WEBSITE
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
(Paragraph on "under construction")
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MOSCOW
METPO
(METRO, subway)

TWELVE STATIONS ON THE
KOЛЬЦEBAЯ ЛИHИЯ
KOL’TSEVAIA LINIIA
(Circle Line)
Sometimes called "Bol'shoe kol'tso" [The Big Circle]

© 1999:2006; Alan Kimball

What follows are descriptions and photos (by me, unless otherwise indicated) of the decorative art found in certain entrances, passageways and underground stations of the Moscow METRO [MOCKOBCKOE METPO]. At several points I provide links to SAC to help put descriptions and photos into a wider historical context.

Attention is here devoted largely to the twelve stations on the famous Circle Line [KOЛЬЦEBAЯ ЛИHИЯ].

Twelve stations of the Circle Line,
listed from Kursk in a counter-clockwise direction =

1.  Kurskaia
2.  Komsomolskaia
3.  Prospekt Mira
4.  Novoslobodskaia
5.  Belorusskaia
6.  Krasnopresnenskaia
7.  Kievskaia
8.  Park Kul’tury
9.  Oktiabr’skaia
10. Dobryninskaia
11. Pavletskaia
12. Taganskaia

The project began on a September evening in 1999. I walked from the Gostinitsa Natsional (National Hotel) under the Manezh square, via the underground pedestrian passage to Ploshchad’ revoliutsii (Revolution Square, with its entrance to the METRO station of the same name). I was on my way to the Circle Line. The station Ploshchad' Revoliutsii is not on the Circle Line, but it connects with it in one stop at the Kursk station, and it is so remarkable that I include a description of it here.

Each September night the underground passage from the hotel to the square was filled with music. Amateur folk singers plucked seven-string guitars and sang. They placed tins for contributions at their feet. Also a professionally trained ensemble (sometimes only a quartet, other times expanded to a larger troop) played Bach, Vivaldi and other chamber pieces. The ensemble apparently had first claim to a busy intersection of two underground passages, and they always had a large audience. I was so moved the first time I saw and heard them I placed a large American bill in their tin. With budgets of the great theatres, conservatories, academies, and other cultural institutions still in shambles, accomplished artists and scholars had to scrap to put food on the table. In 2004 a violinist, quite young but apparently under professional training, played Beatles tunes for handouts. This was the summer in which Beatle tunes burst out everywhere, a pleasing anachronism quite harmonious with the new Muscovite youth culture, with its automobile consumerism and "hanging at the mall". That underground pedestrian passageway from the National Hotel to Revolution Square was interrupted after 1999 by the construction of a deeply dug (several stories underground), startling, ultra-voguish shopping mall called by the old market name "Okhotnyi riad" [ID].

The city was illuminated like never before. In the past, mercury-vapor lamps helped guide night-time pedestrians and traffic, what there was of it. Now warm bright floodlights revealed the facades of central Moscow’s structures, ancient and new.

The wide surface of Ploshchad’ Revoliutsii and the adjoining Ploshchad’ Sverdlova (since 1999 renamed Teatral'naia Ploshchad') were cordoned off for in-line skaters. Dozens of boys, girls, young  men and women, careened around the asphalt square, playing some form of pick-up tag. The imposing Gostinitsa Moskovskaia still stood. [W devoted to its demolition]

The Eternal Flame

After crossing under Manezh Square, before I headed down into the METRO system, I walked south to the Kremlin wall where an eternal flame commemorates the victims of WW2. There are always visitors here. It is still a custom for a fresh bride and groom, direct from their wedding, to visit the site, an ironic twentieth-century fertility rite. The multi-millions dead bless the reproductive couple. On the red marble apron around the eternal flame is inscribed =

ИMЯ TBOE HEИЗBECTHO, ПOДBИГ TBOЙ БEЗCMEPTEH
(YOUR NAME IS UNKNOWN, YOUR HEROIC ACCOMPLISHMENT WILL LIVE ON FOREVER)

[I]

Kolonna revoliutsii
[Column of Revolution, or Obelisk of Revolution]

I walked past the Column of Revolution just a few steps away from the Eternal Flame. This obelisk was originally constructed at this site in 1913 to honor the 300th anniversary of one-family, Romanov tsarist rule. Only five years later, in 1918, it was converted to the service of the young revolution. This happened within the first months of the Soviet Revolution and helps explain the somewhat naive and idealistic implications of the obelisk. Close attention to the revolutionary obelisk suggests that the conversion of the obelisk, from tsarist to Soviet, was hastily conceived and executed. But it has stood nearly 90 years, throughout the Soviet period and well into the post-Soviet period, and it still stands with no obvious plans for its removal, or restoration of the Romanov commemoration, or yet further (Putinesque) transformation.

