Old and New

We are staying in a "guesthouse" (extended stay hotel) owned by S's university.  Near this guesthouse, was an old cathedral, dating back at least 200 years.  In the background is a standard Soviet style high rise apartment building.  Not one we are staying in, but very typical of its period (probably 1980s).

Comment by S, the sociologist (if you find lectures boring, you can skip this part)

When we lived in Russia before, we were in Novosibirsk, which was started as a settlement only in 1893, that is barely 24 years before the October Revolution of 1917.  There were hardly any buildings in Novosibirsk built more than fifty or sixty years ago; it is an entirely "Soviet" city, as many cities in Russia are.  Before the Revolution, most people lived in villages.  The Soviet authorities decreed the building of factories, to catch up to the Western countries in industrial production, and with factories come cities.  So the landscape in Novosibirsk is almost entirely "modernist" architecture of the 1950s and 1960s up to the present.  ("Post modern" architecture by 2010 was starting to appear in Novosibirsk, but only just fragments.)

So our first few days here, it has been very disconcerting to see the modernist Soviet styles (and there are several) standing cheek by jowl with buildings from the 19th century and even older.  Though a lot of Moscow's "face" was remade to "show" the world the "new Soviet nation," a lot of old things remain, and Moscow is in fact very "un-Soviet" in its layout and visual appearance.   A map of Moscow shows it to be typical of European cities founded in the early middle ages, the "hub and spoke" pattern: a center core surrounded by city walls, and radial lines streaming out of the core in various directions.  This hub and spoke pattern also is illustrated in the numerous major train stations, each one with trains heading off in unique directions (the train stations being named for the city at the end of that direction).  This pattern was continued in the three major airports, which originally specialized in flights to particular directions.

In short, Moscow is full of these juxtapositions of old and new, especially toward the city center (which we are not).  Farther from the center, the Soviet modernist styles prevail.  But more about that later.