Rotting Soviet Leftovers Dominate Landscape of 'New Russia'

MOSCOW -- Not long ago, I was visiting a government building in a Russian province, heading up the stairs. Suddenly I felt a little disoriented, and I almost lost my balance. Then I realized why. The marble steps were so badly worn from use, they'd taken on deep depressions where people had worn away the center of the step. It was like walking up the crazy stairs in a Haunted House.

It happens often in Russia. The land is filled with broken old stairways, many of them filthy and foreboding. In the images of political and economic collapse that fill the news, it's often lost on outsiders that Russia is physically crumbling as well. Especially outside Moscow and a few other cities, the landscape tells a sad story. It is a horizon of despair.

Geography is central to how a people think of themselves and their history. Russia is a vast unending plain. It can be a place of incredible isolation. There are villages so far removed that they literally exist in another era. Get on a train and as it pulls out of Moscow, you can feel yourself being tugged inexorably deeper into another world, another universe, another century.

The Russian landscape is also extraordinarily impersonal. It's partly the physical hugeness of it. But it is also the legacy of the Soviet period. Everything was designed to make individuals feel small before the omnipotent power of the state. Soviet decisions on how cities were built have not been erased just because the Soviet state has disappeared. The designs remain, and they still shape how millions of Russians see their world every day.

The cities are ringed by huge, shabby, prefab concrete apartment blocks. These towers, foreboding in their sameness, usually meet the ground with nothing more than a scraggly bush or tree to soften the stark appearance. They overshadow the tiny, metal kiosks that dot the streets, lights burning late into the night, selling cigarettes, liquor and video tapes.

Often you are confronted by the massive, beached whales of Soviet-era commercial architecture. These are buildings which deliberately intimidate the individual -- stores with vast plate-glass windows, expansive facades and threatening overhangs. They are hulks. The plain-vanilla signs of the Soviet days are still in place: Bread. Milk. Groceries. I'm sure the designers never imagined they would one day be selling sleek Italian office furniture, Japanese televisions and all sorts of washing machines inside.

In an earlier time, some long-forgotten Soviet planner had a bright idea. He designed an iron-bar window grate with a semicircular "sun" in the corner and the rays, or bars, streaming outward. This pattern is depressingly repetitive in all of Russia. To me, it seems like the ultimate in impersonal, cookie-cutter design -- like only window grate was ever made. There was no choice, no deviation, no individual initiative. The shining sun is everywhere, but the horizon is not so bright. I imagine most people don't even notice it anymore, but it's another small piece of the post-Soviet Russian tableau.

Whenever Russia gets off its knees -- and economically, the country is still on its knees -- it will want to rebuild. This "re-generation" is important not only for abstract ideas like democracy and free markets. It's important for the landscape, too.

It's possible to glimpse that future now in some places in Moscow, where there are glistening new parks and monuments, refurbished hotels, fancy restaurants and brand new office towers. The killer potholes are being filled, at least in the center of the city. Here, the hulking and crumbling landscape is juxtaposed with a bright neon buzz that is part of the city's hyper-activity. Residential buildings have entrances that are smelly, dark dungeons, but sometimes the stairs lead down to spectacularly lavish and private "clubs."

I know a teacher who has lived here for decades and says her neighborhood looks better than ever before. There is even a new store, selling home-repair goods, like do-it-yourself plumbing and shelves. But, she says, she still hasn't gotten used to this brassy, flashy new store and the others like it. Not only are they expensive, she says, but she just doesn't feel comfortable in them. Also, if you need plumbing parts, you can buy them cheaper on the street, in the makeshift open-air markets.

Russia's newly rich certainly have not been shy in flaunting their wealth. They, too, are part of the contemporary landscape -- with massive new country "dachas," three and four-story, out-sized country "cabins." What's disturbing about them is not so much the garish architecture, but that they are so obviously out of place, rising up above the traditional village wooden houses.

Still, Moscow is an island. It is unlike just about any other place in Russia. The rejuvenation of Moscow is about money: those who have it are rebuilding, those who do not are left behind. The rest of Russia is rotting. Why? First, remember that a huge mess was inherited from the Soviet Union. The decay had set in long before the union collapsed, and the impersonal design was deliberate. Since then, for five difficult years, Russians have been trying to make a giant change, to try something completely new: democracy and free markets. For most of them, the change has been wrenching. It has demanded that everyone focus on survival. It has demanded that bread-winners hold down two or three jobs at once. There is not much time for them to go shopping in the do-it-yourself hardware store. People are preoccupied with the stress that the new system has put on every one of them, and not their surroundings.

Also, rebuilding Russia is a job for generations, not a few years. It's an enormous, expensive task, and right now the country seems to have more pressing needs. When there's not enough money to pay pensioners and soldiers, when the state itself is crumbling at the core, it's hard to worry about the crumbling landscape. That can come later.

How do people cope? Many just look inward. They retreat to their apartments and slam the door. They don't worry about the mess in the courtyard. Perhaps they don't even see it. All too often, the eye-catching changes in the landscape are the unpleasant, in-your-face kind, such as the five-story tall Marlboro man billboard in our neighborhood.

Surely, many Russians are embittered. It's especially acute when you see the decay in museums, when you see the finest university in a state of disrepair, when you show up at a once-esteemed research institute or literary journal, and find yourself squeezed into a tiny closet because the usable space has been given over to a shoe store. Like so much about today's Russia, the landscape speaks to you, and it speaks of humiliation.

After a long while, when people stop working three jobs to feed their families and can worry less about crime and corruption, when banks start lending real money to industry and a middle class takes shape beyond just Moscow, there should be a new landscape for a new Russia. One can hope there will be.