The obelisk is ca. 20-foot high and inscribed from top to bottom on its north face in Cyrillic script with an eclectic list of European "radicals". The list does not include Lenin, but has room, a conspicuous blank space, just below the lowest name, "Plekhanov". It is hard to puzzle out the order of these names. Was there an original intention to put Lenin in the lowest blank spot, implying he was the heir of this rich and diverse European-wide tradition? Was that intention rendered impossible after Stalinist political culture took hold of the revolution? The obelisk provokes surprising thoughts about early Soviet views on Bolshevik "genealogy".

Beginning at the top, Marx and Engels fit perfectly with Soviet political culture. The list continues in a less coherent order. Names are, with one exception, clustered in major Europeans language groups, German (5), Italian (1), English (2), French (6) and Russian (5). But no other order is immediately apparent =

Marx
Engels
Liebknecht
Lassalle
Bebel
Campanella
Melliet [Sometimes spelled Meillet]
Winstanley [Uinstlei]
T. More
Saint-Simon
Vaillant [Val’ian]
Fourier
Juarès
Proudhon
Bakunin
Chernyshevskii
Lavrov
Mikhailovskii
Plekhanov

Some of the mystery derives from the presence of two Frenchmen= Léo Meillet and Edouard Vaillant. What about Meillet?. Might I have misidentified an Italian figure (listed just after Campanella)? Five figures separate Meillet from Vaillant. Yet both their marginally significant political careers ran from the Paris Commune into the 20th century. They were both moderate followers of the political conspirator and always-ready rebel August Blanqui. Meillet was an effective leader of the "Committee of Public Safety" and commander of Parisian revolutionary forces against the French army, but he supported reconciliation between the two sides as the 1871 civil war loomed. He then faded into English exile after the Commune was crushed. Vaillant was an education minister who struggled against Catholic Church influence in schools, held other important governmental posts in the Commune, but also faded into English exile, only to return much later and take up a position of chauvinist patriotism as WW1 broke out.

"Reading" the Moscow METRO

Leaving the kolonna behind, I launched myself on a subway trip around the Circle Line. I stepped off at each station and walked it in a circle, taking note of decorative detail for the first time.

Three years later, I began to photograph representative decorative fixtures.

Then, in the summer of 2006, I posted this page and began attachment of photos.

This is an on-going project, a "work in progress". I return to Moscow with some regularity and set aside time always -- especially in those hours after libraries and archives have closed -- to address one or another of the deficiencies of this current website. My descriptions are those of an amateur esthete, and my "photos" are really only "snapshots", poorly executed in too many cases and awaiting replacement after the next visit to Moscow. The website thus still fails to do justice to the decorative art itself, to the METRO's affective beauty -- I would even say significant and affective beauty.

The METRO is not only the most beautiful in the world, it is more than ordinarily "communicative". Architectural structures can be "read", and not just the words, as in the case of the names listed on the Column of Revolution.

Travelers read the METRO, usually in its "wide-zoom", palatial grandeur. That is indeed a good way to read one of the most important messages intended by shapers of Soviet culture = Earlier, only a noble elite could surround itself with monumental beauty. Now, the people in their work-a-day lives, simply getting to the job or otherwise moving around this gigantic city, will experience opulence on a high-aristocratic or tsarist scale through these magnificent halls.  If aristocrats earlier erected great palaces for the privileged few, now the working class will erect great palaces for the common folk

Consider a few wide-zoom vistas = [??LATER]

Pre-Soviet Russian radicals frequently insisted that their goal was to make a barin [noble lord] out of every muzhik [peasant]. They were ready to struggle and die to achieve shared economic prosperity and universal noble refinement. It could be argued that egalitarian and modernizing trends were too tightly packed together in this pre-Soviet radical formula. Muzhiks might prefer to abolish all barins and shape their own destiny. This seldom occurred to political leaders from the ranks of the intelligentsia. It did not occur to the revolutionary cultural elite that the working class might have no natural interest at all in being promoted into the environment and habits of a superannuated nobility. The people might prefer to find their own way.

