THE GREEN FRIENDS OF MANKIND

ALMATY, Alma-Ata, Verniy

The Almaty Hotel, in the centre of the former capital and largest city of Kazakhstan, was designed in 1963 by a team led by the architect Nikolay Ripinsky. Clad in blue tiles and curving seductively away from the city’s rigid grid plan, it’s the sort of chic mid-century modernism you’d expect to see in Miami or Havana. Only the polychrome mosaic of frolicking folk in folk costume gives it away as a distinctively “Soviet Sixties” product. A few months ago, this hotel held a round table on the preservation of modern architecture in Almaty, organised by the Garage Museum in Moscow.¹ Beginning with quite sober papers defining and charting the architectural developments in the former capital across the twentieth century, it had some very harsh words about the renovation of another building by the architect of the hotel: the Palace of the Republic, or as it was originally called and as everyone still calls it, the Lenin Palace. Photographs show a precisely calculated brutalist pavilion, disciplined and ordered, with a magical interior of coloured glass, suddenly covered over with mirrorglass and fake classical columns. Then, the architect who redesigned the palace stood up to defend himself. At this point, there was a furore, as he made excuses for what had happened. First, he pointed out that he had proposed seven different plans, beginning with a simple restoration, to the building’s owners, only for them to choose the most destructive of the original fabric; clearly reluctantly, he justified the change with the comparison “in Soviet times we wore grey clothes, and now we wear colourful clothes”. The speaker, Elizabeth Malinovskaya of Almaty’s ARK gallery, was not impressed. “I do not have words for the emotions I feel when I look at the current façade”. I tried to follow the argument through a translator, but it soon got out of hand, with claims about the drinking habits of the original architect and counter-claims about who really designed it in the first place. This heated, public argument about the preservation of the city’s modern buildings seemed to stand for an entire complex of opinions about the city’s history and its future. Not the least irony in the events was that this was a smaller adjunct to a larger conference and exhibition at the 2017 Expo in Astana, the planned capital that has supplanted Almaty as Kazakhstan’s administrative centre. The exhibition, centred around photographs by Yuri Palmin and quasi-architectural wooden models of these “utopian skeletons” by the Kazakh ZIP Arts Group, argued that the shift to Astana meant that unlike in other Central Asian capitals like Tashkent or Ashgabat, the Soviet city was untouched, with few buildings demolished or destroyed, and relatively little new construction. This contrasted with the ferocious argument at the Hotel Almaty, and with how many people in the city describe their buildings and the spaces around them, often with a sense of loss of an international “garden city”.

Remembering the Gorod-Sad

The most obvious quality of Almaty – especially compared with Astana – is its extraordinary integration of landscape, urbanism and vegetation. It sits at the foot of the Tian Shan mountain range, where it meets the interminable Kazakh steppe, near the border with China. The greenery on the city’s grid-planned streets is intense, and it grows onto the buildings, with creepers nearly covering limestone-clad brutalist apartment complexes, with cafes on their ground floors spilling onto the two-level pavements, with fast-flowing irrigation canals rushing alongside raised pedestrian levels, usually audible bubbling away when you sit outside and drink your tea. It is the greenest city I have ever seen. Although you gradually notice the poor quality of much of the built fabric, the effect remains of an exceptionally well-planned city – especially when you’ve experienced Astana, where the vast distances and lack of tree cover or pedestrian shelter make it feel like one city’s unwinnable war against its own climate. But that’s not geographical luck on Almaty’s part. Beautiful as its mountains are, it is a highly inhospitable place to build a city, with extremely hot summers and extremely cold winters, and frequent earthquakes. The difference is that its builders – in an era before air conditioning and mass car ownership – recognised this, and planned accordingly

Colourful clothes

Modernist Garden City

According to the scholar Caroline Erin Elkin, the Almaty “garden city” is a “meme”², which has informed the way the place has been discussed ever since the 1930s, when it was first built up as the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. One official guidebook of the 1960s wrote of how “the green outfit is the pride of Alma-Ata, legally called a garden city. Greenery and flowers decorate the city, creating the conditions for cultural recreation, developing aesthetic tastes and love for the green friend of mankind”.³ The curator Yuliya Sorokina describes it today as the “Ghost of a Garden City”; a “fairy-tale landscape” of “lilacs, jasmine, uryuks and apple trees”⁴, maintained by a specially set up local body, Zelenostroy, which is gradually being whittled down by unsympathetic businesses and an indifferent government.

