#1 - JRL 7273
Knight Ridder Newspapers
July 31, 2003
Moscow artists' oasis a victim of land-grabbing
By MARK MCDONALD
PEREDELKINO, Russia - The most expensive real estate in Moscow is a leafy little enclave on the outskirts of the city, a collection of 55 weathered cottages surrounded by a birch-and-pine forest, a haven of peace and quiet that dictator Josef Stalin set aside in 1935 for Soviet communism's most favored artists.
Some of modern Russia's greatest writers and poets still live and work in Peredelkino, although their future in the colony now seems as bleak as a Russian winter. Private developers and ultra-rich Russians have drawn a bead on the tiny community. Suddenly, small wedges of land here are going for a half-million dollars, even as the average Russian earns $5 a day.
In a sense, the fate of Peredelkino represents the perfect collision between old traditions and the New Russia, between nostalgia for a socialist world created by a brutal dictator and the headlong advance of free-market capitalism.
"What is happening in Peredelkino is a cultural tragedy," said Yuri Kublanovsky, a renowned poet and an editor at the literary journal Novy Mir (New World). "The old literary spirit, the old ensemble feeling of Peredelkino is dying. The sorriest thing is the sell-off of Pasternak's field."
Boris Pasternak was Peredelkino's most famous resident. He lived and worked in a creaking, two-story tugboat of a house that's now the Pasternak Museum.
He spent 11 years there writing "Doctor Zhivago" - he won the Nobel Prize for it in 1958 - and from his upstairs study he could look out onto a large field that was alternately planted with beets and potatoes. A movie based on the book won five academy awards in 1965.
Just as Soviet atomic scientists had their own colonies - the better for the KGB to keep an eye on them - writers also had their own community. They paid only token rents for the Peredelkino cottages and were permitted to stay as long as they didn't cross any ideological lines. In a departure from socialist ideals, they also received privileges that were available only to the political and military elite - imported food and quality health care, even cars and overseas travel.
Pasternak's field is fallow now, but not for long. Local officials refuse to reveal who owns the land, which was sold by the former farming collective, but it's expected that ground will soon be broken on a luxury housing development. Dozens of multimillion-dollar, redbrick villas will soon sprout where Soviet farmers once toiled over their root crops.
"These houses will be like red bugs, like leeches, sucking the blood from Russia's soil," says Andrei Voznesensky, 70, one of the country's most famous poets. He's rented a cottage in Peredelkino for many years and recently wrote a poem protesting the new houses.
Another Peredelkino resident, the poet Inna Lisnyanskaya, says the field is just another chapter in what she calls "the Epoch of Great Grabbing."
The grabbing isn't confined to Pasternak's field. Peredelkino's individual cottages, or dachas, are in danger, too.
The Literary Fund, the former state agency that owns the cottages, rents them to writers for small amounts - about $44 a month for 2,000 square feet. With the peace and isolation from Moscow's frenzy, many poets and writers credit Peredelkino for new bursts of creativity and inspiration.
"It's the best possible place in Russia to work," says Lisnyanskaya, who won two prestigious poetry prizes in 1999, soon after she moved to Peredelkino full-time. Her husband, Semyon Lipkin, also a poet, died in March and Lisnyanskaya says she will continue to live and work in their ramshackle dacha until she dies.
When a writer dies, his or her relatives have six months to move out. The dacha is then rented to the next writer on a long waiting list, just as it was theoretically done in the Soviet era. Now, however, some of the surviving relatives have refused to leave Peredelkino. They've taken the LitFund to court not only to block their evictions but also to contest the fund's dominion.
"The daughter of a (deceased) official Soviet poet lives in the United States, rents her dacha to someone else and she has the nerve to take us to court," fumes Rimma Kazakova, a poet who sits on the LitFund board. "But frankly, the dachas are of no real interest to these people. It's the land they really want."
The LitFund admits that it doesn't own the land, just the dachas, but there's now a ferocious legal dispute about who's entitled to the land when a dacha falls down - or mysteriously burns down. The land, it seems, is up for grabs.
Kublanovksy, 56, who rents a cottage in Peredelkino, says there's a brand-new Russian word - bespredel - that describes what's happening in Peredelkino. The word means "free-for-all."
"Some rich guys came, simply took over half of my garden and built a huge house," Kublanovksy says. "How this happened and who they are is a complete mystery. I assume they paid someone an enormous bribe. I fought it, I even went to the governor's office, but no one listened to me.
"These guys cut down hundreds of pine trees on my land and on my neighbor's land, then huge trucks came and hauled off the wood. I knew every one of those pines. Pasternak wrote about them."
Pasternak's field remains the eye of the storm. Peredelkino residents, the Moscow literary intelligentsia and a few of Pasternak's relatives have complained, sued and petitioned against the oncoming housing development, arguing that it will threaten Peredelkino's quiet ambience and the dreamy solitude of the Pasternak Museum.
That isolation helped Pasternak finish Zhivago. When the epic novel was finally published, it angered the Soviet literary commissars and Pasternak endured smear campaigns, KGB surveillance and a ban on his subsequent writing.
He died from lung cancer - wheezing in an oxygen tent in his downstairs parlor - in 1960.
After his death, Natalya Pasternak, the writer's daughter-in-law, fought to have the state keep the house as a national landmark. She lived in the house for 23 years, her daughter was born there, and she was there on a chilly day in October 1984 when Soviet police arrived to evict her and the other Pasternaks. The agents balked at moving a grand piano, but they threw the rest of the family's furniture out the windows. Pasternak's oak desk went hurtling from the second floor and landed in the front garden.
"They told us to get the hell out," Natalya Pasternak said the other day as she stood at the old desk, which has been repaired and returned to the upstairs study. "They didn't want any spirit of Pasternak to remain."
Natalya, who lives in a small lodge next to the house-museum, persisted in her campaign to save her father-in-law's home. In what she says was "a miraculous court ruling," the house and grounds now belong to the Russian Ministry of Culture - presumably safe from predatory developers or the super-rich New Russians.
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