The Moscow Theme
The towers of the Izmailovo Kremlin evoke the Kremlin on Red Square and also hark back to the Moscow Baroque architectural style of the 17th century (“Naryshkin style”).
At the Vernisazh and Izmailovo Kremlin, as well as at other Moscow venues where souvenirs are sold, we found diverse objects depicting well-known Moscow views or landmarks — so many that we decided to devote an exhibit to this topic! Whether vintage and contemporary postcards, common souvenirs such as znachki or refrigerator magnets, or specialty objects that reflect new trends in graphic design, images conveying the “Moscow theme” were all over the city. Some objects were clearly intended for tourists, whereas others expressed Muscovites’ insider knowledge and love for their city. Taken as a group, these images reflected many different perspectives on Moscow’s essential qualities.
We were fascinated by the different cultural and artisanal pathways for the circulation of old and new images of Moscow. Some images of Moscow taken from historical sources such as old photographs or paintings were reproduced on surfaces of both hand-crafted and mass-produced objects like jewelry box covers and wall hangings. Older Moscow-themed printed materials were also on offer, as in the case of vintage postcards – these were originally mass-produced items, but are now sold as rare single exemplars.
This exhibit explores the ways in which the Kremlin and other iconic Moscow sites have been represented across the different periods of the city’s history – Muscovite, imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet – in postcards and souvenirs. In searching for and examining the “Moscow theme” as conveyed by images and objects for sale, we looked for continuities across the city’s diverse periods, as well as combinations and selective reconstructions of Moscow’s history.
Around Moscow
We noticed a lot of “Moscow love” around the city – expressions of affection and pride towards the city in prominent public spaces. “I Love Moscow” markers were common in Moscow city parks when we visited, offering ideal spots for a tourist selfie.
The Izmailovo Kremlin is also an object of love!
The epithet “friendly city” was associated with the public-facing culture of Moscow in the late 2010s, a place of festivals and attractive up-to-date urban recreation spaces like the lively post-Soviet incarnation of Gorky Park.
About Souvenirs
When we visit a city, we hope that a small piece of the experience remains with us after we leave, as a material witness to the fact that we were there. At the Vernisazh and elsewhere, we found diverse forms of Moscow-themed souvenirs – keepsakes such as matryoshka dolls and imitation Fabergé eggs, as well as printed items such as Moscow postcards and thematic maps. These small and inexpensive souvenir objects prompted us to consider Moscow’s various pasts and the ways in which cultural memory brings historical images of the city back to life, imbuing them with new meanings for new times. This imaginative work is accomplished by the artisans and designers who create the souvenirs, but once the sale is completed, the buyer takes possession of what is now a personal object with individual as well as collective significance. In this way, souvenirs are both ordinary and special. Souvenirs convey a double-nostalgia – for vanished eras, but also for the personal travels and experiences that prompted their purchase.
In his book Souvenir, Rolf Potts describes five different types of tourist mementos. The first two types are “real” objects — physical fragments such as pebbles or ticket stubs, as well as local products, including the revived artisanal crafts we saw at the Vernisazh. These objects asserted a handmade authenticity in contrast to the mass-production origins of most souvenirs for tourists. In fact, the other three types of souvenirs that Potts lists are connected to the history of affordable mass tourism, which dates back to the late 19th century. These latter three types include pictorial representations such as postcards, markers such as mugs or T-shirts, and “symbolic shorthand” items such as miniature representations of famous monuments.
The Eiffel Tower, constructed as the entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, offers the consummate example of this last category, as is fitting for the most-visited paid monument in the world.
The Eiffel Tower is also the premiere example of a classic “postcarded” site. You can buy a postcard right there and send two messages simultaneously – “I was here” and “Wish you were here”!
