyovki are being razed
and residents moved to new buildings ranging from 17 to 22 stories.
The goal is to demolish all pyatietazhki by 2010. So far, about 900
have been bulldozed, said Alexei Vidansky, a spokesman for the city
Architecture, Construction, Development and Reconstruction Complex.
The city insists the program will improve living conditions.
"Pyatietazhki were built to last 25 years," Vidansky said. "They've
already lived through two lifetimes, and they could soon be
dangerous." He added that the thin panels comprising the walls of
many of the buildings had become warped over the years.
The plan to remove the buildings, Vidansky said, comports with
President Vladimir Putin's $770 million national project to improve
housing nationwide, announced last fall. "For the government, people
are always the most important concern," Vidansky said.
Many residents don't buy that. They say they're being forced to give
up their homes so authorities can make a killing in the booming real
estate market. Indeed, construction firms such as Satori, Krost,
SU-155 and Don-Stroi are lining up to pay for the right to destroy
khrushchyovki and build their replacements. Vidansky refused to say
how much long-term leases bought by construction firms cost.
Profit margins are promising: It runs from $1,000 to $1,200 per
square meter to build new apartments; the average price tag for a
square meter of Moscow real estate is $3,920. And even though
builders must move pyatietazhki residents for free, they can sell
the remaining apartments -- expected to be 60 percent of all units
-- to homebuyers at a profit. What's more, tearing down old
buildings is said to be cheap.
"I don't care what they say on paper," said William Brumfield, a
Russian architecture expert at Tulane University, in New Orleans,
who has written the definitive book on the subject, "A History of
Russian Architecture," and is a member of the Russian Academy of
Arts and Sciences. "There is no comprehensive plan to take care of
people."
Referring to khrushchyovki, Brumfield said: "These buildings can be
rehabilitated, successfully but plans to do so have been squeezed
out by property values, not a concern for people."
Vladimir Filonov / MT
Now decrepit, the pyatietazhki provided millions with their
first apartment.
True, khrushchyovki are not spacious, allowing only 11 square meters
per resident. Many haven't been renovated for decades; the pale
green and yellow interiors of many apartments are chipped, fading
and full of cheap, Soviet furniture.
But khrushchyovki gave the masses something they had been
unaccustomed to under the Stalinist dictatorship, with its hugely
invasive secret police, purges, camps and general lack of concern
for how people lived: a bit of privacy.
Vidansky said: "It was the first time people could have sex without
their neighbors there."
Marina, 82, who declined to give her last name, fears the future.
With her cane, she can now get from her first-floor apartment in her
khrushchyovki to a bench just outside. She lived her for decades
with her husband, who died 10 years ago; both of them served at the
front during World War II, she said.
"This house was full of soldiers -- to destroy such houses, this is
Heaven," Marina said, doing her best to keep her composure. "I'm not
going to move to the new building. I'm going to die here. I'll live
here maybe two or three more years, and then I will die."
Khrushchyovki not only offered residents warmth and a place of their
own, they also gave rise to a new Soviet order, a way of living and
organizing daily routines. Semyon Mikhailovsky, a professor of
architecture at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, noted that on
any given block, there would be a school, stores, parks and
playgrounds. The geometric order of khrushchyovki, Semyon said, were
Russia's answer to the German Bauhaus movement.
While the old design under Leonid Brezhnev evolved into taller
buildings with sturdier materials, the basic idea behind all Soviet
housing well into the 1980s remained the same -- comfortable,
no-frills apartments in large, impersonal housing blocs with easy
access to all of life's necessities at no cost.
By 1985, the year the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, took
power, a total of 60,000 pyatietazhki had been built; thousands of
larger but similar housing blocs had also gone up. The buildings
were cheap, filled a gaping housing hole, and could be built almost
overnight: The record was set in the summer of 1972, when builders
in Leningrad erected a pyatietazhki in five days.
Now the old order is yielding to the pressures of a housing market
that must make room for younger and richer residents born, in many
cases, years after Khrushchev passed away in 1971.
Some of those who have been resettled have been won over.
Yevgeny Ivanov, a 77-year-old retired engineer, said many of those
who had protested the move had quieted down since moving into their
new homes.
"We went from 60-something to 80 square meters," Ivanov said,
comparing his old apartment in the pyatietazhka near the Kakhovskaya
metro station to his new residence. "Things were alright in the old
building, but here it's better, more free."
On Volgogradsky Prospekt, the new and old tangle with each other,
weaving in and out of the same, sometimes-schizophrenic skyline.
While the new buildings housing Moscow's nascent middle class
continue popping up, whole neighborhoods of decades-old storefronts,
cafes, government agencies and grade schools linger behind.
According to the city complex web site, 40 apartment buildings on
the avenue will be demolished within the next four years. At 113
Volgogradsky, where Nikitina lives, many of the original residents
worked in the same textile factory.
Today, Nikitina, a widow who lives with her children, voices doubts
about th...