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Since the end of the Soviet era, thousands of kiosks and pavilions,
above, have bloomed in Moscow. Crowded around metro stations,
these small shops sell everything from auto parts to frozen food
to vodka.
(Photo by Jim Curtis)
| Muscovites find the joys of buying and selling at their local pavilions, not the upscale new malls. by Jim Curtis Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who understands the value of PR as well as any Western politician, has just hosted an elaborate celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow's founding. For the better part of 1997, the great city organized special concerts, exhibitions, dances, and other events. The festivities concluded in September with a grand theatrical performance, folk dancing at Kolomenskoye, a seventeenth-century architectural complex, and fireworks at the city's biggest stadium. All this didn't mean a lot to the average Ivan and Ludmila, though. They were a lot more interested in finding clothes that would fit the kids, fresh vegetables for dinner, and a good tape to watch on the new VCR. But when Ivan and Ludmila go shopping, they don't to the Actor Galleria, a new upscale mall in the heart of downtown. They go to their local kiosks and trading pavilions. These small, utilitarian buildings--or "nonstationary sites," in Russian legal jargon--are the most visible evidence of the new commercial order in Moscow. High-profile, high-profit companies (the city now boasts more than 200 ad agencies) have snapped up almost all of Moscow's offices, leaving small businesses out on the street--literally. Prefabricated and semipermanent, kiosks and pavilions have provided a quick fix for Moscow's critical shortage of commercial space. These small buildings crowd around virtually every metro station, selling everything from frozen food to jeans to rubber duckies, creating a hurly-burly, catch-as-catch-can atmosphere of buying and selling and negotiating. The latest European techno-pop is usually blaring from tinny loudspeakers; kids are hanging out; and housewives who need to make every ruble count in an inflationary economy circulate, comparing the prices and quality of goods. It is a scene very much like that of Delancey Street in turn-of-the-century New York. About the size of glorified ticket booths--rarely more than six feet by 10 feet--kiosks are open, modest affairs made of plywood or some light, synthetic material. They are usually rented by people selling small items like shoe polish and toothpaste or produce from the truck farms around Moscow. Pavilions, on the other hand, are usually prefabricated structures, made of heavy plastic and sheet metal panels. Pavilions are more like "real" stores--grocery stores in them usually have frozen food cases, for example--and are often clustered together in what Russians call "trade associations" (and what Americans would call a strip mall). No one knows just how many of these impromptu shops exist in Moscow, though city officials are no doubt making brave efforts to keep track of them. New ones appear every day, just as old ones disappear; in a city with over 8 million people, there are surely several thousand of them. But while their numbers may be hard to determine, Mayor Luzhkov and his colleagues on the city council have done their best to regulate and control this new presence on Moscow's streets--at least as much as anyone can. Their principal instrument is a resolution of the Moscow City Council passed in early 1996, now trailed by many minor amendments. The resolution, with its various subsections, offers some unexpected insights into the mind-set of post-Soviet Russia. To open a kiosk, one must obtain a permit from the administration of the raion, or precinct, in which it is to be located. A sketch of the proposed structure, however modest, must be included in the application, as well as a fee for the clerk who processes it. There's more to it than this, though; so many Muscovites want to open kiosks that the city has mandated a bidding process. A special commission examines all the bids for a given location and accepts the highest one--in principle, anyhow. In keeping with Russia's ancient tradition of bureaucratic corruption, money no doubt changes hands under the table, and friends of commission members often turn out to have the highest bid. Needless to say, no one is willing to talk on the record about such matters. Since by law the kiosks and pavilions are located in public spaces, the city is able to charge rent. The payment is determined by such criteria as location and goods sold, as well as the extremely vague standard of "social significance"--surely a carryover from socialist thought. In the Soviet period, social significance meant anything the authorities wanted it to mean; the Bolshoi Theater could have as much social significance as a hydroelectric power station or a shoe store. Many other kiosk matters are regulated by law--laws that owners of comparable small businesses in America would consider an infringement of free trade. As opposed to the chaos of Main Street that Robert Venturi finds "almost all right," Beaux-Arts uniformity remains the order of the day for Moscow's planners. Thus, the first goal of the city's kiosk resolution is "the establishment of a single order for the... deployment and further use of nonstationary sites." It's this official pursuit of a "single order" that has led Moscow's government to require an "even distribution" of goods and services throughout the city, though just how that will be achieved has never really been explained. The city has also mandated the gradual removal of all businesses that sell audiotapes, spare parts for cars (a very big business in the new Moscow), liquor, and food. But liquor is sold on just about every street corner, and even small pavilions have frozen food sections. But why does Yury Luzhkov, who is said to have presidential ambitions, care where people buy and sell car parts? The city's overreaching regulations are not just a legacy of the Soviet obsession with micromanaging everything that moved, though that is certainly part of it. But the answer also goes further back in Russian history. Ever since the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Russian government has been trying to regulate the appearance of its cities and the trade conducted in them. And for centuries, administrators attempted to meet the challenge of governing the enormous, sparsely populated expanses of their country by imposing uniformity on them. The kiosks themselves have abundant precedent in the city's history; except for the Soviet period, Moscow has always been a city of trade. So it's not surprising that the return of kiosks to the streets has been accompanied by the return of other Moscow traditions, including the reappearance of St. George, the patron saint of the city. These days, St. George can be seen everywhere--on the city's coat of arms at City Hall, as a statue in the new Victory Park, on the logo of an insurance company, and on huge billboards. In their different ways, St. George and the kiosks are satisfying some of the needs the Soviet government ignored. At the kiosks, Russians' longstanding consumer hunger is gradually and partially being sated. And around the city, the new, ambiguous images of St. George--are they religious symbols or secular decorations?--are addressing something deeper, the need to make connections between the present and the prerevolutionary past. Indeed, Russians need to figure out where they've been in order to figure out where they're going. But they are finding it extremely difficult to do so. Repeatedly, the Muscovites I've met express bewilderment when they contemplate their country's history. So much has happened to them, so rapidly, that they cannot assimilate it all. When asked about this or that odd aspect of Russian life, a friend often says, "Russia is a land of miracles," and lets it go at that. As for the average Ivan and Ludmila, their comments are usually limited to expressions of delight at the astonishing availability of goods (kiwi fruit in Moscow!), as well as shock at the prices of those goods. Although they may seem modest to Americans accustomed to megamalls, the kiosks and pavilions on the streets of Moscow are evidence of a new kind of revolution. Although their goods are still relatively expensive, they have the potential to do what the Communists could never do in seven decades of misrule--satisfy the ordinary needs of ordinary people. |
Keywords:
Moscow, street, traffic