A well-known essay by scholar Naomi Schor, “Cartes postales: Representing Paris 1900,” proposes turn-of-century Parisian postcards as a kind of “discourse of the metropolis.” Schor sees postcard iconography as a way of offering French citizens of the time a self-representation in “euphoric mode,” expressing both nationalistic and imperialistic ambitions. Paris postcards recorded both the vanishing “old” Paris with its celebrated past and the emerging “new” modern Paris. In this way, postcards made it possible to possess the totality of the city at a time when the rapid changes associated with modernity were making Paris seem more fragmented and less monolithic, both physically and socially. We can apply Schor’s ideas to Moscow as well, scrutinizing the images on vintage and contemporary Moscow postcards in search of clues to the attitudes they convey about this mythic, “most Russian of cities,” across times of change.
Russian Postcards
Postcards, like leaflets and brochures, are a form of ephemera, a term that refers to transitory written or printed material created for short-term purposes, not meant to last or even carry meaning beyond their initial use. In actual fact, the sale and purchase of vintage postcards points to the value of preserving these seemingly commonplace ephemeral-material artifacts, such that any piece of ephemera has the potential to become a valued personal souvenir, even something like a torn ticket stub. In Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, Maurice Rickards observes, “The essential appeal of most forms of ephemera lies in their fragility, their vulnerability, the very improbability of their survival.”
Postcards first appeared in Russia in the late 19th century, just as they did in Western Europe and the United States. In 1894, the Russian Minister of Internal Affairs granted official permission for private persons to create postcard blanks, opening the way for a surge in production, with print runs ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of copies. The first postcards bearing photographic images of Moscow and St. Petersburg soon appeared in shops and by the late 1890s, color postcards of these and other Russian cities were produced by both foreign and Russian publishers. A black-and-white postcard cost 3-5 kopeks and a color postcard 10-15 kopeks.
The “view” postcard — in Russian, vidovaia otkrytka — is one of the main postcard types across cultures, particularly common in urban environments. While these postcard views were the natural successors to earlier visual forms such as prints, drawings, paintings, and maps, the postcard as a mass-produced object was accessible and affordable to all.
In Russia, the disruptions of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War interrupted the postcard industry, but after a time, mass-produced early Soviet postcards began to circulate. Some of these vintage Soviet-era postcards are now on display and for sale at the Vernisazh.
During the post-Soviet 1990s and continuing to the present, book-length studies of postcards have explored this aspect of Russian cultural history. In Russia’s case, postcards are a very important source of information about architectural structures destroyed during the 20th century, not just in capital cities, but in locales where major Soviet engineering projects fundamentally altered the natural and cultural environment. Vintage postcards offered a way to resurrect and reconstruct lost elements of the built environment, and there was therapeutic value for Russian society in re-membering the fragmented past and re-collecting losses. But putting all the pieces back together again was also, by definition, an impossible project. These contradictions lend the old postcards recirculating at the Vernisazh a particular poignancy.
Every postcard tells a story and postcard series and collections tell many stories. A multi-purpose market like the Vernisazh can put these images back into circulation so that we can enjoy and learn from them.
The 1898 Memorial to Alexander II pictured here was demolished in 1918 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, a cultural moment marked by the destruction of significant imperial-era buildings and monuments. A contemporary statue to Alexander II, different yet similar to the old one, was established in 2005 near the reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This reversal is characteristic of Russian culture, always contending with the many complex legacies of the past, cast in doubt by historical disruptions and reclaimed in a new era for more present purposes.
Moscow Kremlin Views
Postcards offer opportunities for comparison and reflection. This exhibit began with a photo of the Izmailovo Kremlin towers. Here we offer a small selection of Moscow Kremlin postcards from imperial and Soviet times. In considering how these familiar structures were represented at different cultural moments across the 19th-21st centuries, we also offer views of Muscovites moving through the spaces of their city.
This next image shows a city of everyday scenes, with a foreground emphasis on the humbler foundations and functions of the great city, whose famous Kremlin and St. Basil’s spires rise in the distance — the Moscow river and a set of small barges. Many Moscow postcards from the imperial era include ordinary scenes and people like this. The tiny human figures emphasize the grand-scale of the buildings and thoroughfares, but Moscow nevertheless emerges as a lived-in place for real people.
