Economist.com Cities Guide: Moscow Briefing - April 2006

News this month

And the walls came tumbling down

Moscow's crumbling infrastructure is in dire need of repair, according to local building experts. This announcement came in the wake of the Basmanny market collapse on February 23rd, which killed 66 people and was only the most dramatic in a string of accidents. From December to March, five Moscow buildings either partly or completely collapsed. On March 13th alone, three roofs in the Moscow area caved in.

According to an independent building-inspection bureau, these disasters cannot be attributed solely to design flaws—though most of the blame for Basmanny was placed on the architect, Nodar Kancheli, who also designed a Moscow water park that collapsed in 2004, killing 28. Poor maintenance and neglect, dating from the fall of the Soviet Union, are said to be the real culprits. The city's chronic underfunding of repairs will be partly addressed by increases in the capital's building budgets, but according to Tatyana Fillipova, a spokesperson for the city’s inspection agency, “It is hard to make up for all the lost time at once”.

Mourning Milosevic

The death on March 11th of Slobodan Milosevic, a former Serbian dictator, provoked a variety of responses around the world, not least in Russia’s capital. Relations between the Milosevic regime and Russia were warm, and the ex-dictator’s family now lives in Moscow in self-imposed exile. Though Mr Milosevic was on trial for 66 counts of war crimes, many in Russia sympathised with him; on March 13th protestors outside the American embassy held banners declaring, “Milosevic is a hero! Bush is a Fascist!”

Moscow’s politicians also expressed scepticism about the circumstances surrounding Mr Milosevic’s death. In the preceding months Mr Milosevic had asked to visit Moscow to treat his heart condition, but the UN tribunal rejected his request, despite assurances from Russian officials that he would be returned to the Hague. Shortly before he died from a heart attack, Mr Milosevic sent a letter to the Russian embassy in the Netherlands alleging that he was being poisoned. This prompted Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, to dispute the official autopsy results, and a team of Russian doctors went to the Hague to verify the work of the Dutch autopsy team. But they did not find evidence of foul play: although the Russian doctors expressed concern that Mr Milosevic had not had access to specialist help, they confirmed a heart attack as the cause of death.

A flower for the lady?

One of the most popular of Russia's many prazdniks, or holidays, is International Women's Day, celebrated on March 8th. Far bigger than the western-imported Valentine's Day, this festival traditionally sees men buying presents, particularly flowers, for their lovers, mothers and female colleagues. Canny retailers hike up prices for the occasion: roses were being sold for up to $7 each at a stall in central Moscow.

This year street vendors were not the only ones to profit from the holiday. Moscow customs officers, in a scheme code-named “Operation Hyacinth”, cracked down on undeclared flower imports from February 13th to March 11th, and claimed to have boosted customs duties by $600,000. Dutch imports were especially suspect, with several importers accused of trying to evade duty by declaring cheaper flower types or lower weights for their cargo. The vast majority of Russia's imported flowers come from or through the Netherlands, which exported €101m ($121m) worth of plants and flowers to the country in 2005.

The insider

Irina Khakamada’s racy new memoir, “Sex in Big Politics”, exposes the seamy underside of Moscow political life, as its title might suggest. In a supposedly egalitarian country where male MPs vastly outnumber their female counterparts and there are no senior female ministers, Ms Khakamada has written an informal guide to help women navigate Russia’s political arena. She writes from experience, as a respected liberal politician who ran for president in 2004.

Appropriately the book was released just before International Women's Day, on March 6th.
Ms Khakamada's tips include clothing advice, how to rank groups of officials at a glance and how to politely ward off unwelcome advances from lascivious colleagues. But risqué title aside, she has a serious point to make: Moscow's political culture is not only male-dominated but truly rotten. Its politicians are frequently in hock to big industry and many are interested only in serving themselves. Through plenty of personal anecdotes, she relays how promotion is always linked to personal connections and how, at the end of the day, the corridors of the parliament building reek of vodka.

Whoops

The efficiency and grandeur of the Moscow metro may be unparalleled, but its safety procedures apparently need some work. On March 19th workers assembling an advertising billboard drove a concrete post through the street surface and into the path of an oncoming train. The driver saw the large pillar coming through the tunnel roof and quickly engaged the emergency breaks, but it was too late to prevent a collision. The pillar hit the right side of the first carriage, then became lodged in the roof of the third. Six teams of emergency workers helped evacuate the train's 500 passengers, and remarkably nobody was hurt. A section of the affected metro line was disabled for the rest of the day and buses helped ferry stranded commuters.

Police caught the five guilty workers, who tried to flee the scene in a passing mashrutka (public transport minibus). The Moscow metro prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation of the violation of safety rules during billboard erection.

Catch if you can

April 2006

Photobienniale—2006

March-June 2006

This photography festival is one of the crowning jewels of Moscow’s cultural calendar. With over 100 exhibitions in nearly as many venues, this year's Photobienniale will feature home-grown talent as well as international names. One of the festival’s most popular spots is sure to be the Zurab Tsereteli Gallery, which has Simon Norfolk’s powerful photos of Afghanistan, James Hill’s images of the Beslan tragedy in Chechnya and Sebastião Salgado’s series “The hand of man”, in which the Brazilian photographer documents men toiling around the world. Other promising venues include the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, which will display Nan Goldin’s counter-cultural work and the intriguingly titled “Photography in Document 1880-1950”.

Zurab Tsereteli Gallery, Prechistenka ul., 21. Metro: Kropotkinskaya, Oktyabrskaya, Park Kultury. Tel: +9 (095) 201-5840. Open: Wed-Fri noon-10pm; Sat-Sun 10am-5pm.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Ulitsa Petrovka 25. Metro: Pushkinskaya. Tel: + 9 (095) 200 6695. Open: Mon, Wed, Fri noon-7pm; Sat-Sun 11am-6pm.

The festival is also at other venues throughout the city. For exact listings, check www.afisha.ru (in Russian) or the culture page of the Moscow Times.

More from the Moscow cultural calendar