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T h i s s p e c i a l a d v e r t i s i n g s u p p l e m e n t i s p r o d u c e d a n d s p o n s o r e d b y R o s s i y s k a y a G a z e t a ( R u s s i a ) a n d d i d n o t i n v o l v e t h e r e p o r t i n g o r e d i t i n g s t a f f o f t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l N e w Yo r k T i m e s .

EXCLUSIVELY AT RUSSIA-DIRECT.ORG

A DIFFICULT YEAR, BUT STILL MUCH TO BE THANKFUL FOR

EXPERT

The political harvest in 2014 was rich, but the fruit was probably not to the liking of most peace-ful citizens worldwide. Interna-

tional crises, wars and catastrophes seemed to follow each other relentless-ly; one of Europe’s largest countries, Ukraine, was engulfed in political fi re, and relations between Russia and the

IVAN

TSVETKOV

THE CHANGING FACE OF MOSCOWRussia and the West may be growing farther apart politically, but at street level Moscow looks closer to Western Europe than ever.

Among long-time visitors to Russia, there are those who recall when a cus-tom’s declaration at Moscow’s Sherem-etyevo International Airport meant a bottle of whiskey for you, and one for the border cop.

Not anymore. Today, such bottles are stored safely away in the gleaming in-ternational duty free shops. Saunter past those, and there’s the shiny new Aeroexpress train to whisk travelers to the city center.

While political pundits debate the start of a new Cold War, Moscow seems farther from Washington or Brussels politically than it has been in decades. But the renewed political drama un-derscores a distinct irony: At street level, Moscow today looks more like a European metropolis than perhaps any time in its 900-year history.

As the world remembered the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this November, perhaps no other major city has transformed more dra-matically since then than Moscow.

During the original Cold War, Rus-sia was cut off from international trends like fast food, Hollywood mov-ies and credit cards, and many Rus-sians lived radically different lives from their Western counterparts.

Today, the city is in the throes of a massive face-lift as the new mayor, Ser-

gei Sobyanin, works to undo the worst remnants of Soviet urban planning.

“Moscow is reborn in terms of ar-chitecture, green spaces and lighting,” says Justin Lifflander, an American who has spent 27 years in Moscow as an embassy driver, businessman and business editor for the English-lan-guage daily newspaper, The Moscow Times. “When I moved here 27 years ago, the roads were ragged and devoid of vehicles,” he says. “The city was gray, and so were the people. Now the roads are first rate, and so are the traffic jams.”

The change refl ects a key difference between Cold War I and Cold War II: Russia is far more integrated into glob-al markets and international trends today than its Soviet predecessor was. Another way to look at it, perhaps, is today, Moscow has Starbucks.

Modern, refreshed imageWhen it was the capital of the social-ist world, Russia’s most important city presented Western visitors with some-thing of an alien landscape. For many,

the fi rst impression after leaving the airport was of wide streets with few cars and no advertising. Today, the city is struggling to clear mammoth traf-fi c jams, while officials consider mea-sures to reduce the clutter of billboards.

More recently, a campaign by Mayor Sobyanin to refresh Moscow’s image included placing carefully manicured pedestrian walkways throughout the center, and completely refurbishing large public spaces such as Gorky Park.

The changes have rendered the city center cleaner, more convenient, and — thanks to new restrictions on the sale of alcohol in public — more sober.

In one marker of the change, a sur-vey by the British-based multination-al bank HSBC recently named Russia the 17th-best country to live in among expats. Five years earlier, Russia ranked 24th out of 26 countries.

Throughout the city, landmarks to the Soviet past have been torn down and replaced with modern elements. In the heart of Moscow, opposite the Kremlin and directly in front of the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral, once stood

the colossal Rossiya Hotel. Built in 1967 at a scale meant to showcase rising Soviet power, the hotel boasted 3,200 rooms and was the largest in the world for decades. The Rossiya had its own post office, night club, movie theater, 2,500-seat concert hall, and even its own police station with jail cells be-hind unmarked doors.

The Rossiya has now been torn down. The location is being redesigned as an open public space by a group of com-panies led by Diller Cofi dio + Renfro, the New York architecture company that designed Manhattan’s celebrated High Line.

Meanwhile, a small island in the cen-ter of Moscow that was once the home of the Red October chocolate factory has been gutted and revamped. Today, according to the New York Times, the region is “being called Moscow’s an-swer to New York’s Tribeca or Lon-don’s Docklands…. Moscow’s fi rst full-fl edged culture and dining district.”

The island that older Russians as-sociate with Soviet chocolates now teems with hipsters scuttling between

bars, cafes, photo galleries and media offices.

A few miles away lies the 300-acre (121 hectare) Gorky Park. Once the socialist “people’s park” mentioned in the Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad Wind of Change, the park fell into disrepair after the Soviet collapse and became infamous for drug use. Now, the space has been transfi gured by the design company Wowhaus, which fi lled the park with public art and free Wi-Fi. Every weekend, from summer to win-ter, the park’s sprawling grounds teem with Muscovites playing table tennis, taking yoga classes or playing bocce. The renewed green space has proved so popular that it attracts 14 million guests annually — a fi gure higher than the entire population of Moscow.