It is curious that the up-to-date photographic and color technologies that produced this image render, in contrast, this peaceful, almost retrograde urban landscape, especially in the foreground. In fact, Moscow of this period in the late 19th century was growing rapidly due to industrialization and peasant migration, beset by crises in housing, sanitation, and transportation. This image thus reflects a selection principle, a choice to represent Moscow in a particular, more familiar and comforting way.
The next two postcards offer a contrast between imperial- and Soviet-era views of the same Kremlin site. These images both show the Troitskie Gates of the Troitskaya Tower (the tallest Kremlin tower) and the white Kustafya Tower, its barbican. The imperial-era image shows the bridge and entranceway, with individual Muscovites rendered in detailed miniature. The imperial-era postcard includes inscriptions in both Russian and French, a common convention of the time, convenient for foreign tourists unlikely to know Russian.
The 1957 Soviet-era postcard, in contrast, pulls back to diminish the Muscovites clustered by the entrance, their postures and arrangement suggesting a line of supplicants. The physical entrance provided by the Troitskie Gates is not shown and the Kustafya Tower appears larger and somewhat menacing. This Soviet postcard also emphasizes the modern trolleybus wires laced above the scene, signs of state technologies and forms of transport that benefit Soviet citizens, but also a net in which the whole seems ensnared. There seems no sense that this postcard is intended for foreigners. The differences between the two postcards reflect in part the Kremlin’s more elevated role as the seat of power for the Soviet state, as compared to its status as the “ancient former capital” eclipsed by imperial St. Petersburg. In the Soviet postcard, a red star sits atop the tower instead of the double-headed eagle.
The next two postcards offer contrasting representations of Russian state power. The imperial-era postcard of the Tsar-Cannon shows people of diverse classes sharing the intimate space of the monument itself. (For some, this image might recall the famous scene from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which this same cannon offers a place of refuge from the crushing crowd for young Petya Rostov at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, a moment of great national vulnerability.) In the Soviet-era postcard, in contrast, Red Square is vast, a burning sun in the sky turns everything pale, shining on both the spire of tsarist St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin star atop Spasskaya, the main tower on the eastern wall. Lenin’s Mausoleum is the most prominent structure in the foreground, a clear sign of the state’s great and seemingly all-seeing power.
More Postcard Views of Moscow
Consider these next two packets of postcards — komplekty in Russian. The first, a 1954 Views of Moscow set, displays static and uniformly grey images of monumental architecture. Eight of the images are devoted to buildings, whereas two images display monuments to iconic figures in Russian cultural history: national poet Alexander Pushkin and Russian war heroes Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, who fought to expel the invading Poles in the early 17th century, thereby securing the rule of the Romanov dynasty. These mythic human figures are central to imperial Russian national identity, and yet their monuments are claimed as central icons of Soviet Moscow, the result of a strategic shift in official cultural policy under Stalin. The other images on this same Moscow postcard set cover tell many such stories of built structures and their unlikely cultural afterlives.
The next three images come from a special 2012 postcard set devoted to the historical Zariad’e neighborhood, produced by the project “The Moscow That is No More” (Moskva, kotoroi net) on the eve of the massive construction project that would create a major urban landscape park in Zariad’e in the later 2010s. The Zariad’e packet provides a subtle geographical and historical tour of the area, now even more strikingly overtaken by time.
The 2012 post-Soviet postcard set maps the old Zariad’e neighborhood using intimate photographic images from the 1930s that show shabby urban scenes such as this view of Mokrinskii Lane. These images appear in black-and white, like the ones in the 1954 Views of Moscow set, but the two are very different. The 1954 set is monumental and the black-and-white photography is precise, almost hyperreal, and thoroughly official, whereas the 2012 set feels intimate and elegiac, a view into a lost world. And yet, 1930s Moscow does not usually carry such quiet associations: this was a time of terror, when Muscovites themselves, rather than old buildings, were disappearing in alarming ways.
