Zaryadyology

Abstract

This paper is written in lieu of an introduction to the political-aesthetics of Zaryadye Park, a $300 million, Kremlin- abutting prestige project, designed by the architects of Manhattan’s High Line on the ruins of the gargantuan Brezhnev-era Hotel Rossiya; which opened with fanfare by Vladimir Putin in September 2017. Zaryadye Park is the flagship of the Sobyanin Mayoralty’s ongoing campaign to erase the troublesome legacies of the Soviet era and the ‘wild capitalist’ Luzhkov Mayoralty (1991–2010) from its urban fabric. But Zaryadye — nicknamed ‘Putin’s Paradise’ — is also a prime exemplar, critics say, of the manner in which Moscow’s makeover has more to do with performance than reality: a cosmetic retouching of the city’s surface (and center), rather than a substantive repair of its dilapidated social and infrastructural fabric (and peripheries).

The relationship between performance and substance, simulation and reality, superstructure and infrastructure, state and art, in and around ‘Putin’s Paradise’ is discussed. How the continuities and ruptures — economic, political, aesthetic — between socialism and post-socialism, between the Luzhkov and Sobyanin eras, are performed, implemented and revealed there.

This paper was written towards the end of twelve months of fieldwork, carried out in collaboration with students at Moscow’s Vysokovksy Graduate School of Urbanism. We explore Zaryadye’s infrastructure and superstructure, performances and realities, through numerous prisms, among these: foundation myths, gift logic, bricolages of nested tendering processes, patriotic spectacles, soundscape controversies, competing authorship claims, clashing cults of (non-)personality. Furthermore, in an ‘ethnographic conceptualist’ vein, we consciously use performance and spectacle as a research method and output — our research fed directly into the substance of “Portal Zaryadye”, an exhibition, curated by the author