Almaty is old by the standards of Astana, but very young compared with ancient Silk Road cities like Taraz or Turkistan, in Kazakhstan itself, or Tashkent, Bukhara or Samarkand outside it. The city that exists today was founded by Russian colonists as a citadel, Verniy, and then gradually built up as a local centre, largely through the work of the engineer Andrei Zenkov, whose earthquake-proof lightweight wooden structures were the first responses to the city’s aggressive geology. Zenkov designed the city’s major pre-Soviet monument, the 1911 Ascension Cathedral, a kind of funfair version of St Basil’s, made only out of wood, without metal bolts.

The Soviet city, renamed “Alma-Ata” in 1921 (apparently a mangled version of the Kazakh for “the place with apple trees”, Almaty) was initially a place where people were dumped, as much as where they came to create a new capital. Generations of dissidents, “formalists”, or the merely unlucky were exiled here between the late Twenties and the mid-Thirties – among the earliest was Leon Trotsky in 1927, for whom Alma-Ata was his last address in the USSR before being deported to Turkey. Stalin deported entire nations here, such as Koreans and Volga Germans – most of the latter have left for the suburbs of Berlin, but there are still 30,000 Koreans in the city.

The Ascension Cathedral

Many of the accounts of the city come from these prisoners and exiles, most famously in the long-term Gulag inmate Yury Dombrovsky’s novel The Keeper of Antiquities, published in Novy Mir in 1964, which describes the affairs of an archaeologist relocated to Alma-Ata in the 1930s to run the History Museum in the Ascension Cathedral. Exiled to “that curious city, so unlike any other city in the world”⁵, his protagonist rhapsodises about Zenkov’s daringly engineered wooden buildings, whose “barbaric ornamentation […] perfectly expresses the spirit of the old town of Verny, as Zenkov built it: its youthfulness, its total lack of roots in the past, its naïveté, its independence and finally its bold determination never to fall flat on its face”.⁶ The other strain in the novel is the archaeologist’s baffled impatience with local politicians’ attempts to find a longer pedigree for Alma-Ata, insisting that this was a important ancient city, possibly even a Roman city, based on misunderstood excavations; indifferent to these nation-building efforts, the “keeper” prefers to research the nomads of the steppe and the buildings of the Russian colonists. At the end of the book, the cathedral is to be replaced with “a sort of shiny prismatic cube of glass and steel. The profusion of windows gave the building a multi-faceted look that reminded me of an insect’s eye. There were arches at each end and the roof was crowned by a tower and a flag”.⁷

This of course didn’t happen – the church survives, and became a church again after 1991. But the description recalls a modern building that was built, the House of Government of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, designed by Moisei Ginzburg in 1928. Derived from research on Uzbekistan (actually a long way away, culturally and geographically), it resembles Le Corbusier’s attempts at making a modernist “casbah” in North Africa, tightly packed cubic volumes with plenty of shelter and roof gardens. It is currently barely recognisable, and painted a queasy blue. Later 1930s buildings, like the Abay Opera House, with its mock-Islamic detailing on a boxy frame, aim to be “national in form, socialist in content”. Deported here in 1941, the leftist Polish writer Alexander Wat recalled that “the Soviet buildings (are) the worst, pseudo-mosque style – the Opera House and so on” (it was co-designed by the chameleonic Alexey Shchusev, never an architect to tell his client something he didn’t want to hear). “But you don’t pay attention to that, mostly because of the marvellous trees, Alma-Ata’s poplars”, which are “truly evangelical, more beautiful than King Solomon’s trees. Sunlit jewels”.⁸

Wat found to his surprise that the city was full of filmmakers, artists and poets, who had been sent here en masse at the start of the war, far from the front – practically the entire Soviet film industry was in Alma-Ata. Yuliya Sorokina tells me that it’s this combination of artists and prisoners (frequently, both) that defined the sort of place the Soviet capital became. “We had here all of the USSR’s intelligentsia during the Second World War, and through Stalin’s concentration camps. These people taught our teachers, they taught us.” She argues that as a result of this a multinational culture was created, where “even in Soviet times, people here were global in a way. They found a way to read forbidden books and wear modern, fashionable clothes; they heard jazz and rock and roll, and learned foreign languages – my father put me into English school in 1975.”