Contemplating contemporary Moscow-themed postcards reveals the diverse iconographies of the city – the images and symbolic language through which the city speaks its identity.
Across the top of this recent Moscow postcard are two of the oldest and most iconic architectural structures of the city – St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Spasskaya Kremlin Tower, juxtaposed as a tourist might see them at night. This view offers a contrast to the emphasis on Soviet brute power in the earlier Kremlin postcard example. Images of these two buildings appear over and over again on all types of Moscow souvenirs.
Along the middle row of our postcard, however, things get more interesting. Here are three iconic structures, reflecting the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet-reconstruction eras – the outer images show a Seven Sisters skyscraper from the Stalin era and the imperial Cathedral of Christ the Savior, destroyed by Stalin in 1931 and triumphantly rebuilt in the 1990s. In the middle is the Bolshoi Theater, constructed in the early 19th century after the great fire of 1812. The Bolshoi Theater had an uncertain future during the early Soviet period, but in the end, escaped demolition, becoming a monument to postwar Soviet achievements in the arts. The juxtaposition of these three structures raises many complicated questions about Russian cultural legacies, past and present.
The final row of this post-Soviet postcard shows the skyscrapers of Moscow-City, the Moscow International Business Center Complex on the Presnenskaya Embankment, a soaring tribute to the new post-Soviet Russia built on the site of an old industrial zone. It is interesting that Moscow-City is presented in the bottom row, rather than the top. Perhaps this is because this postcard is intended for tourists who associate Moscow with the more fanciful-looking architectural styles of the past, or perhaps because Moscow as a city can never escape the weight of its complicated pasts.
We can juxtapose the preceding contemporary photo-collage postcard of Moscow with a 1985 Soviet-era postcard set titled Artists on Moscow, which reproduces paintings from both the 19th and 20th centuries. This postcard set looks back to earlier periods in the city’s development and offers a late-Soviet narrative of progress and prosperity. By purchasing this 1985 vintage packet at the Vernisazh, we can contemplate a late-Soviet compilation-representation of Moscow that gathers and recirculates images from the past, a move that we ourselves repeat in the present, as we look through the postcards.
This painting now hangs in the Tretiakov Gallery of Art. The slightly mournful evening scene of the Germashev painting contrasts with the hopeful post-war winter dawn of a Soviet morning, as small groups of people go to work and the smokestacks of the industrial region emit clouds that fill the sky. Slightly left of center in the sky, the sun is breaking through.
This Socialist Realist cityscape reflects the massive postwar housing construction projects of the Khrushchev era – prefabricated concrete buildings intended to relieve the housing crisis in Moscow. A young man offers a humanizing gaze from the open window of his construction crane’s glass cab – many more cranes like his extend deep into the background. And yet, these buildings “of tomorrow” that we see under construction in the late 1950s are the same Khrushchev-era buildings (“khrushchevki”) that were demolished in great numbers across early 21st-century Moscow to make way for more expensive post-Soviet housing and commercial buildings, in spite of their longtime occupants’ protests. Today’s Moscow is the true “District of Tomorrow,” at least for now.
This final postcard from the Artists on Moscow series looks across the street towards the Bolshoi Theater, sharing the perspective of the late-Soviet Muscovites dressed in their theater finery. The impressionistic style conveys the bustle of a cultured world capital with a developed nightlife, the desired endpoint of the 20th-century decades of Moscow “becoming.” But this postcard is also a nostalgic artifact, recalling a time of greater cultural conformity and shared values. Many older Russians still espouse these attitudes, prizing the canonical works of Russian and Soviet high culture that were performed at the Bolshoi during the late Soviet era.
Moscow-Themed Souvenirs
As we wandered around the Vernisazh and across Moscow, we became curious about the diverse variety of specifically Moscow-themed objects for sale. Some Moscow-themed souvenirs reflected the upsurge of interest in renewing traditional handmade artisanal forms, whereas others offered mass-produced versions of formerly elite objects. We sought to understand what souvenir-artifacts tell us about the images of Moscow in circulation today and also which particular aspects of the city’s past these souvenirs evoke.