The wild eastIn the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s, the city transformed from a gray socialist neth-erworld into a wheeling-dealing me-tropolis full of entrepreneurs reinvent-ing capitalism by their own rules.

“After the fake life of the Soviet sys-tem — big stores empty of goods, peo-ple lining up for lemons — this seemed like real life, real commerce,” says Mi-chele Berdy, an American translator who moved to Moscow in the late 1980s.

The commercial life of the city changed dramatically again after Pres-ident Vladimir Putin took over in 2000. Rising global prices for oil and gas turned Moscow into a city of “massive amounts of money, massive market growth, all accompanied by interna-tional interest in opening up stores, businesses and hotels,” says Nikolai Petrov, professor of political science at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics.

In 2012 alcohol sales were banned after 11 p.m. and the ubiquitous beer-selling kiosks were cleared off the streets. Smoking in restaurants was banned this year.

As Berdy says, Moscow is neither the grim Soviet capital nor the gang-land paradise many Westerns think it to be.

“No matter how many times I tell people, ‘really, it’s a modern European city’ nobody believes me,” she says. “And then they come here.”

West sank almost to Cold War levels.So what is there to give thanks for

this year against the background of such political turbulence?

The world of great power politics is a world unto itself. What plunges or-dinary people into a state of horror often only whets the appetite of those with the power to decide the fates of

nations. International crises arouse passion in the hearts of the powerful, and provide a glorious opportunity to show all what they are capable of.

A politician who uses an interna-tional crisis to outdo his competitors is often later described as “talented.” The epithet “outstanding” is reserved for those able to resolve that crisis. All

too often, the great politicians whose names fi gure prominently in the pages of history books are those who pro-voked an international crisis, used it to eliminate competitors and, only then, if they had the time and effort, sought to resolve it and usher in global peace.

The Ukrainian crisis, which has led to a humanitarian disaster in the Do-netsk and Luhansk regions and un-told human suffering, has changed a great deal in international relations. Paradoxically, it has opened a window

of opportunity for many world lead-ers — and not necessarily the most obvious ones.

Perhaps the main benefi ciary of the unfolding crisis in Ukraine has been the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Chinese diplomats could not have handpicked a more favorable environment than the one in which China found itself after the quarrel between Russia and the West.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Moscow conjures up an array of images for foreign vis-itors. From the colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and the red-brick walls of the Kremlin to the bleak paths of Gorky Park, as pictured in the Cold War-era film. Yet recently, the Russian capital has undergone a massive transformation. Glass-and-steel skyscrap-ers compete for space with centuries-old Orthodox churches, while trendy restaurants and galleries in-habit factory buildings once filled with assembly lines and printing presses. Take a new look at this nearly 900-year-old city in this edition of RBTH.

■SAM SKOVE

JOURNALIST

GENNADY KHAMELYANIN/TASS

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A $62 BILLION PLAN TO UNSNARL TRAFFICSo traffic can fl ow smoothly again, Moscow is making a serious effort to reduce gridlock.Moscow has launched an ambitious, multibillion dollar campaign to un-snarl its notorious traffic jams, a gar-gantuan task in a city ranked as the world’s most-gridlocked.

The city aims to transform itself by 2020 by spending 2.9 trillion rubles ($83 billion) and doubling down on public transportation in a series of projects initiated by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Meanwhile, a paid parking system and expanded toll roads will raise the cost of car own-ership.

Amid signs of progress, skeptics say success can only come in degrees.

“Even if you spent the entire bud-get of the Pentagon [on improving Mos-cow’s roads], you couldn’t solve the problem,” says Mikhail Blinkin, direc-tor of the Institute for Transport, Eco-nomics and Transport Policy Studies.

The city’s twisted streets and cen-turies-old layout mean that “Moscow can’t be a city for cars,” Blinkin says.

The plan, which includes suburban rail development, road construction and even creating 300 kilometers (186 miles) of bike lanes, aims to save driv-ers 88 hours a year, according to Dep-uty Mayor Maxim Liksutov, the man many credit for the heightened focus on Moscow’s traffic problem.

Easing bottlenecksAt the top of the mayor’s action plan: Getting Muscovites to park in approved spaces, instead of simply pulling their cars up on the sidewalk or double park-ing in the road. The latter creates an acute problem for traffic by disrupt-

The roots of the problem stretch back to the Cold War. Under the Soviet Union, deficiencies in the socialist economy made cars a luxury. That left Moscow’s centuries-old byways large-ly congestion-free, and city planners had no need to worry.

When the Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s, decades of pent-up demand for automobiles was un-leashed. As Russian incomes grew, so did car ownership and Russia emerged as one of the Europe’s top-fi ve auto markets.

Young Russians, whose parents and

grandparents had never even dreamed of owning a car, enthusiastically em-braced the new symbol of wealth. In 2014, Moscow’s official population of 11.5 million was driving at least 4 mil-lion cars, according to the Interior Min-istry’s count.

Some experts argue that Moscow was simply never designed for this many cars. Unlike the orderly grids of New York or Chicago, Moscow con-verges all transport options into the business-heavy city center.

“Just look at [the roads] on Google maps — it’s like an asterisk,” notes the Institute for Transport’s Blinkin.