The Opera House and so on

The Modernist Garden City

The two names I heard most in conjunction with the Soviet garden city were Nikolay Ripinsky, architect of the Hotel Almaty and the Lenin Palace, and Dinmukhamed Kunayev, the head of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan from 1964 to 1986. Kunayev, according to the researcher and campaigner Anel Moldakhmetova of Archcode Almaty, was able “because of his close connections and good relationship with the centre – Moscow”, to “increase the budget for architecture development in Almaty and improve the quality of construction and construction materials.” There is little in the way of standardisation in the city’s modern architecture, with façades in the local limestone rather than mass-produced tile and concrete. Kunayev’s 1986 dismissal by Gorbachev on grounds of corruption and replacement, foolishly, with the Russian Gennady Kolbin, led to protests that ended in violence in 1986, now seen as the start of Kazakh statehood. Among Kunayev’s proteges was the hard-working apparatchik Nursultan Nazarbayev, who succeeded Kolbin in 1989 and has never left power since. If Kunayev was a typical Soviet bureaucrat, able to pull strings for his people and for the edification of “his” republic, then Ripinsky was at the other end of the scale, a victim, then a beneficiary of the system. A student of the Constructivist Vesnin brothers in Moscow, he was deported to Kazakhstan in 1949. After Stalin’s death he was made head of the state construction body Kazgorstroyproyekt, becoming the most important figure in the city’s planning and architecture, teaching a generation of Kazakh architects, and developing a distinct “school” of modern architecture, internationalist with delicate local touches.

Hotel Kazakhstan

The low, long Lenin Palace and the city’s first high-rise, the Hotel Kazakhstan (the latter of which still features on Kazakh banknotes as an icon of Almaty) were intended as vertical and horizontal complements to each other. Alongside them is the Cinema Arman, a simple late 1960s box with bulging relief sculptures carved for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1967. On the same street is the “Three Knights” residential complex, an aggressive brutalist composition of three interlinked towers, softened and worn by the residents’ insertion of new balconies and additions. Another cluster can be found around the Azueov Theatre Metro station, where an early 1970s “Wedding Palace” and Circus, both designed as rotundas decorated with concrete sun-screens, flank the surging design of the theatre. It is all overlooked by a silvery TV tower, placed on the Kok-Tebe mountain above the city. It’s this city that played host to the World Health Organisation’s conference, held at the Lenin Palace in 1978, that issued the Alma-Ata Declaration, committing governments worldwide to “health for all”, free and accessible, by the year 2000; this colonial citadel turned multicultural metropolis, on a scale both epic and humane, must have seemed like the ideal place for this – eventually utopian – declaration.

The Revolution in Kazakh

The Circus

Kok-Tebe TV Tower

Later Soviet architecture, after Ripinsky, goes much further into a Communist-Islamic-Postmodernist “national style”. Early 1980s buildings like Vladimir Kim and Tolegen Abildayev’s Palace of Pioneers, and A.V. Khan, M. Ospanov, E.V. Chechelov and K. Tulebayev’s Arasan Baths combine domes and towers in the manner described by the architectural historian Boris Chukhovich as the “made in Moscow national style”, although several of the architects were local. Dreamlike, full of nostalgic and orientalist motifs – golden domes, minarets, great marbled baths, ceremonial stairs – these buildings are intensely atmospheric, but may have more to do with a Russian, imaginary idea of the “east” than the international and highly Soviet city Alma-Ata actually was. The centre of “Kunayev’s City” is Republic Square, originally Brezhnev Square (he had for a time been the local viceroy), a series of towers and office blocks placed symmetrically at the point where a steep slope runs from the mountains to the garden city below. It is an authoritarian space, much more so than anything else in Almaty, but an extremely impressive one: vast, commanding and coherent, and with sweeping views of the mountains around. A sculptural monument in the centre tells the current “national story”, with nomads gradually becoming citizens becoming violently repressed protestors in 1986, then to be watched over by the kindly eye of Nursultan Nazarbayev. Glass domes, just like those in Moscow, Kyiv and Minsk, show the typical way of fitting shopping malls into grand Soviet squares.

