The negative public reaction to the illegal demolition of historical and cultural objects and their barbaric reconstruction, of course, existed before, spilling out from time to time in the media, then in the form of open letters to the authorities. However, these were scattered, "pinpoint" strikes, and it was "Arhnadzor" who managed to turn them into a massive attack, provoking a whole wave of publications, pickets and other protests. The most important result of the year seems to be that this wave finally reached the authorities - the Moscow Heritage Committee not only became tougher to define its position in relation to manipulations with protection legislation, but even sued several investors. One of the reasons for the high-profile trial was the superstructure of the Pasternak House in Oruzheiny Lane, and the other was the seizure from the owner of the Orlov-Denisov House on Bolshaya Lubyanka. As far as I remember, the Moscow mayor himself, in 2009, threatened with criminal liability for damaging the heritage, and the word “remake” in the lexicon of officials finally turned into a curse.
The most successful campaign of the year in defense of heritage, perhaps, can be considered the action to save the Church of the Resurrection in Kadashi. Recall that directly next to the temple, the city was going to build an office and residential complex "Five Capitals", the dimensions of which were such that the monument would inevitably be built up on three sides with massive buildings, and the panoramic views of Zamoskvorechye would be hopelessly distorted. The public protests were actively supported by the Moscow Heritage Committee, and as a result, the Moscow authorities abandoned the initial version of the project threatening the monument. Officials even admitted that the order of the Moscow Government permitting this construction was issued in violation of the law. True, the investor, relying on a number of other decrees, managed to "cleanse" the entire territory surrounding the temple from the historical buildings, which made it impossible to include this monument in the UNESCO list. This last fact speaks volumes about how imperfect the current system of heritage protection is.
However, Kadashi is not the only example of a generally successful resolution of the conflict between investors and defenders of genuine antiquity. So, the Moscow mayor this year ordered to mothball the house of the architectural school of the famous architect Matvey Kazakov (corner of Bolshoy and Maly Zlatoustinsky lanes). The chambers of the Pafnutyev-Borovsky Monastery also received a conservation status, a fragment of which was moved back in Soviet times and thereby saved from destruction by Pyotr Baranovsky. But the chambers of the Zinovievs in Bolshoi Afanasyevsky Lane, unfortunately, continue to remain hostage to an uncertain property status and stand in ruins.
But, perhaps, the most serious achievement of Arkhnadzor is not even local campaigns to save certain heritage sites, but the movement's ability and readiness to conduct a dialogue with the authorities at the legislative level. During the year Arkhnadzor took an active part in the meetings of the Moscow City Duma and the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation. Sergei Tkachenko, director of the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan of Moscow, even called Arhnadzor "an irreconcilable and highly qualified opposition." In confirmation of this, the movement joined in the adjustment of the controversial draft of the Actualized Master Plan for the Development of Moscow until 2020. In total, "Arkhnadzor" submitted to the Moscow City Duma deputies about 230 amendments to this town-planning document. The main drawback of the general plan, according to the movement's activists, is that it completely ignores about a thousand of Moscow's newly discovered monuments, i.e. those objects for which there is an expert opinion of the Moscow Heritage Committee, but there are still no resolutions of the Moscow Government, and more than 1,500 declared, i.e. those that do not yet have protection status at all. In total, this is a third of the entire array of capital cultural objects! The authorities went to meet "Arhnadzor" and adopted an amendment stating that all newly identified monuments are automatically taken into account in the so-called. reorganization zones. But, unfortunately, this is not enough: firstly, it turns out that the monuments are protected only within the outlines of the buildings themselves, while their territories are actually defenseless, and secondly, the interests of the 1,500 declared objects are still not taken into account in the general plan.
The very fact that so many historically valuable buildings are still "dangling" without status, eloquently testifies to the neglect of heritage objects for many years. And only now the Moscow Heritage Committee, in the wake of general interest in the monuments, has bothered, as Konstantin Mikhailov put it at a press conference, "to start raking up their Augean stables." Since the summer of 2009, the committee has been assisted in this by the Commission of the First Deputy Mayor Vladimir Resin. During four sessions, she examined several hundred monuments, in most cases confirming their conservation status.
However, the opposite happened: often, working with a list of newly discovered monuments, for which a priori there are already conclusions of the Moscow Heritage Committee experts, the commission headed by Resin unreasonably left the objects without any status at all, or conferred the title of “valuable object of the urban development environment” on them. It sounds, of course, beautiful, but legally it does not mean anything, and if anything can be guessed behind such decisions, then, as a rule, a stubborn investor and an already developed reconstruction project with demolition. It is no secret that often such stories in Moscow are also preceded by fires. There were several such "fire victims" in 2009 in the capital. This is the house of Bykov Lev Kekushev, and the house that burned down literally last week, which was based on the two-story chambers of the Gurievs of the 17th century. The printing house of El Lissitzky, which had long been damaged by fire, also lost its status, the only completed project of this architect. Finally, in the opinion of the members of "Arkhnadzor", the exclusion from the list of the so-called. The firing house on Nikolskaya, where the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court was located, which sent about 30 thousand prisoners to execution, and in the late 1990s it was planned to create a museum of military repression.
"Arkhnadzor" considers the Shakhovskys' estate reconstructed for the new stage of "Helikon-Opera" as a bitter loss of the year. Rosokhrankultura refused this object, citing a typo in the address of the monument. But the procurator recognized the claim of "Arkhnadzor" as legitimate, and perhaps a criminal case on the fact of the destruction of the monument of the 18th-19th centuries will nevertheless be initiated. The Children's World building can almost certainly be considered the second big loss of the year. Now it belongs to VTB Bank, and its representatives do not react in any way to the arguments of the heritage defenders. There was no response to the letter signed by the rector of the Moscow Architectural Institute Dmitry Shvidkovsky and other respected architects. And photographs taken a few days ago indicate that inside the workers continue to destroy the interiors of the department store, breaking out marble balustrades and metal floor lamps, and they do this in full accordance with the law, since the subject of protection in this case is only the outer walls of the object, and even then without the obligatory preservation of source materials.
At a press conference dedicated to the results of the first year of Arkhnadzor's work, much was said about the fact that domestic security legislation, of course, has a lot of gaps, but even larger gaps are found in how the value of the true historical environment is perceived by society as a whole and subjects "in particular. That is why the protest activity of "Arkhnadzor" is conducted hand in hand with the educational one. A special section within the movement is engaged in creative projects, among which it is enough to recall Rustam Rakhmatullin's press tour of the semi-closed objects of Nikolskaya Street, courtyard concerts at the walls of the Synodal House and on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, museumification of Bakhrushin Street, for whose houses Arhnadzor made the appropriate plates. The movement is also reviving the half-forgotten tradition of festivities on Moscow boulevards - carnival "shatalis" that return the city to its inhabitants. And in early December, "Arhnadzor" opened its club within the walls of the Turgenev library-reading room and thus put its educational activities "on stream". However, this does not mean that the movement has ceased to be sensitive to what is happening on the streets of Moscow. In particular, Arkhnadzor regularly monitors the state of both monuments and objects worthy of this status. In total, in 2009, the movement managed to defend 25 addresses of already resettled houses from the "passable list". Sometimes it’s just a matter of minutes. So, thanks to one of the volunteers who voluntarily inspects a number of central streets of the city on a daily basis, it was possible to literally stop by the hands of the workers who intended to destroy the interiors of the famous "House with Caryatids" in Pechatnikov Lane. In general, the voluntary responsible protection of monuments continues, and, unfortunately, most likely, Arkhnadzor's work will take a very long time.