Roadblocks may lie aheadYet even as Moscow grapples with its existing traffic snarls, population growth may only make the challenge more difficult. The city estimates Mos-cow may grow to 15 million by 2025, and illegal immigration from Central Asia could make the real population much higher.

Blinken notes that progress will de-pend in part on the city’s commitment to spending in the face of Russia’s eco-nomic uncertainties.

Russia’s ruble lost more than a quar-ter of its value from January to No-vember, hit by the one-two punch of sinking oil prices and Western sanc-tions over Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis.

The World Bank said in October that Russia’s economy was near stagnation for 2014, and predicted 0.3 percent growth for 2015 and 0.4 percent for 2016. All that poses deep challenges for the city’s budget.

In the meantime, notes Alisher Bud-tobaev, a Moscow taxi driver with three years’ experience, the construction con-nected with the upgrade has actually made traffic worse in many places.

“As soon as the construction ends, I expect it’ll become gradually better,” he says.

Millions of Russian commuters — along with city officials — hope that he’s right.

■SAM SKOVE

JOURNALIST

When the Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s, decades of pent-up demand for automobiles was unleashed. As incomes grew, so did car ownership, and Russia emerged as one of Europe’s top-five auto markets.

Signs are appearing on Moscow metro station floors, with large lettering indicating the direction to go in order to change lines.

ing the city’s circulation with random bottlenecks.

To fi x the parking malaise, city of-fi cials dispatched a fl eet of small green tow trucks, which quickly became no-torious for removing inappropriately parked cars.

In 2013, paid parking, regulated by the towing fl eet, began in the center of the city, then spread outward. Soby-anin announced that as of late Octo-ber, the average speed of traffic in the paid parking zones has “risen by an average of 12 percent.”

Toll roads and limits on commercial

transport were also out in place. The plan also foresees an expansion of the Moscow metro system, boosting the number of stations by 78 to 250. Such an expansion would place 93 percent of Moscow’s residents within walking distance of a metro station.

Worst traffic in worldMoscow is ranked as the world’s most-gridlocked metropolis, ahead of Istan-bul, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, according to road navigation compa-ny TomTom’s 2014 yearly report on traffic. It wasn’t always so.

The Russian capital’s traffic was rated the worst in the world by the road navigation company TomTom in its 2014 yearly traffic report.

Travelers stream past navigation signs

on the floor of the Pushkinskaya metro

station in central Moscow.

A GROWING TASTE FOR DINING OUTAccording to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, the average American adult goes to a restaurant about fi ve times per week. In Russia, however, dining out has never been much of a tradi-tion. In fact, just a few years before the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, there were only 87 registered restaurants in Moscow, a city of mil-lions.

An Associated Press article from 1981 noted that the Socialist capital had no Italian or French restaurants, and observed drily that the city’s lone pizzeria — located down a narrow side street a few blocks from the Kremlin — “falls well short of world pizza stan-dards.”

In order to cater to local tastes, Chi-nese restaurants served dishes accom-panied by big helpings of traditional Russian black bread.

But over the past few years, the city has been transformed by a revolution in dining culture. Official city statis-tics now list 11,000 restaurants, a num-ber that has expanded 15 percent to 20 percent per year since 2000, ac-cording to Andrei Petrakov, executive director of the RestCon consulting company.

Meanwhile, another American tra-dition, coffee, is also taking hold, as a trip to the local coffee shop starts to replace Russia’s traditional mid-after-noon custom of enjoying a cup of tea in the office.

Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks opened its fi rst outlet in Moscow in 2007 and has expanded rapidly, with 70 branches in Moscow today.

“We believe people will develop an even stronger coffee culture,” says Han-nah West, a U.S.-based representative of Starbucks’ PR fi rm, Edelman.

“The increasingly dynamic lifestyle in the city makes us optimistic about the potential of the market,” she says. “We believe that there’s plenty of room

This fall, riders on the Moscow metro noticed a series of small changes. In many metro stations, signs have ap-peared on the fl oor with large letter-ing in Russian and English indicating the direction to go in order to change lines. The moves are aimed at making the city’s much-heralded subway more accommodating for visitors. Previous-ly, foreign visitors using the subway had to rely solely upon deciphering the Russian-language signs hanging from the ceilings.

There are still no English transla-tions of the names of subway stations in the station vestibules and on plat-forms, but Latin transliterations of sta-tion names can already be found in the subway cars themselves.

At fi ve of the central stations near Red Square — Okhotny Ryad, Teat-ralnaya, Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Luby-anka and Kuznetsky Most — city au-thorities have installed colorful stands at the exits with schematic diagrams of the station’s concourse and sur-rounding area. These provide informa-tion about the main attractions and facilities.

The diagrams are the work of Brit-ish specialists from City ID collabo-rating with Billings Jackson Design, who have already implemented suc-cessful projects in New York and Lon-don.

According to Alexei Novichkov, ex-pert at the Design Laboratory at Mos-cow’s Higher School of Economics, the design of these information booths

■KIRA EGOROVA

RBTH

■YELENA DOLZHENKO

SPECIAL TO RBTH

in the market where independent stores and small chains can continue to grow along with Starbucks.”

Moscow residents still have a way to go before they catch up with Amer-ican dining habits. According to the Moscow Department of Trade and Ser-vices, Muscovites spent 7.4 percent of their 2013 food expenses on eating out.

