On a sunny afternoon in early September 2001, having recently returned to Moscow, I stepped out of Kiev Station to find myself stunned by the sight of an enormous glass and steel object. Whatever it was, this had definitely not been there the year before. A postmodern extravaganza of angled shapes in glass and painted steel, it seemed to have taken its inspiration from a pile of irregularly shaped blocks left by some gigantic child (fig. 1). What on earth was that? I walked up to the mystery, entered through a door in its tall glass portal and, amid faint echoes of Paris and the Centre Beaubourg, let myself be carried up by an escalator. The mystery was a bridge, a glassed-in pedestrian bridge with yellow steel frames and white support beams, shiny wood floors, and two riveted blue steel arches, all contained under a glass roof. By now, the impression of irregularity and chaos had vanished completely: I found myself inside an elegant glass tunnel flooded with warm September light and populated by parents and grandparents with children, couples sitting on benches conversing, and the occasional solitary flaneur (fig. 2). To the left opened a spectacular view of the river, Borodinskii Bridge, the Stalinist steeple of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID), the city government building, and the federal government building—more commonly referred to as the White House. To the right there was another view of the river, the twin smokestacks of a nearby factory, and Moscow State University in the distance. Doors on each side led onto open-air walkways. From a passerby, I learned that the bridge had been opened only a couple of days earlier on September 1, the Day of the City, Moscow’s annual self-celebration, and that employees of the hotel next door had dubbed it the “crystal bridge.â€? (Much later, it was to be officially named Khmel’nitsky Bridge.) Yet, as I was to find out, this was not an entirely new bridge. It was half old and half new, a suggestive piece of architecture, linking Moscow’s past and future, an attractive hieroglyph situated at the center of a larger zone of redevelopment in the rapidly changing Russian capital.

This essay will engage the current transformation of Moscow by taking a closer look at two recent and highly visible projects. One of these is a rather bold historic preservation project in which two prerevolutionary railroad bridges—Andreevskii Bridge and Krasnoluzhskii Bridge—were floated along the river on barges to new locations, where they were fitted with glass walkways and turned into pedestrian bridges. One of these was the bridge I had stumbled upon that day in early September. Completed in 2000 and 2001, respectively, these new pedestrian bridges have quickly become places where Muscovites and tourists like to hang out and where spectacular (and often expensive) events are held.¹ The second project I will be discussing is the ambitious development of a new International Business Center known as Moskva-City. Between them, these two projects are beginning to rewrite and redesign the area west and southwest of the city’s historic center in the name of a new, post-Soviet, and globalized Moscow. In my discussion, I will not approach Russia’s capital from the perspective of a historian, an architect, an urban planner, a political scientist, or an economist. I will approach it, rather, as a literary critic and a regular visitor who became intrigued by the symbolic suggestiveness and allegorical density of a particular constella- tion of these urban development projects. A rewarding object for informed inter- pretive play, this configuration speaks to the current complex and fascinating moment in the city’s history.