The clash between elevated expectations and everyday outcomes is a familiar feature of Russian history, and not just Russian. For example, environmentalists mobilize against the automobile, promote alternative and public forms of transportation, and agitate for a more naturally beautiful world, but every month the past several years thousands of new personal automobiles turn onto the crowded streets of Moscow and seek parking wherever there is the slightest space, on sidewalks and, in winter, even in the covered entrances to METRO stations. In the summer of 2006, a knowledgeable Muscovite told me that the monthly rate of increase in the number of automobiles had reached 20,000. Few members of the post-Soviet intelligentsia approve of this.

Here's another example, another post-Soviet example, of the "nekul'turnaia" combination of contemporary, right-now pop and old-world grandeur = the fantastic shopping mall dug deep into the grounds of the old Okhotnyi riad [Hunter's Row, Bird Market Row, a very old designation of a very old section of town]. Garish advertisement and shop-front displays feature near-naked, anorexic teenage models in the very latest, most faddish kostiumy. In the summer of 2006 a swimsuit display showed across the crotch of a man's Speedo-style trunks the bold-face Latin-lettered eructation "F[bleep]CK". Youthful hip-hop tunes are piped throughout. All these familiar features of contemporary "Western" commercial culture are arrayed within a deeply excavated but otherwise conventional ancient-regime architectural structure. Look at the heavy marble appointments, statuary, and fountain..

The global question of our time, and not just for Russians, might be, "Are venders of commercial culture as wrong about their muzhiki as were the patronizing Russian intelligentsia and ambitious Soviet planners? Might the modern world eventually display as little natural interest in being promoted into the environment and habits of brainless consumerism as were muzhiks in being promoted into the environment and habits of superannuated Russian aristocrats?" Patronizing is very different from condescending, yet the two can work together. Patronizing involves promotion of one's own elevated agenda in the midst of folk presumed inferior. Condescending involves a pretence at lowering one's self from an elevated status into the inferior ways of hoi poloi. Both actions pretend to influence and benefit inferiors. The Column of Revolution lists a number of figures who, rightly or wrongly, thought they found a way to hope, plan or act for a better human future without patronizing or condescending.

Here's yet another example of esthetic discord between elite hopes and popular inclination. To this day pensioners like to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in Soviet-style Moscow and Petersburg banquet halls. In 2002 a small group of us joined just such a celebration. From the ornate rococo ceiling an original massive chandelier suspended itself  forty feet above the dance floor. But now a small and, in spots, “toothless” disco ball hung to the side, a touch lower than the chandelier, and made lazy turns. One flash-light-strong spotlight attached to one of the bas-relief Alexandrine columns along the outer wall tried to bounce frisky darts of light off the ball and all about the big room. The hundreds of bulbs in the chandelier were dark.

The chandelier seemed a perfect symbol of that early Soviet cultural imperative = If aristocrats had banquets and danced under massive chandeliers, now the working class will have banquets and dance under chandeliers. The old-fashioned "Stalinesque" quality of Soviet architecture derived in part from an atavistic imitation of designs preferred by tsarist grandees in the 18th and 19th centuries. And look at one or two of the heroic Soviet architectural plans, most never realized = ?? [I] [I] [I] [I] [I].

In the banquet hall and ballroom the too heavy chandelier and the more recently installed and pitiful disco light together represented a suggestive post-Soviet compromise. Another very global question arises, "Must we presume a contest rages between pop and high culture? Aren't the two often distinguished and consumed simultaneously, or in sequence, or in tandem?" [Consider this essay on early 20th-century American attitudes about "low-brow" and "high-brow" in relationship to Russian traditions.]

Some of the same quest to make all muzhiks into barins informed the design and construction of the METRO. And I think it can be fairly said that the METRO is the finest achievement of that cultural quest.

With the wide-zoom vistas of METRO stations fresh in mind, consider this one fine building on the Sheremetev estate on the eastern outskirts of Moscow [I ??LATER??].

Without denying the message of democratic grandeur of the Moscow METRO, this website concentrates on the "small print". Here are some simple adornments of various passageways to and from METRO stations on the Circle Line = [I] [I] [I] [I] [I] [I] [I]

The "micro-text" seems sometimes historically quaint. The hammer & sickle and other Soviet-era themes are like gargoyles on the walls of Scottish castles or graffiti on the ruins of Rome. The Soviet "empire" has fallen. But as with similar artifacts of the past, there remains something powerfully contemporary and alive. Just stand safely to the side for a few moments at 9:30am in any one of the three METRO stations named "Kiev".