For Americans living in big cities, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the equivalent fi gure is 76 percent. Yet as recently as 2007, an ap-plication for one Moscow restaurant chain’s frequent diner card asked po-tential diners if they ate out once a month, once every six months or once a year.

Despite the rapid expansion in re-cent years, local restaurateurs face challenges. Customer numbers have recently dropped because of the weak-ening ruble, the impact of sanctions on the variety in menus and the ban on smoking in restaurants, which came into effect this summer.

Economic sanctions and the falling ruble have restricted Russians’ pur-chasing power. The average bill in a Moscow restaurant ranges between $30 and $50, while the average month-ly salary is about $1,200. Additional-ly, restaurants have been forced to change menus and suppliers because of Russia’s ban on food imports from the U.S. and the E.U. In October, the Department of Trade forecast that by the end of 2014, the city’s restaurant market may suffer a drop of as much as 15 percent.

A spokesperson for the Federation of Restaurant and Hotel Owners told the Russian daily newspaper Izvesti-ya that chains have stopped opening new outlets and have begun review-ing existing ones.

SUBWAY NAVIGATION SYSTEM AIMS TO MAKE TRANSPORT MORE USER-FRIENDLYMoscow authorities have recently launched several new initiatives to help travelers fi nd their way.

should be easy to follow: The color so-lutions, font, layout and icons are con-sistent with international standards.

The stands, however, do have some shortcomings. “Many questions are raised about the fact that the devel-opers of these maps did not apply ori-entation to the north, and have pro-vided layouts of the surrounding areas with respect to the exits,” says Nov-ichkov. “A system like that is used for road navigators, but most of the paper guides and maps are oriented strictly to north. The subway map is also ori-ented to north, so people may become confused.”

Muscovites and foreign visitors are

generally positive about these naviga-tional elements, with most of them cit-ing the numbered exits from the sub-way as the most useful feature.

Many Moscow stations have several exits. One of the busiest central sta-tions, Kitay-Gorod, has more than a dozen. Previously, these exits were dif-ferentiated from each other with signs only in Russian referring to street names and places of interest to which they led, making it easy to get con-fused.

“I’ve lived in Moscow for seven years,” says Angelika, a designer from the southern Russian city of Voronezh, “but I still don’t always know where to go to fi nd the place I need, so the new schematic diagrams will be very useful. Previously, some subway sta-tions had maps, but not with so much detail.”

Foreigners, meanwhile, focus on other elements. “It is good that the new in-formation boards have QR-codes, which can be ‘read’ by smartphones,” said Florentina, a writer from Vienna. But there are also shortcomings. “The English font of the information on post-ers and in the captions to theaters and museums is too small — you have to come very close to see it well,” she says.

Florentina was also unhappy that such posters are not provided at all subway stations, particularly those fur-ther from the center: “When I was try-ing to fi nd Tsaritsyno Park [a museum and reserve in the south of Moscow] at a subway station with the same name, it turned out to be quite diffi-cult,” she says.

Officials say that the navigation sys-tem is gradually being redeveloped and improved. According to Darya Chu-vasheva, a press representative for the Department of Transport of Moscow, the introduction of a unifi ed naviga-tion system will take place in stages.

“By the end of 2014, the system will fi rst appear on the fi rst subway sta-tions on the Circle Line. By the end of 2015, we plan to install the system at all major stopping points, subway sta-tions and transport interchange hubs,” she says.

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And the resolution of the years-long wrangle over the price of Russian gas was the least of it. Moscow described Beijing as its most important strate-gic partner, and conferred China with what amounts to most-favored-nation status in the implementation of nu-merous joint projects. As a result of two separate agreements, Russian en-ergy resources will begin fl owing to China through two new pipeline sys-tems. Eventually, Russia could supply China with as much as 138 billion cubic meters of gas in the coming decades.

In the end, the development of eco-nomic ties with Russia is not what will determine China’s economic future. Of far greater signifi cance is that with Russia as a de facto junior partner and ally, China will acquire a strategic ad-vantage over its key foreign competi-tor, the United States. Russia’s resource base, strategic nuclear potential and voice on the United Nations Security Council are all, to varying degrees, under Beijing’s command, and Presi-dent Xi Jinping may just feel a bit more confident than a year ago. So some do have reason to give thanks this year end.

U.S. President Barak Obama seems to be faring much worse: the midterm elections were a wipeout, the Ameri-can economy is still in second gear, Is-

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

December

Quarterly Report:

Year in Review

December Brief:

Relations with

India

This new report will ana-lyze the main events in Rus-sia-U.S. relations over the past year and offer a look ahead to 2015. Today, bilat-eral contacts in most areas and at all levels are either frozen, suspended or stag-nant at best. This memo re-views how that happened, and asks what choices lie ahead. As we enter a new year, what lessons should be learned and what steps can be taken to avoid further confrontation? Get the view from Moscow.

On Dec. 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an offi-cial visit to India for the 15th Annual India-Russia Sum-mit. Could this event open the door to a new era in this long bilateral relationship, which has been relatively low-key for the last couple of years? in this brief, Russia Direct examines the current state of relations between Moscow and Delhi and points out the obstacles that stand in the way of a stron-ger partnership.

