Moscow Metro – Park Pobedy – Lines 3 and 8a

Posted on 17/08/2024 by Michael

Park Pobedy

Moscow Metro – a Socialist Realist Art Gallery

Moscow Metro – Park Pobedy – Lines 3 and 8a

Park Pobedy (Russian: Парк Победы, lit. ’Victory Park’) is a station of the Moscow Metro in the city’s Dorogomilovo District. It is on two lines: the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line and the Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya line. At 84 metres (276 ft) underground, according to the official figures, it is the deepest metro station in Moscow and one of the deepest in the world.

Construction began in 1986. The initial plans envisaged connections from the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line to the future Mitino–Butovskaya and the Solntsevo–Mytischinskaya Chordal lines. The former was accommodated in the station’s design, with two additional tracks included parallel to those of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line (the latter would have used a third set of track perpendicular to these). However, the 1990s financial crises ended the Chordal projects; the station opened in 2003 as a terminus of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line, and in 2008 the Strogino–Mitino extension of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line was begun from Park Pobedy. The second set of tracks saw their first use on 31 January 2014 as part of the Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya line’s partial service to Delovoy Tsentr.

This is the only Moscow metro station where all passengers board and alight trains in different locations. A further complication was that only the southern, or inbound, platform had an entrance vestibule, so passengers arriving at the northern, or outbound, platform had to change platforms to leave the station. This, however, changed in March 2017, when the southern platform was connected directly to the entrance by a new escalator tunnel.

At 84 metres (276 ft) underground, Park Pobedy is the deepest station in Moscow and the fifth-deepest in the world by mean depth, after Chongqing Rail Transit’s Hongyancun station, Kyiv Metro’s Arsenalna, Chongqing Rail Transit’s Hongtudi station and Saint Petersburg Metro’s Admiralteyskaya, and is the third deepest station by maximum depth, 97 metres (318 ft). It also contains the longest escalators in Europe, each one is 126 metres (413 ft) long and has 740 steps. The escalator ride to the surface takes approximately three minutes.

The two platforms, the work of architects Nataliya Shurygina and Nikolay Shumakov, are of identical design but have opposite colour schemes. The pylons of the outbound platform are faced with red marble on the transverse faces and pale grey marble on the longitudinal faces. The inbound platform is the exact reverse. The station is adorned with two large mosaics by Zurab Tsereteli depicting the 1812 French Invasion of Russia (at the end of the inbound platform) and World War II (on the outbound platform).

The station has a unique structural design. Instead of traditional cast iron tunnel lining Park Pobedy lining included steel blocks filled with concrete. It significantly reduced amount of structural metal and consequentially overall cost of construction.

Text above from Wikipedia.

Park Pobedy – 02

Park Pobedy

Date of opening;

6th May 2003

Construction of the station;

deep, pier, three-span

Architects of the underground part

N. Shurygina and N. Shumakov

Park Pobedy was opened on May 6, Day of George the Victorious, patron saint of the Russian host. It is the 165th station of the Moscow Metro – first of the new, already the sixth or seventh, generation of stations. It includes a great number of design, engineering, and technical innovations along with architectural novelty and freshness. It was constructed with modern tunnel machinery.

As a result, an enormous complex of two stations and two underground pavilions was constructed..

The stations are parallel and lie at the same level, 64 m deep. Trains of Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line arrive to station 1 but depart from station 2. The station halls are elegant, refined, and simple. Compact, upper opening pylons are separated by wider passageways. There is a wide cornice, hiding lamps, over the pylons along the whole station. There are additional ceiling square lamps on the lower part of the cornice, which reflect (when switched on) in the smooth surface of the floor. The level of polishing of decorative stones is higher than elsewhere in the Moscow Metro.

The pylons and walls of station 2 are faced with light marble, ranging from white to bluish-grey. The walls of the passageways and plinths are with unique marble breccia, from yellow-orange to red with very good-looking combination of fragments of different shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. The ceiling is covered with the same smoothly polished plates of red and light-grey granite. Station 1 is the mirror image of station 2. White is replaced by yellow-orange and vice versa. The ceilings are chessboards of black gabbro and light-grey marble. The stations are thematic – the second one is

devoted to the Patriotic War of 1812 and the first one is to the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. The themes are manifested with great striking panels. The panel of station 2 is in the eastern end, while the panel of station 1 is in the western end. They are the unique works in the Moscow Metro. They are unique in technique (colour enamel on metal) and style. The author of both panels is Z. Tsereteli.

The theme of the western panel is Victory in 1945. It shows the monument of a liberator-soldier

in the Treptov Park on the background of the Kremlin. A triumphant throng is around. Order of Victory is above and the ribbon of Guard is below. Very interesting is the effect inherent only in

the technique of enamel. White colour appears very bright. So, the first thing that one see looking

at the panel is white eyes and teeth in slightly opened mouths. The theme of the eastern panel is Victory in 1812. It shows top officers of the Russian army, which was victorious over Napoleon – M. Kutuzov surrounded by major associates. It is neither the meeting in Fili (no Bagration) nor the meeting after occupation of Paris (no Emperor). It could be the meeting before the Borodino Battle but the generals trample on thrown French standards. It seems the painter has pictured a summoning of the saint army of Christ in the heavens. There are massive benches of marble with large marble balls on the arms located on a small pedestal along the walls.