Minarets of the Pioneers

The Arsan Baths

Inside the Soviet Nationalist Postmodernist Bathhouse

The former Brezhnev Square

The leader

Efforts to preserve this city have not been particularly successful. The Hotel Zhetsyu, a simple and elegant modernist building, was, Anel Moldakhmetova tells me, “set on fire soon after our article on its historical value was published in the mass media”. It is currently gutted, stripped to its concrete frame, revealing the red painted slogan “Builder! Prepare for the 40th Anniversary of the Kazakh SSR!”, that is, 1965.

Domes of Brezhnev Square

I asked the photographer Yuri Palmin, who had documented the city’s Soviet architecture for the Garage exhibition, whether or not there was any nostalgia in his lovingly-detailed depiction of the city Kunayev and Ripinsky built. “There never was, and I hope never will be, any nostalgic element in my work with the architecture of Soviet Modernism”, he replies. “I’m 51 now and was born and raised in the period of most obvious stagnation of the Soviet bureaucratic regime when its cynicism and hypocrisy were impossible to hide under the thin film of (mostly imported) modernity.” Instead, the photographs are a matter of “relocating the time that was out of joint”, showing the way that the buildings’ age in a manner determined by lack of maintenance, general negligence of the urban environment, combined with initially poor construction quality. The Three Knights residential complex is the perfect example of a modernist project being dynamically inhabited throughout its history in the absence of strict codes and regulations. Rather than his work here being about showing off a perfectly preserved Soviet capital, “I am generally interested in the ways architecture survives and approaches ruination”.

An uncovered address to the builders

It may be hard to tell from the typically late-Soviet kitsch – all mahogany, figurines and doilies – of his private House Museum, but Kunayev is reckoned by local architects, artists and activists to have had a very positive influence on the city. Oddly, this doesn’t extend to his bureaucratic inheritors. According to Yuliya Sorokina, “Kunayev’s heritage is still valuable for the oppositional intelligentsia, but current state leaders actually hate Kunayev: I am afraid that they would like to forget everything he did. Maybe that’s the reason they don’t mind about barbarous reconstructions of Almaty’s modernistic buildings as well.” Partly this is a matter of taste: “It is not their style… they prefer Stalin’s quasi-empire”, and in Astana’s flamboyant but cheap neo-Stalinist buildings, with their spires, Corinthian columns and triumphal arches, they’ve had a chance to realise it. She is scornful of the architectural aspirations of Kunayev’s protege. “Nazarbayev is talented leader, but he is poorly educated in comparison to Kunayev”. For her, this Father of the Nation “is a kind of primitive architect, let’s say. He uses architecture as a tool for showing his power and thinks that he’s glorifying his country during his epoch.” At the heart of this, she tells me, is the fact that Nazarbayev, as a worker turned bureaucrat, was never fond of the city. “Almaty was and is a city of progressive intellectuals. Almaty and Astana are like two different universes. I guess Nazarbayev did not like Almaty – he felt like an alien here, and probably that was one of the reasons that he changed the capital. He wanted to build the city of his dreams and he did.”