AFTER A DIFFICULT YEAR, THERE IS

STILL MUCH TO BE THANKFUL FOR

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discuss, debate and understand the issues

in geopolitical relations from a sophisticated

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lamists are on the rampage in the Mid-dle East, and his ratings are falling. Yet despite his few political victories in 2014, Obama could not let the Ukrai-nian crisis slip by. He seized the op-portunity to demonstrate who’s still in charge and to frame a common agen-da uniting the countries of the West-ern world for the fi rst time in many years.

Despite the obvious economic loss-es, Europe, steered by the United States, managed to present a united front against Russia. The system of common values that took shape in the second half of last century proved quite lively and efficient. The United States and Europe were joined by Australia, Japan and many other international players, who, after weighing up the pros and cons, chose not to show open solidarity with Russia. Rather, they opted to continue reliable partner re-lations with the United States.

The year 2014 presented German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a few gray hairs, but also an opportunity to act as a key negotiator on Ukraine and to further shore up Germany’s al-ready solid position in European pol-itics. In the strained circumstances of the past year, Merkel gave both Brit-ish Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande a master class in how to be a consistent and realistically minded politician.

Other European leaders paled in com-parison.

If all the world leaders could sit down together at a summit where their comments were guaranteed to be off limits to prying eyes and ears and dis-cuss what they and their countries have gained from this year’s events in Ukraine, the meeting would probably drag on for some time.

Ukrainian President Petro Porosh-enko would impart to his colleagues that without Maidan and the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, he would not be president (which may be more of a curse than a blessing in today’s Ukraine).

The leader of Belarus, Alexander Lu-kashenko, would say that he not only acquired the status of major facilita-tor and confi dant of the warring par-ties, but also had an opportunity to strengthen the Belarusian economy through selling foreign goods into Rus-sia as a way of getting around the food ban. Additionally, he would note that Minsk has become the go-to destina-tion for international conferences in the last few months. As Russia’s rep-utation has worsened in the West, that of Belarus has begun to look better.

Even North Korea’s Kim Jong-un might weigh in with a boast that the Pyongyang regime had found a new infl uential backer in the form of Rus-sia, shielding North Korea from inter-national censure.

But what might Russian President Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man in the world according to Forbes mag-azine, say about his fortunes? Can an international crisis such as that going on in Ukraine ever bring political div-idends to all parties involved, even ir-reconcilable enemies? Experience shows that, yes, it can. For Vladimir Putin, 2014 has been the most trium-phant year of his career. His approval ratings in Russia have never attained such lofty heights, and despite the high-ly ambivalent attitudes to him, no one is indifferent to the figure of Putin. What more could a successful politi-cian ask for?

In the spirit of optimism, however, we can all hope that neither Obama, nor Putin, nor Poroshenko, nor indeed Kim Jong-un, would in fact wish for the crises in Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and elsewhere to continue plagu-ing international relations, and that instead they would wish for peace in 2015. However, as the 19th-century German general Carl von Clausewitz once famously noted, war is just the continuation of politics by other means.

Ivan Tsvetkov is an associate professor at the School of International Rela-tions of St. Petersburg State Univer-sity. He is an expert in U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacifi c Region, U.S. history and contemporary U.S. society.

MOSCOW PEDESTRIANS TIPTOE THROUGH TULIPS

INFRASTRUCTURE IS KEY TO IMPROVING CITY TRAFFIC FLOW

This fall, after a long phase of re-construction, Pyatnitskaya Street in the center of Moscow re-opened to the public — but not

to their cars. Pyatnitskaya is just the latest in a series of Moscow streets that have been closed to traffic.

Creating pedestrian streets is not a new trend for European capitals. The most famous European pedestrian street, Stroget in Copenhagen, was closed to cars in 1962. In fewer than two years, the number of pedestrians on the road doubled — much to the delight of shop and cafe owners. Half a century later, this street is one of the main attractions of the city for both tourists and residents. Each day, up to 100,000 people walk along Stroget. In comparison, only 40,000 people pass daily through Moscow’s best-known pedestrian street, the Arbat.

Whether the new pedestrian zones in Moscow will become as popular as the Danish street is an open-ended question. It will surely be pleasant to walk along such streets, but they should attract people with more than the op-portunity they offer for walking or reading outside on a pleasant day.

“In itself, the creation of pedestrian zones and streets is a great break-through in Moscow’s urban policy,” says Ilya Mochalov, vice president of the Association of Russian Landscape Ar-chitects. “It transforms the city’s car

According to navigation systems producer TomTom, Moscow has some of the worst traffic jams in the world. The Moscow au-

thorities have been trying to address road congestion for at least 15 years, but the situation is not improving. Why?

Unlike many foreign cities, Moscow began facing the problems caused by mass motorization only in the 2000s. And those problems were dramatic. Cars were considered a luxury in the Soviet Union. In 1982, only 5 percent of Muscovites were able to afford one. That number rose to 18 percent in 1997 and to 30 percent by 2000. Such rapid growth led to serious problems with infrastructure.