The stations are connected by bridges through the wall between them. The passageways are also faced with very good looking marble breccia of pastel colours, ranging from cream-coloured to soft pink. The stations are connected with the ground by the longest escalators in Moscow (126 m, 740 steps), which end in the two-level underground hall.

Vestibule of Park Pobedy

This vestibule is an original underground architectural ensemble consisted of three halls. There are

wide doors decorated with a granite panel with metal letters ‘Park Pobedy’ on the side at the corner of the L-type underpass crossing Kutuzovsky Prospect and Ulitsa Barklaya. Behind the doors, there is a wide passageway of white marble, which is cut by the long axis with square columns. The passageway leads to the ticket hall – a rectangular low hall. Behind the turnstiles, a staircase goes down turning twice at right angles and three short escalators end. The staircase leads to the greater escalator hall whose ceiling is supported by columns faced with orange marble breccia. Their cup-shaped metallic caps hide lamps. The vestibule is illuminated with five very large and deep coffers made in the suspension ceiling. The walls are faced with orange marble with an edging of white marble above.

The text above comes from Moscow Metro 1935-2005.

Park Pobedy – 03

The station at Park Pobedy really falls out of my idea of recording the Socialist Realist art on the Moscow (and Leningrad) metro. However, even some of those stations most recently added to the network have interesting designs, even so many years after the end of Socialism in the USSR (which I consider to be the mid-1950s) the tradition of making the public space something that is attractive to the users still persists.

Many of the earlier stations have references to either the Civil War (1918-1921) – following the October Revolution – or the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and Park Pobedy follows a military theme as it is the station that serves the park that surrounds Moscow’s Museum to the Great Patriotic War.

As is suggested in the Wikipedia write up above this station is not the easiest to navigate for a first timer. I must have been going down the wrong escalators as I couldn’t find the mosaic that depicts events from the Great Patriotic War. There are a few pictures of the mosaic about the war against the Napoleonic imperialists – hopefully images from the other mosaic will be added in the not too distant future.

The images that are united by the orange and black Saint George ribbon (which was used on a par with the Hammer and Sickle in installations commemorating Victory Day (9^th May) in 2024) line the tunnel sides of the entrance from the street at Victory Park (Park Pobedy) itself. Not sure if these are permanent or were installed for the 9^th May Victory Day celebrations.

Location;

Kutuzovsky Avenue, Dorogomilovo District

GPS;

55.7362°N

37.5182°E

Opened;

6 May 2003

Depth;

84 metres (276 ft)

More on the USSR

Moscow Metro – a Socialist Realist Art Gallery

Special Military Operation – art and posters exhibition on a Moscow street

Posted on 15/08/2024 by Michael

SMO exhibition

More on the USSR

Special Military Operation – art and posters exhibition on a Moscow street

I didn’t know what to expect when I entered Russia from Georgia, in late April 2024, on my way to Moscow. The country had been in a war with the US/UK/NATO/EU proxy for more than two years and although the route from the border to the capital city was not close to the conflict it wasn’t a continent away.

I thought there was a chance I would see troop and equipment movement, either along the motorways or the railway, but there was none of that. In fact, there was nothing at all that indicated the country was in the middle of an ‘existential’ war with the collective ‘West’.

Along the whole route (and even more so in Moscow itself) their were banners and posters in anticipation of the Victory Day celebrations on May 9th. These decorations might well have been more extensive than in previous years but even though these banners etc., had to accept in their imagery that it was the Soviet Red Army that had defeated the Nazis the modern day capitalist rulers of Russia would know how to use the parallel of the two struggles for their own advantage, if necessary.

But I never came across anything in the country that such a propaganda campaign in support of the government in the persecution of the war was really necessary. Yes, some young people had left the country back in 2022 in fear of being conscripted. Whether the majority of them were actually at risk of call-up could be debatable as, apart from volunteers, those called up for service were classified as reservists – who had already been in the military and whose contract specified that in certain circumstances they would be expected to rally to the cause. By all accounts there was no real opposition to this as the majority of the Russian population accept the aims of the ‘West’ even if they hadn’t read a ‘paper’ which was published by the Rand Corporation, a US government-leaning ‘think tank’, in 2019. Entitled ‘Extending Russia – competing from advantageous ground’ it lays out, almost to the letter, the ‘road map’ the ‘West’ has followed up to and since February 2022.

There might have been local opposition to the conflict but I was never aware of such and saw nothing (even overnight graffiti) that indicated real opposition to the Special Military Operation (SMO). Even those opposition groups ‘sponsored’ by the ‘West’, such as the group that Navalny once headed, would find little support for their activities if they came out directly against the war. From all that I’ve been able to learn the majority of the Russian population considered the present situation on a par with that of 1812 (with the invasion of the country by the Napoleonic imperialists) and 1941 (when the German Nazis crossed the western border of the Soviet Union). (Articles, podcasts, etc., with this point of view can be found on the page ‘The war in the Ukraine – what you are not told‘.)

