Space Park To Mall: A Giant Leap

Overheard recently in a chic new shoe store on Tverskaya Ulitsa:


First Woman: I don't like anything here.


Second Woman: Me neither. Let's go to VDNKh.


Not long ago, this suggestion would have rung like the punch line of a joke poking fun at Soviet life.


The Exhibition of the People's Economic Achievements, usually referred to by its Russian acronym, VDNKh, was in its heyday a Soviet World Fair of sorts, an enormous park dotted with ornate shrines to Soviet industry such as the Electrification Pavilion, the Atomic Energy Pavilion and the ever-popular Pavilion of Mechanized Pig-Fattening.


However, many Muscovites remember it best as the place they went to peek through display windows at consumer goods they could never buy -- from fancy Soviet-made washing machines that never seemed to appear in stores to piles of produce carted in even during food shortages.


Today, VDNKh is a good place to buy shoes. It is also a good place to buy computers, Jeeps, Ferarris, coffee makers, stereos, eyeglasses and televisions. Every few minutes, a couple carrying a Japanese television set staggers past a statue of Lenin and out through the park's imposing gate, an imperial colonnade topped with two gilded, beaming agricultural laborers hoisting aloft a fat sheaf of wheat.


Nearly all VDNKh's 72 ornate pavilions have been converted into shops or stuffed with kiosks since the Soviet Union fell and VDNKh became known (technically) as VVTs, the All-Russian Exhibition Center. The center is government-owned but must earn its own keep, said deputy advertising director Mikhail Andreyechev.


"For a long time, the situation was not quite right," said Andreyechev. "People would hear and see all kinds of products here, but they really had no way of buying them."


Now even a Tupolev jet that was part of a Soviet aviation exhibit has been gutted and converted into an electronics store -- accessible by gangplank only.


Flocks of shoppers, storekeepers and middlemen looking to cut wholesale deals have made the 254-hectare complex at the north end of Prospekt Mira a bustling -- if bizarre -- shopping mall, with 150,000 visitors every weekend.


"There are more stores all together in one place here, so there is more competition and the prices are cheaper," said Yury Simakov, a salesman at a slick kitchen appliances shop whose white facade, crowed with Soviet stars and carved cornucopia, still reads "Atomic Energy."


Even on weekdays, there is a chaotic, carnival atmosphere to the place. Steam rises from shashlik stands and children with balloons stroll beside fountains munching greasy "American Doughnuts."


"It's more cheerful now -- young people hang out here," said Anya Pulyashenko, 20, relaxing at VDNKh on a recent sunny afternoon with friends who said they were dragged there as schoolchildren to listen to their government "brag."


"Before it was mainly grandmothers and grandchildren," said Pulyashenko.


In one sign that the complex is a potential gold mine, the capital-hungry Moscow government plans to take over a 31 percent share in return for reduced rents, deputy VDNKh director Vladimir Morzukov said in an interview.


Still, the center's new success is bittersweet.


The panoply of imported goods that prompted one foreign visitor to dub VDNKh "the Exhibition of the Achievements of the Peoples of Germany, Japan and Korea" has also caught the eye of Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets. He labeled the new look "intolerable" while touring the complex last week and demanded that directors devote more space to domestic goods.


"Before, they criticized us because nothing was for sale, now they complain because everything is for sale," said Morzukov, who began work at VDNKh back in its propaganda days in 1984 and keeps a portrait of Lenin in his office.


But he said he agreed with Soskovets, adding that the complex's "main task" was to organize trade shows, foster ties among Russian entrepreneurs and introduce new technologies to the Russian market. The commercial activities, he said, are just to keep VDNKh afloat.