In the Soviet era, Moscow’s infra-structure was designed with an eye toward maximizing the effectiveness of public transportation. Relatively few large roads were constructed, while many bus, trolley bus and tram routes were built along with a very high qual-ity subway system. Additionally, there was no culture of driving or of pedes-trians and drivers living together. Be-cause of this situation, when cars began to fl ood the city, they took over every available free space. Cars were parked (and sometimes driven) on sidewalks and in playgrounds and yards. Con-gestion and traffic jams increased each year.

It would have made sense for the Moscow authorities to learn from the experience of American and Europe-an cities in developing proper infra-structure for cars before the problems with traffic became acute. But they did not.

The key mistake transportation au-thorities generally make when trying to address traffic problems in cities is to pour money into constructing more and bigger roads in an attempt to clear traffic jams.

This is what happened in the Unit-ed States, which confronted the prob-lem of large numbers of private cars earlier than most countries, starting in the 1930s. Experience and the sub-sequent development of transport-re-lated science have shown that this plan leads to a dead end. More roads only create more places for cars to get into traffic jams.

Even if municipal authorities could build roads and parking lots capable of holding all the cars that could pos-sibly be driven in a particular city, they would create other problems. Invest-ment in road construction would be enormous; the roads would take up too much space; and drivers would be no closer to where they needed to go.

Additionally, the problem with such cities — and one that many Ameri-

What can be done to attract people to the pedestrian zones, besides having a pleasant, secure place to promenade?

chaos into a comfortable atmosphere. There have been excellent decisions: for example, paving the streets with durable materials such as granite slabs or sett. But there are also weak points. The quality of construction is not al-ways good, and planning and design-ing new pedestrian space is a refer-ence to past architectural styles without any innovation.”

The main shortcoming of Moscow’s pedestrian zones is the lack of trees. The mayor’s office says there is just no place to plant them: the land under the sidewalks is not even earth, but just mounds of pipes and cables. Even if one planted a tree in such condi-tions, it would die. That is why the au-

Arbat, which has long been known as a place to buy souvenirs and have a portrait drawn; and Stoleshikov Lane, one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world, are not contrived spaces.

Stores that cater to the average con-sumer are not anxious to set up busi-ness on pedestrian streets. Rents are higher there and there is no guaran-tee that foot traffic will be good — at least not yet. So far, the most interest-ed businesses are restaurants that can have open-air cafes in the spring and summer.

The only pedestrian zone that has a truly innovative concept in the Rus-sian capital is Romanov Lane, which is located between Vozdvizhenka Street and Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street just steps from the Kremlin. In 2009, in-vestors from Luxembourg received a contract to reconstruct six buildings behind the Moscow State University Journalism Faculty, across the road from the main visitor’s entrance to the Kremlin. But instead of a high-end business center or an elite apartment complex, they decided to create a street with cafes, restaurants, culinary bou-tiques and a heated sidewalk paved with sett. For the moment, only the fi rst row of Romanov Lane is rented out and only two out of the six build-ings have been restored. But a French bakery and a cozy Armenian restau-rant are already operating inside. The construction is scheduled for comple-tion by 2016.

Other pedestrian streets still do not have such clear visions for their de-velopment. Occasionally they host con-certs or photo exhibitions, but they cannot compare with the public parks

cans cities struggle with today is that the only convenient way to get around them is by car. The distance to the cen-ter is too far on foot, and population density is too low for public transport. Buses must either stop at every cor-ner and move too slowly, or the dis-tance between stops is too far.

The more the city authorities try to build roads, the more complicated it becomes to live in the city without a car and the more compelled residents feel to buy one, What results is a vi-cious circle.

People who live in cities take four factors into consideration when de-ciding how to get around: comfort, cost, convenience and speed. Most Musco-vites can afford a car, even if it is an inexpensive or used one, at the cur-rent average monthly income level. The percentage of people who choose to buy a car, therefore, depends on the convenience of traveling in one as op-posed to on public transport.

If the Moscow authorities want to combat traffic jams they must make public transport faster, cheaper and as comfortable as a private car.

Unfortunately, Moscow has not in-vested in improving public transpor-tation in these ways. Instead, the city has spent money to build roads and interchanges. That has only exacerbat-ed the road congestion problem with each passing year. In addition, car use has not been restricted at all. Until 2013, parking was free everywhere, even in the city center. People were able to park their cars virtually along the Kremlin walls.

At the same time, tram routes have been eliminated and metro construc-tion has been stalled. The situation be-came so bad that in 2010, when Mos-cow got a new mayor, then-President Dmitry Medvedev said: “Moscow is a model situation. It is not just the task of Sergei Sobyanin, who is the mayor, to solve this problem [traffic jams], but of the entire country. This is a sort of test of the authorities’ abilities.”

The situation did begin to improve with Mayor Sobyanin’s arrival.

Metro construction began again, paid parking was introduced, lanes were delineated, new trams and subway cars were purchased and several tram lines were revived.

Unfortunately, there is still a very strong lobby of construction compa-nies in the city. In many cases, instead of focusing on projects that would serve the city in a positive way, these com-panies advocate for the construction of unnecessary roads and interchang-es and the widening of streets in dense-ly populated areas.

The moves to improve public trans-portation in Moscow pale in compar-ison with these initiatives, so, the num-ber of traffic jams continues to rise, albeit at a much slower rate.