SCHEME of FOLLOWING DESCRIPTIONS

Kol’tsevaia Liniia (Circle Line) Described,
but first, the station Ploshchad' Revoliutsii

There are about 20 stations embraced within the Kol’tsevaia Liniia. To get from Red Square at the center of town to Kol’tsevaia Liniia, I entered one of those encircled stations =

ПЛOЩAДЬ PEBOЛЮЦИИ
Ploshchad’ Revoliutsii
(Revolution Square)

A plaque at the entrance says "Metropoliten named for V. I. Lenin, second phase constructed 1935-1938. The station Revolution Square began operations 13 March, 1938".

This station has eight broad posts on either side of the aisle, sixteen in all. Each post has four corners, two on the side of the aisle and two on the side of the platform. Each corner of each post is “guarded” by one or two bronze figures. At the FRONT of the station on each side of the aisle at the first opening from aisle to platform, there are also figures. [Example]

Twin scenes stand diagonally across from one another at each opening. The two rows of posts on either side of the left and right aisles also present reverse images of one another. Therefore, the station displays only sixteen different scenes at the posts, each scene repeated four times in patterns described below in connection with the first two sets of pairs at posts 1 and 2. At the end of the station, two arches are closed to passage and provide space for two additional, non-repeated figures. The two figures in the closed arches bring the total number of unique scenes to eighteen, displaying twenty-four different bronze individuals (seven of them female), and one dog.

The figures are just beyond life size. That dimension is expressive. If larger, these figures would seem “bigger than life”. Being just beyond life size, they seem “giants on this earth” but familiar. They are recognizable representatives of all who rush to and from the subway trains, but those who made the Revolution are just a mythic touch beyond the here and now. We could be like that, but only with superior self-motivation, application and discipline, all visible in the faces of those who guard the posts. We should “live larger”, like them. They are the epitome of “revolutionists”, and yet among the twenty-one people (and one dog) only six are obviously armed. These exemplary figures are parents, workers, farmers, engineers, teachers, college students, school kids, and athletes, as well as representatives of armed force.

We might make a good deal of the transition implied in the progression of figures from the station's END to its FRONT. First there is revolutionary violence and struggle. Successful revolution allows more productive work in fields, factories and laboratories. Revolutionary laboring people can now enjoy the tranquility of conventional family life and the pleasures of sports and learning.

КУPCКAЯ
Kurskaia

As the train pulls to the platform, an elaborate bronze plaque announces the station = KURSK (not always with the hammer and sickle in the center of the star)

Plain decoration with floral pattern in diamond and circle settings, dated 1945-1949. A non-repetitive pattern of red on white marble. On platforms, clustered floral chandeliers, like stalks of some heavy plant, hang low over the trains. The central hall is lit by sconces.

Posts are round, straight columns supporting arches, topped by verdant bronze vegetative clusters (represented by “~”):

~~~~~~~~~~~~
_∩_∩_∩_∩_∩_
||    ||   ||   ||    ||   ||

КOMCOMOЛЬCКAЯ
Komsomol’skaia

Arches on posts (something like Kurskaia), 33 on each side of center aisles [I] [I]

Ceiling [C] displays two sorts of mosaic, all in chronological order, END to FRONT (Leningrad Station side) =

Here is a grand view of the station

ПPOCПEКT MИPA
Prospekt Mira (Peace Prospect)

The escalator hall displays a rich celebratory banner [detail]

Nine arches on eight posts on each side of aisles (16 posts in all). Ceiling decorated with diamond patterns [I]

The 16 posts are decorated with cream-colored tiles with rich gold inlay [I] [I]. A center circle on each post portrays people in relationship to plants. Each portrait is festooned with rich floral and vegetable patterns, topped by a sinuous variation on the egg & dart pattern. The big ceramic pieces are cracking now.

HOBOCЛOБOДCКAЯ
Novoslobodskaia 

Ceiling is a simple quonset crown from which hang huge disk chandeliers with floral cuts in massive crystal lens
Between passages, eight arched Romanesque posts with mosaics of leaded glass
Mosaics mirror the Romanesque shape of posts and passages and are back-lighted electrically
Each mosaic features a central circle within a rounded arch decorated with wild cabalistic floral & geometric designs [I]
Each central circle encloses a picture or design [I] above a patterned base [I] [I] [I]

Still undistributed examples =
images32
image33
image36