During the imperial period, the famed Fabergé eggs were associated with St. Petersburg, not Moscow. A series of some fifty richly ornamented works of master craftsmanship, the Russian Imperial Easter Eggs were commissioned between 1885 and 1917 from the workshop of Carl Fabergé as personal gifts to royal family members – keepsakes and family heirlooms, rather than souvenirs. During the early Soviet decades, a number of the original Fabergé eggs were sold abroad to finance the projects of the new Soviet state, but during the post-Soviet period, many of those expatriate eggs were purchased by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and returned to Russia, to be featured in a new Petersburg museum housed in the Shuvalov Palace.
Today, a visitor to Russia encounters thousands of mass-produced Fabergé-inspired souvenirs of every size, color, and design, and at every price point – like the Moscow-themed version shown here, with its miniature approximation of St. Basil’s Cathedral housed in a sky-blue egg depicting the Kremlin. Beginning at the Moscow airport, the ubiquitous eggs are featured in tourist retail venues, museum stores, and souvenir market stalls in a hallucinatory proliferation. Our Moscow-themed egg is an example of the “symbolic shorthand” performed by souvenirs, offering its purchaser a vivid sense of the Fabergé experience, conveyed by an immediately-recognizable icon of imperial Russian culture for new times.
Although the tsarist St. Basil’s Cathedral is the treasure at the heart of this egg, the splitting apart of its shell cuts the imperial double-headed eagle in half, turning it into abstract ornamentation. When the egg is open, St. Basil’s is framed by the two halves of the shell, each of which shows part of the Moscow Kremlin, the seat of Soviet power.
It is not fanciful to evoke the Moscow Kremlin with a Fabergé egg. The real Fabergé Moscow Kremlin egg of 1906 was inspired by the Dormition Cathedral, where all of the Russian tsars were crowned. The Moscow Kremlin egg was the largest of the original Fabergé eggs and it was never sold abroad, although it might easily have been during the early Soviet years. The Moscow Kremlin egg has long been exhibited in the Kremlin Armory alongside other Russian state treasures. The coexistence of the inexpensive blue souvenir egg from the Vernisazh, which reclaims an imperial tradition by making it available to any tourist as an affordable souvenir, and the now-priceless imperial artifact in the Kremlin museum, maintained for decades by the Soviet state that initially despised such royal baubles, is one of the fascinating accidents of Russian history that the circulatory powers of the Vernisazh brings into focus.
Continuing to search out Moscow-themed souvenirs, we found this cheerful matryoshka with a fantastical rendering of Red Square architectural elements on her belly. As shown in the two dedicated matryoshka exhibits on our site, the surface of this common Russian souvenir provides a canvas for depicting a variety of Russian motifs for new times. The choice of Moscow here suggests a connection between the form of the matryoshka doll and the potent ideal of “Mother Russia” – or perhaps “Mother Moscow.”
This selection of Moscow-themed znachki felt classic as well as educational – encouraging the purchaser to learn the names of the individual Kremlin towers. It is curious that these post-Soviet representations use a de-emphasizing silver-white, instead of the immediately recognizable Soviet-red for the stars atop each tower.
Sources
- N. Larina, Istoriia Moskvy v pochtovoi otkrytke (2010).
- Julie Buckler, “Performing Commodities: The Fabergé Imperial Eggs” in Russian Performances, eds., Buckler, Cassiday, and Wolfson (2018).
- David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds., Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (2010).
- Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian (2000).
- Alison Rowley, Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880-1922 (2013).
- Naomi Schor, “Cartes postales: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter 1992.
- S. Zabochen’, M. A. Blinov and T. I. Geidor, eds., Russkii gorod na pochtovoi otkrytke kontsa XIX–nachala XX veka (1997).