MAX

KATZ

EXPERT

Max Katz is the director of the City Project foundation, which works on creating livable cities.

Vadim Yershov is a journalist who has lived in and written about Moscow for nearly 20 years.

VADIM

YERSHOV

JOURNALIST

that the mayor’s office has developed, which have really transformed the look and feel of the Russian capital. In just three-and-a-half years, Gorky Park was transformed from practically a wasteland to the largest public space in Eastern Europe, attracting millions of locals and tourists. The number of visitors has grown to almost 14 mil-lion annually — more than the popu-lation of the city — and the revenue brought into the local administration’s coffers from the park’s commercial ac-tivities has more than doubled.

Most likely there are still no planned concepts for Moscow’s pedestrian zones because the priority of the mayor’s of-fi ce at the moment is simply to increase the number of public pedestrian areas. His office has already announced plans to create a new six-kilometer (3.7 mile) pedestrian walkway. It also revealed plans for modifying Tverskaya Street, the main artery from Red Square north. Here, a lane for cars will be removed from both directions in favor of ex-panding sidewalks.

The city is changing. And the direc-tion is a good one. The success of the initiatives will depend on creating con-cepts to bring people to these areas, the creativity of the architects and de-signers, and the continued support of the mayor’s office for the construction and upkeep of such zones.

Moscow’s parks are the best exam-ple that successful public spaces are possible in the city, and they must be used as a model for developing other public areas.

thorities have made the decision to plant seasonal fl ower beds in the zones.

The other question is what can at-tract people to the pedestrian zones, besides a pleasant, secure place to promenade. Most of the popular pe-destrian streets in Europe and the U.S. have evolved in accordance with a cer-tain urban concept. Times Square in New York is a concentration of the-aters, cabarets and concert halls. The Viennese Mariahilferstrasse is the larg-est shopping street in the city. The at-mosphere of many pedestrian streets is also created by musicians and street artists. In Moscow, however, only the

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EXPAT FINDS HIS COMFORT ZONE

A Moscow Must-see: Iconic, Rejuvenated Gorky Park

Hotel executive calls Moscow “Europe’s best-kept secret,” adding that the time to visit Russia is now — and not just because of the exchange rate.

When Stephen Ansell, his wife and two children landed back in Moscow in September 2010, Ansell’s young son looked around Domodedovo Airport and announced to his mother, “Mommy, we are home.” After two years in Wash-ington, D.C., Ansell and his family were happy to return to the part of the world where the hotel executive has spent the bulk of his career. Ansell is the general manager of the Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow, which was named the best hotel in Russia at the Interna-tional Hotel Awards in January. He is also Hyatt’s area director, which makes him responsible for all the Hyatt prop-erties in the region. Before assuming his current position, Ansell managed hotels in Bishkek, Kyrgystan and Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. Earlier in his career, he worked at hotels in Germa-ny, Hong Kong, Saudia Arabia and Tur-key.

Few people are more positive about expat life — and life in Moscow in general — than Ansell, a U.K. native. “I feel more out of place if I go home sometimes, because if you are out for a long time, you become very interna-tionally minded, very multiculturally minded. Your perspective on things is different when you’ve lived in a lot of different countries. That changes your outlook,” he says.

And Ansell’s outlook on Moscow is very positive. “I think Moscow is in many ways Europe’s best-kept secret,” he says. “Moscow, especially over the past couple of years, has seen an im-mense number of changes. There has been a serious effort, particularly over the past fi ve years, to make our city more livable, more tourist-friendly for sure, and the overall experience has become a lot more positive, To live here really is a pleasure.”

Ansell should know. He’s lived in 11 countries during his career and spent his childhood in Southeast Asia and Europe as his family followed the ca-reer of his father, a BP (British Petro-leum) employee. But he never had a chance to live in Eastern Europe until after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The week the wall fell, Ansell, who was working in West Germany at the time, went to Berlin with his girlfriend, who later became his wife. “We have very strong memories,” he says, “and if you refl ect on that, it’s amazing how the world has changed in 25 years….the perceptions we had about this part of the world at that time. That falling of the wall was rather symbolic in many ways, but for me, it was that the abil-ity to communicate with this part of the world suddenly changed and it’s become better and better ever since.”

After the reunifi cation of Germany, Ansell took a position in East Germa-ny at a hotel his employer had just taken over. The experience prepared him for his future working in the for-mer Soviet Union. “My exposure to working there was to [understand] the mindset of the people, and to see how they had been trained. They were very professional, but used to working in a slightly different environment. That may be a slight understatement actu-ally,” he says, laughing. But, Ansell is quick to add, he learned as much from his local colleagues as they learned from him.

“It taught me to realize that you didn’t always know best, and it was a real fi rst experience of something dif-ferent to what I was used to, at least work-wise,” says Ansell.”The way peo-ple worked, we learned a lot from them and, if anything, it taught me that de-spite people’s perception that we were

Hyatt hotelier Stephen Ansell, who calls Gorky Park a gem and considers a visit there obligatory when in Mos-cow, isn’t the only one who fi nds the 300-acre (121-hectare) green space the best place in the city to spend a free afternoon. The iconic park placed fi fth in a ranking of the world’s top-10 most popular geotagged destinations on In-stagram in 2014, according to the Aus-tralian website Traveller.com.au. Red Square came in seventh. This is the fi rst time Russian sites have made it onto Instagram’s top 10 list.