Soviet in Form, Kazakh In Content

However much it might seem to be a thing of the past for long-time residents of the city, the intelligence and elegance of the city built between the 1960s and 1980s is still very striking to the visitor. It is so not only by comparison with the ruthlessly inhospitable and riotously kitsch new capital, but seen alongside other Soviet cities of the same era that were not able to resist Moscow’s pressure for standardisation and cost-cutting. Oddly enough, however, its recent buildings are distinctly post-Soviet, in a style which you can see in Moscow or Kyiv or Baku – concrete-framed residential towers inserted into the green interstices of the garden city, clad in brightly coloured “stone” and mirrorglass, with no natural ventilation, and with the roofs given a profusion of domes so as to look “local”. Many of them are placed in the way of the carefully planned vistas of the Seventies – old pictures of the TV tower show it standing clean away from anything else on a green mountain, and now it is crowded in with poor quality, unplanned construction. One is tacked onto the end of the Almaty Hotel; another cluster crammed in behind the Palace of Pioneers, another lurking above the Auezdov Theatre.

Anel Moldakhmetova tells me that the work of the campaign and research group Archcode came initially from trying to create an “inventory” of the city: “We were trying to find out the roots of architectural landscape of the city and its historical and cultural value. At some point it became clear that more than 50% of architectural landscape of Almaty consists Soviet modernism.” They then “created a list of 100 objects which we published in the form of an online catalogue, to start a conversation with the public about the importance and value of these buildings.” So far this is proving to be a difficult task, taking into account that architects and restoration professionals often have to compromise their values to their “clients”, who are “shaping architectural landscape of the city based on their personal tastes and beliefs” – something that was obvious when the hapless architect of the “restored” Lenin Palace tried to defend himself by blaming the client.

There was no public oversight over planning at the Lenin Palace, she points out:

Construction works started before anyone could realize what was happening, the reconstruction project was never discussed with the professional expert community and there was no publicity around the case. As a result, reconstruction happened quietly and without public attention, and poor reconstruction became an object of discussion and criticism only after all the works have been done.

Archcode’s attempt to publicise a more complex “identity of the city” has included issuing postcard sets of major Kunayev-era buildings, as part of trying to create “a strong professional community which shares common values related to heritage, which is not an easy task to do”. That’s especially because any sort of “campaigning for the Soviet historical heritage has a lot to do with rethinking history and identity of Kazakhstan after gaining independence”.

This lack of interest in the recent past might seem strange, given the fact that many of Kazakhstan’s current rulers were also its rulers in the 1980s. But in terms of approaches to architecture and planning, there is, she argues, little in the way of continuity between Kunayev’s rule and Nazarbayev’s:

After independence many useful traditions of Soviet construction and approaches to the formation of visual style of the buildings were forgotten, and new approaches are mostly dictated by the availability of cheap imported materials from China and Turkey and interest in the maximum profit from the most minimal investment.

There is a rushing for “Western” solutions in order to make the city look less “Soviet”, which have the paradoxical but common effect of making Almaty look not so much “normal” and “European” but distinctly post-Soviet, with a rejection of long-term planning and architectural education that is common across the former USSR. This is obvious in almost all the new construction in Almaty, with one curious exception: the Almaty Metro.

The Metro was begun in 1988, given that the Kazakh capital had passed the all-important 1 million mark that got you the funding for a tube network in the USSR. But the stations that exist now were designed in the 2000s, and the currently existing single line was opened in 2011. The impression that the Metro might give, that Almaty’s government is investing in transport, is deceptive – the tram network was suspended in 2015, a few years after the Metro was opened, as it was no longer profitable. In most respects, this is a staggeringly Soviet project. The dimensions of the underground halls, with their extreme depth and their grand arched vaults, are straight from Kyiv, St Petersburg, Moscow or Taskhent; so too is the approach to decoration, with each station treated as an independent artwork, with chandeliers, high relief, gilding, ceramics and stained-glass. Unlike in a Soviet Metro system, there is of course no Communist imagery, aside from one station dedicated to the Baikonur Cosmodrome – though the folksy images of people doing traditional Kazakh things are very similar to those on the mosaics across the Hotel Almaty. The Auezov Theatre station even features mosaic panels of the 1970s buildings above. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know that this wasn’t actually built and opened in the 1980s. There is one exception – a 1980s Soviet architectural project wouldn’t feature any artistic images of a living political leader. And yet there he is, at the end of the tiled hall of Almaly station, on a photograph placed under glass: Nazarbayev, in front of a fruit tree, waving at the commuters.

Still Soviet underground

A memorial to Soviet Modernism

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