From Propaganda to Nostalgia:
The Decaying Disneyland of Moscow
Story and photos by Matthew Davis

MOSCOW — Soviet propaganda was not known for its subtlety. For citizens of the USSR, it was as stern and authoritarian as the policies it stood for. Even the buildings were designed to menace and impose. Hardly what you'd call the stuff of happy childhood memories.

Despite the harsh hand and mouth of the Party, a new wave of nostalgia for Communist times has surfaced in Russia. Apparently, time has glossed over memories of Soviet hardships, giving way to warm and fuzzy feelings for times of old.

Indeed, according to a Dec. 29 study by the Yuri Levada Analytical Center, Russia's most widely-respected polling agency, 67 percent of Russians say they regret the fall of the USSR.

These days, the signs are everywhere. Hawkers roam the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg flogging Soviet souvenirs; uniforms, medals, flags, and coins from Communist days are hot sellers. Moscow is even home to a number of USSR-themed bars, where the decor, staff attire, and service are throwbacks to the good old days.

Enter the ultimate experience in over-the-top state promotion: the Soviet theme park. Known by its Russian initials, VDNKh, it's a case study in architecture as propaganda on the outskirts of Moscow.

VDNKh is a monstrous 578-acre park in northwest Moscow, (accessible via the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya metro line). It houses more than 80 pavilions and monuments originally designed to showcase the achievements of the USSR. Each one is devoted to a specific aspect of the Soviet Union: agriculture, economics, science, industry and hunting, to name a few. And of course, there's the cosmonaut pavilion.

The place is a theme park of ideology, a carnival of communism. VDNKh was designed solely to boost the glory of the State. Welcome to Soviet Disneyland.

VDNKh is lined with once-grand boulevards, fountains and statues, all adorned with the icons of communism. When Stalin had it built in 1939, it was open to all Russians as a kind of state-approved Soviet world's fair. Visitors would flock to the site for a day and be duly dazzled by the all-providing power of the State. Then they'd go line up for bread.

The years following the Empire's collapse saw a knee-jerk purge of all things Soviet from public spaces: streets were renamed, commemorative plaques were defaced, and hundreds of statues were torn down. Indeed, VNDKh is one of the few bastions of the Soviet State left that generations too young to remember the Empire can visit.

For them, VDNKh must function as a kind of surreal testament to the entirely different world they would have lived in, had they only been born some years earlier. For tourists, it's an intriguing chance to encounter the onetime showpiece of the Soviet Union. For older Russians, it's either a source of nostalgia or simply an eyesore.

A walk through VDNKh provokes a deep sense of irony. The city of Moscow, lacking the funds to either tear down or reconfigure the site, has rented out the space inside the buildings to dealers of cheap electronics, furniture, toys, clothing and even handguns. The site now functions as a gigantic marketplace for goods of every description. None of the exterior facades or monuments has been removed. Buildings topped with nine-foot-tall bronze hammers and sickles are now makeshift bazaars where shady dealers peddle cheap Chinese electronics. Here, at the former epicenter of all things Communist, capitalism mushrooms.

But that's old news. New thinking is taking root. According to a number of writers, Russians have been slowly redressing their attitudes towards their country, its economy and the plight of the ordinary Russian. The frenzied fetish for all things Western that swept the nation during the decade following the fall of the USSR seems to have dropped off, replaced by a new reverence for the old system.

For many, nostalgia for the Soviet era goes deeper than memorabilia and public monuments. A growing number of Russians pine for a return to red ideology.

According to French journalist Jean-Marie Chauvier, Russians are jaded by the fact that most are worse off now then they were under communism, as the country is now run by a core of private oligarchs. Neo-Communist political parties have repeatedly tried to pounce on this. Glossing over the gulags, censorship and bread lines of the old system, they call for a return to the guaranteed security of Communist days. More and more people are listening.

A trip to VDNKh illuminates this new wave of thinking. It's been 70 years since the place was built, and more than a decade since it was used as intended. As a free-wheeling market, kitsch and nostalgia replace reverence and fear as the dominant feelings in the place.

Now that it's little more than a bazaar where anything goes, it's easy to forget old atrocities and wish to return to a rosier past.

The same goes, it seems, for Russia herself.

E-mail Matthew Davis at graytona@hotmail.com.