Gorky Park, which is easily acces-sible from two metro stations and sev-eral bus routes, became known around

there to teach, we also learned a lot. I think that’s a useful life experience. No matter where we go, we learn,”

That statement may best express An-sell’s worldview. “Stephen travels well,” says Neil Hardwick, a media invest-ment company executive who met An-sell four years ago. “By that I mean that he can adapt and join in with the environment around him. When you do that, you get to see so much more and participate so much more in to things, events and the people around you.”

Unlike many other high-level expa-triates, Ansell is happy to experience Moscow as the locals do. “Stephen simply adores Moscow and Russia, and transmits his passion for this destina-tion to the clients and employees,” says Julia Usoeva, a former colleague of An-sell’s at the Ararat Park Hyatt who now lives in France. “Many foreigners living in Moscow are scared to use pub-lic transportation and try to avoid it, Stephen, on the contrary, was even en-joying it, using this experience as an opportunity to mix with the local peo-ple, local culture and local language.”

In fact, Ansell takes the metro every day. “It’s crowded sometimes, but I think it’s less crowded than many of the undergrounds that I’m used to; it’s affordable and I highly recommend it.”

Ansell is also in favor of the move by the Moscow City government to in-troduce paid parking in the center of the city, although he acknowledges his may be a controversial position. “I think it has changed the whole visual, the whole way you perceive the center of town,” he says. “It has made things a lot easier, it has reduced traffic and, aesthetically, it’s just much more pleas-ant. From a tourist perspective, visu-als, aesthetics are very important.”

His favorite place in Moscow is the famous Gorky Park, although this was not always the case. “When I fi rst ar-rived here, [it] was really not on the list of places to see and places to visit,” he says. “We went there once or twice because of the historical value — of course, we’ve all read the book — but now it’s a real pleasure to go there. I would say it’s a gem. In fact, I send ev-eryone there, if it’s in the winter — for the ice-skating rink — and in the sum-mer of course it offers some activities, the cultural events that are taking place there. It’s amazing.”

As far as Ansell is concerned, there’s no better to time to visit Moscow, than

■LARA MCCOY ROSLOF

RBTH

now, despite the ongoing geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West.

“For one thing, traveling here is cheaper,” Ansell says with a smile, be-fore adding, “what we would like to see is an increase in the number of tourists and visitors, obviously because of our industry, but also because there’s so much to show here.

“St. Petersburg has been on the radar for a long time. But with all the im-provements we’ve made, we’ve turned Moscow into a very attractive desti-nation and I think it’s an experience everyone that should have,” says the hotelier.

“The signifi cance of Russia histori-cally, at least for us in Europe, is with-out question. It’s been on the world stage for many, many years, and will continue to be so. And as it’s a desti-nation that has not often been visited, I think now is the time to come and see Russia. And people are working very, very hard to make Russia tour-ist-friendly. I think that if politics gets in the way of people traveling, the world would be a very boring place,” he says.

Ansell, who is 45, believes that Rus-sia has a particular appeal for travel-ers his age and older, who remember the Cold War.

“I grew up in that era. 25 years ago when the Berlin Wall came down, I could never imagine that I would be sitting and eating and living my life in Moscow. It would be unthinkable at that point. But I really view that as part of history. I believe that people of my generation should start to leave that behind, because I believe that the global issues the world faces are much more critical and that we are so more mobile,” Ansell says. He notes that his hotel works with some tour operators who target travelers with an older pro-fi le, and that the programs are full of American, British and French travel-ers who are slightly older, and they are all amazed by what they discover here.

“In many ways, they appreciate Rus-sia anyway, because they understand the historical signifi cance of what they are looking at when they see Red Square, and for them that has a lot of meaning. Frankly every time I stand on the hotel terrace [which overlooks Red Square], I think ‘Wow, how the world has changed.’”

the world through pop culture, pri-marily through Martin Cruz Smith’s eponymous 1981 novel and the 1983 fi lm of the same name. During the So-viet era the space was mainly fi lled with cheap amusement park rides. Later it became the home of the Buran, a Soviet-designed space shuttle.

Those who remember the park from their Soviet childhoods would hardly recognize it today. After a slick rede-sign, the park is full of visitors check-ing out a pop-up market or taking yoga classes. From spring to fall, bicycles, skates, scooters and pedal cars are available for hourly rental, and Nike sponsors a running club on the expan-

sive grounds along the Moscow River. Several organizations hold classes for children in an open-air pavilion and fi lms are shown under the stars on a giant screen.

Gorky Park is also the site of a giant ice-skating rink from mid-November to early March. The rink was the larg-est in Europe for several years, before being overtaken this year by a rink at VDNKh in northern Moscow.

For those more interested in indoor activities, several popular local res-taurants have branches in the park, and socialite Dasha Zhukova opened her contemporary art center, Garazh, in a pavilion there in 2008.

Stephen Ansell, general manager of Moscow’s Ararat Park Hyatt, in front of the Bolshoi Theater, near the hotel.

Join other Instagrammers this winter at the ice rink in Gorky Park.

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