Moscow, not unsurprisingly, was awash with imagery from the Great Patriotic War in readiness for May 9th but I saw nothing that was specifically addressing the SMO in the Ukraine. That was until I was walking along Arbat Street after having visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (one of the seven early 1950s Soviet skyscrapers). Almost to the top of this pedestrianised street, just before a large wall mural of Field Marshal Zhukov, (coincidentally?) was an open air exhibition of posters and art works relating to the war with the ‘West’s’ proxy.

Zhukov – Arbat Street

I don’t intend to make much of a comment on the contents other than point out that even though I might consider Russia to have been provoked into this conflict (by having to respond to NATO’s expansion) and can come up with nothing rational that Russia could have done other in the circumstances that existed at the beginning of 2022 I in no way support the ‘road’ Russia has been following since the 1990s. This is a war of one capitalist country against a coalition (although very often somewhat shaky) of other capitalist countries and therefore very different from the situation that existed at the time of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.

Culturally the country has regressed in the last 30 or so years and although there was some reference to the battle against the Nazis the imagery in these posters took from superstition, religion, ancient Russian mythology and from conflicts with other invaders from Russia’s pre-revolutionary past.

Hopefully, the slide show will provide an idea of how the government was presenting the conflict to its own people. This exhibition was in no way directed at outsiders, not least due to its location – and, anyway, few foreigners from the ‘West’ are presently visiting Russia.

The only other public reference I encountered during my time in Moscow was a room with a large mural commemorating those who were fighting in the Ukraine in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Park Pobeda (Victory Park). This installation was accompanied by drawings and paintings, I assume at least some, by combatants. At the time I thought this strange, a museum with an exhibition of a current conflict? But thinking subsequently, after visiting the small museum to the Great Patriotic War in Gori, Georgia, I started to look at Soviet/Russian museums in a different light. Now, I think, I understand they are places to celebrate those who fought and might have died, for the Motherland, that they are ‘shrines’ in a sense, and places of pilgrimage for those who might have lost a relative or friend in a conflict, even one that is still ongoing.

Location;

Top end of Arbat Street, in the direction of Arbatskaya Metro station. This street unites the two metro stations of Smolenskaya and Arbatskaya.

GPS;

55.751043º N

37.596201º E

More on the USSR

Moscow Kievskya railway station

Posted on 02/08/2024 by Michael

Kievskaya Railway Station – Sachkv

More on the USSR

Moscow Kievskya railway station

Kiyevskya railway terminal (Russian: Ки́евский вокза́л, Kievskiy vokzal) is one of the nine railway terminals of Moscow, Russia. It is the only railway station in Moscow to have a frontage on the Moskva River. The station is located at the Square of Europe, in the beginning of Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street in Dorogomilovo District of Moscow. A hub of the Moscow Metro is located nearby.

Kievskaya railway station – 03

As the name suggests, there were regular services to Kiev and many other points in Ukraine. There used to be regular services to Belgrade, Zagreb, Varna, Bucharest, Sofia, Chișinău, Niš, Budapest, Prague, Vienna and Venice as well. 15-20 years ago, all these trains were cancelled, some were transferred to the Belorussky railway station.

The station was built between 1914 and 1918 in the Byzantine Revival style, which is especially pronounced in the 51m-high (167 ft) clock tower. Originally named the Bryansk station, it was designed by Ivan Rerberg and Vladimir Shukhov, and is considered an important landmark of architecture and engineering of the time.

Text above from Wikipedia.

The decoration of the building, both inside and outside, seems to be very much as it was designed at the beginning of the 20^th century. Soviet imagery just appears to have been superimposed on what could be considered tsarist baroque. This is apart from the main waiting room that had four large bas-reliefs added after the Great Patriotic War. In fact, this particular area contains the greatest amount of Soviet emblems, i.e., the hammer and sickle image, stars and also references to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

Kievskaya railway station – 04

At the time of my visit in May 2024 there was also a temporary exhibition of Soviet posters (reproductions) from the time of the Great Patriotic War to coincide with the celebration of Victory Day on the 9^th.

Kievskaya railway station – 05

The exterior façade of the building includes two images of Saint George – one of him killing the dragon and the other on his stay in heaven. These appear to be coloured mosaics but I have no idea whether these were covered in the past or just allowed to be there as they were part of the original decoration. Also of interest from the original design are the four art deco statues which flank the image of George, allegories for early 20^th industry and transport.

Kievskaya railway station – 01

Also, on the left hand side of what is now the main entrance to the building is a large grey marble plaque to VI Lenin.

Kievskaya railway station – 02

So far the building has avoided the same sort of ‘modernisation’ that has been inflicted upon other railway stations. Whether that is a sign of its now limited use or the fact that the modernisation is about to come is unknown.